Mr. Brooks, you disappoint me. Your article started off so strong about Mr. Gladwell and his new book, Outliers, and ended extremely poorly and obviously missing the core point.
Did you even read the book? Did Mr. Gladwell ever in the book make a point such as: every successful person in the world, including people such as Shakespere or other artists who were only fully appreciated long after their time, benefited from happy chance. No. Moreover you even hit on this point very specifically in your article that he in fact covers how important meaningful work is over and over again.
So let me please be clear here in what this book was to me when I read it: it was a book that, contrary to Mr. Brooks assertion, was not at all about politics of the moment or getting swept away with new discoveries but rather talked to people in Mr. Gladwell's very accessable tone about the effect that we can have on one another and each others' success. Not every person is going to be Mr. Shakespere of course, but Mr. Gladwell's point Mr. Brooks is that if you were truly the successful person you seem to think you are you would realize that given the right push and incentive you could help others to be successful too. There will always be outliers but we each can certainly do our part to move the bell shaped curve as far towards the successful outliers as we can.
