Has it ever struck you that, had Neil Armstrong been born in the 17th century, his chances of becoming the first man on the moon would have been severely diminished? That remarkably few medieval peasants ever made killings on the stock market? That the drive and attack of the Rolling Stones's singles might have been a bit dampened if their lead instruments had been crumhorns or flageolets? If so, you will find yourself in enthusiastic agreement with the first half of Malcolm Gladwell's new book, which sets out to demolish the myth - as he sees it - that success (and/or genius) is either a happy fluke of nature or the product of solitary, unaided talent. Nope, he says. You have to be born at the right moment; at the right place; to the right family (posh usually helps); and then you have to work really, really hard. That's about it. I have just saved you 17 quid.

Is there honestly nothing more to Outliers than this? Well, maybe a little bit, though a fair slice of what Gladwell states might be summed up in the old saw about genius being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. His own favourite figure is that to be genuinely good at anything, from writing fiction to being a Beatle, takes a magic total of 10,000 hours of intensive training. (Ancient joke: “Excuse me, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?” “Practise.” ) The Beatle detail? Had the moptops not gone to Hamburg and played eight hours a day in strip clubs for years, Gladwell says, they would never have been all that special.

Now, I am no great Beatles fan, but I have a hunch that what made them world champs had more to do with the youthful spirit of the age, the vogue for guitar bands and a spark of collaborative chemistry than with a capacity for nimble fretwork. Compare the Sex Pistols: it's doubtful that Johnny Rotten ever devoted 10,000 hours to anything except being obnoxious, and Sid Vicious barely knew which end of a bass was up, but they still achieved a memorable impact. Nor does the Gladwell theory do anything to account for the notorious phenomenon that so many rock groups are terrific for a few albums and then become dull, embarrassing self-parodists for the rest of their lives. (Success and genius are not synonymous - far from it.) No amount of practice cures that. Listen to Ringo's solo albums.

Fortunately for Gladwell's sales figures, his path through the annals of success is paved with decent anecdotes. You probably didn't know, and almost certainly did not greatly care, that the majority of Canadian hockey champs were born in January, February and March. This freak has nothing to do with the passage of Capricorn through the heavens and almost everything to do with the system that determines at which age child players are recruited, since the post-Christmas lads are a significant number of months older, hence stronger and bigger, than their autumnal peers. Gladwell also makes an entertaining case of the fact that if you wanted to be a bigwig at Microsoft, it helped a great deal to have been born circa 1955, to affluent parents. Gladwell's conclusion: “What your parents do for a living, and the assumptions that accompany the class your parents belong to, matter.” His italics.

The second half of the book takes a more wide-angled view, by examining the touchy area of what we inherit from our deep cultural backgrounds. Gladwell has rooted up some true oddities here, such as the disposition to vengeful behaviour among present-day inhabitants of America's southern states. Experiments show, it seems, that they take offence at being called “asshole” more deeply than their northern cousins. Quick explanation: they are descended from sheep farmers in Scotland and Ireland. Sheep are easy to steal, crops are not. Sheep farmers learn to be vigilant, touchy, and triggerhappy. They pass the habit on down the generations. Discuss.

There are some painful stories in this section - notably one about a Korean air crash that was caused by a co-pilot being too polite to tell his captain that they were doomed - and some inferences that offend common sense. Is the well-attested excellence of Asian students in mathematics a happy legacy from the hard-working ways of rice farmers? Well, maybe. Thinking along these lines of cultural bias, I began to suspect that Gladwell's book will probably be a bigger hit in the United States than in the United Kingdom. Here, the proposition that “what your parents do for a living, and the assumptions blah blah . . . matter” hardly calls out for the italics, or even for stating. In America, where the highly paid dimwits of network television tell you the contrary every evening, it can still count as a surprise.

In brief, for British readers, the problem with Outliers is not that it is contentious but that it is largely platitudinous. Take the best chapter in the book, a study of an educational project in the Bronx that has allowed hundreds of young people from poor and harsh backgrounds to thrive, go to college and so join the middle classes of that “classless” nation. The secret? They are made to work hard, for long hours. Unsurprising though it is, this is the only case history of success that deserves further reflection; the rest are as forgettable as the Rolling Stones on crumhorns.

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Allen Lane £16.99 pp309

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