And, just as if you were following your river explorer, Gladwell takes you through fascinating stories of the history and, sometimes even geography, of successful people. To sum up this very anecdotal work in his own words: The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.

But while the book makes for an extremely interesting read, all it does is to bring to the upper consciousness something all of us intuitively know, that “Success is not a random act. It arises out of predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities”.

In other words, if a man is highly successful — an outlier — there is a reason behind it way beyond his talent and hard work. Talent and hard work, howsoever indispensable for success, cannot make the man an ‘outlier’ unless helped by the “powerful set of circumstances and opportunities”. To borrow another couple of lines from the book: Successful people don’t do it alone. They are products of a particular place and environments.”

But this is the bare essence of the book. To put it in this drab, philosophical way would be unjust to the book, which is full of stories. For instance, of Bill Gates. If Gates had not been born at a particular time or had not been lucky in a particular way, he could not have become what he is. Gladwell also draws a parallel between Robert Oppenheimer, the man who made the atom bomb and Christopher Langan, an American known for his very high IQ, in fact, higher than Oppenheimer’s. Both faced hurdles in their lives, but Oppenheimer’s background has sufficiently prepared him to overcome the hurdles, while Langan’s humbler background has not.

In the second part of the book, Gladwell shows how cultural legacies play a key part in a man’s success. What you are owes a lot to where you come from.

‘Outliers’ is really a book of stories that encompass biographies of successful men, early Jewish immigrants into America, the gun battles of feuding families of the US in the 1800s, study of air crashes, the rice fields of China and Gladwell’s own Jamaican ancestry — all told in elegant and easy prose.

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