THAT FAMOUS JOURNEY from log cabin to White House has just been reprised, so some would have us believe, by the victory of Barack Obama in the US presidential election. Obama's father began life as a goatherd in Kenya, and the distance from that fact to the world's imperial seat is intergalactic. What is the secret of such phenomenal success?

Malcolm Gladwell's book is not about Obama, but it is very much about what explains success. Its argument is not one to cheer individual hearts much, but if our senators had wisdom enough to reflect on its thesis, future generations would benefit. For Gladwell's argument is that success is not a matter of individual will triumphing over adversity, but a combination of luck, opportunity, culture, initial advantages, hard work, and enough talent and intelligence - enough, note: not necessarily vast amounts of either - to profit from the advantages and opportunities at issue.

This is explained by Gladwell in his trademark manner, which is to build a convincing case with admirable lucidity. The result is an absorbing, indeed a compelling, book, and a mind-changing one. I say this as one who is emphatically not a target reader for the kind of publication that claims to tell you how to succeed in business, be a great leader, crack the secret of entrepreneurship, take ten steps to happiness and slimness. The cover of this book might give the impression that it is one such, but not so: it is an instructive and thought-provoking challenge to our assumptions about why some people succeed and others do not, and whether or not you agree with Gladwell, you will never again think as you did before about what he has to say.

Most top-flight ice hockey players in Canada are born in the first three months of the year. This has nothing to do with astrology; it is because January 1 is the start date for a year cohort, and the oldest children in their year are bigger, stronger, and more co-ordinated in their movements than the cohort's younger children. So they are more likely to be chosen for the hockey team in the first years of school, and get more attention, training and practice in the succeeding years.

This is tied to another fact, that high achievers in any skilled endeavour from sport to music performance are those who, in the course of their formative period, accumulate at least 10,000 hours of practice at what they do. If you are chosen for the hockey squad because you are the biggest and best co-ordinated in your class, you are going to get more hours of practice than the little November-born kid who was not picked.

Thus, Gladwell says, we lose the potential skills and contributions of more than half the population because we put children 11 months apart in age into the same class or cohort, and the older ones profit.

Because of how we organise things we make it a matter of luck when you are born in the year, but it need not be. Luck, however, has other roles to play. Gladwell looks at the careers of a number of high achievers such as Bill Gates, and picks out the lucky accidents that helped to surf them to the heights of their field. Gates was lucky enough to attend a school in Seattle that, very rarely for any school in those days, had a computer connection to a mainframe, so his talent for programming was given an early opportunity to flourish. He came of age just as personal computers became a reality, and he exploited the opportunity. Yes, he had talent and entrepreneurial vision; but he also had opportunity, and luck.

Gladwell also nominates culture as a major factor in success. People of Asian origin do not differ in intelligence from any other population segment of the world, but on average they are notably better at mathematics. Why? Because their number words and counting system are simpler and more easily memorable and manipulated than those in Western languages, which derive from the classical and Germanic tongues. The work ethic of people who intensively grow rice, which requires year-round work on a number of different facets of the process, differs from the work ethic of peoples who work from the spring to the autumn harvest, and who leave fields fallow one year in three. Gladwell suggests that the long school vacations taken by Western schools mimic the idea that everything needs its fallow time, including children's brains, whereas Eastern schools have half the vacation time of their Western counterparts.

As an example, the Kipp school in New York, based on the Eastern model of 7.30am to 5pm Monday to Friday plus half-day Saturday schooling, produces outstanding results with children from deprived and minority communities who are admitted by lottery.

If this example of culture does not persuade, how about the fact that more air crashes occur in airlines of countries with more marked hierarchical social systems of deference to authority. Psychological studies of black-box recordings from crashed flights show that in addition to other causative factors, there is a significant input from social deference: one characteristic cause is the need in those cultures for co-pilots and flight engineers to use “mitigated speech” - hints, polite suggestions, deferences - to their captains instead of speaking their minds about a problem. Korean Airlines had a high crash rate until this problem was explicitly addressed and crews retrained accordingly.

Not a lot of this offers present help to anyone now wishing to be a success. But it suggests how we might structure our future social and educational arrangements better, so that more people can have a chance at being successful, making the world a better place. This book deserves the gold star that adorns its front cover.

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
Allen Lane, £16.99; 256pp Buy the book

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