Outliers

Outliers takes apart the self-made-success story. Gladwell shows Canadian hockey rosters clustered into a few birth months, Bill Gates handed rare access to a computer terminal, and rice-farming traditions feeding into mathematics scores generations later. Talent matters, but so do timing, culture and sheer accumulated hours. This is the book that put the ten-thousand-hour figure into circulation, and it is more careful about it than most of the people who quote it.