How to fly high: A genius guide, by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell, born in Fareham, Hampshire, but raised in Canada, has become one of the most prominent cultural commentators working today. He spent a decade at the Washington Post before moving to the New Yorker, and his two books, The Tipping Point and Blink, have sold millions of copies and paved the way for non-fiction bestsellers such as Stephen J Dubner and Steven D Levitt's Freakonomics and Nicholas Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan.

In 2005, Time magazine named Gladwell as one of the "100 Most Influential People". He reputedly received a $1m advance for Blink, which has also been adapted for the cinema by Stephen Gaghan, the Oscar-winning writer of Traffic. Now 45 years old, Gladwell has been called a stud, a phenomenon and the cleverest man alive. His new book is called Outliers: The Story of Success. "I always think of my writing as an attempt to organise ordinary experience," he tells me from his home in New York. "They are exercises in curiosity, right? There are a series of dots – can we possibly connect them in a way that is interesting? Can we start an interesting conversation about a given topic? That's really what my books are about."

In Outliers, this conversation occasionally sounds like the first half of a whimsical joke. Why do so many aspiring Canadian hockey players have birthdays in January, February or March? Why were so many software giants (including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Google's Eric Schmidt) born in 1955? How did Robert Oppenheimer get away with poisoning his Cambridge supervisor? And why, during the 1990s, were pilots at Korean Airlines 17 times more likely to crash than those at American Airlines?

Each question, however, represents a serious attempt to get under the skin of a particular "Outlier" – Gladwellian shorthand for extremely successful people. In addition to the teenage Gates, Gladwell examines the Beatles and Joe Flom, arguably the most powerful lawyer in New York.

Although he calls accomplishment "incredibly attractive", the reason Gladwell begins with these superstars is to reveal our common humanity. "If you are interested in explaining and understanding success, it's always most fruitful to start at the extremes and work back towards the middle. If you want to understand great pilots, you should start with the worst."

So Gladwell also investigates the flip-side of success (the child genius who drops out of college) and the lives of mere mortals: feuding families in America's southern states, disadvantaged students at a school in the Bronx, and even his own Jamaican mother and grandmother.

Outliers doesn't laud the mega-successful so much as bring them down to earth. "I felt there has been a self-congratulatory strain in the culture where successful people justified their position on the top of the pyramid on the basis of their own great personal virtues. The principal proponent of the rags to riches myth was Andrew Carnegie, the second wealthiest man in human history. He went out of his way to say that only the poor had the wherewithal to become rich. Talk about a strategy for justifying his own achievement, and fighting off the income tax."

Gladwell admits that talent and hard work play crucial roles in making it to the top: Outliers recommends no fewer than 10,000 hours of practice for any budding tycoon, rock star or writer. But he places equal emphasis on random events outside our control: luck, opportunity, timing, community and the significance of cultural inheritance.

He argues that the Jewish background of lawyers such as Joe Flom enabled them to view the New York legal world of the 1950s from fresh angles. "They didn't inherit a whole series of assumptions about what legal work was, and that was phenomenally useful." In the case of the Korean air crashes, a culture of deference made co-pilots reluctant to correct the mistakes of their superiors.

When I ask Gladwell about his own cultural background, he says that his "baroque" personal history has been central in shaping the kind of writer he has become. It is a story that contains recurring themes: the pursuit of freedom, a desire for autonomy, a willingness to graft and the drive to succeed. In other words, Outliers' main criteria for meaningful work.

Born to a Jamaican mother and English father, Gladwell lived in England until he was six years old, when the family relocated to Ontario. Describing himself as a "double-immigrant", he says that his place on the margins grants him valuable insights, especially into American life. "There are considerable advantages to being an outsider. It's no accident that Canadians play a disproportionate role in American popular culture. We have a unique perspective, and that can be enormously useful if you are in the culture business."

Although he spent his childhood "in a hurry", Gladwell learned the value of patience and work from his father's dedication as a mathematician. "The problem as a child is you cannot conceive of 10,000 hours. That's 10 years of effort. One of the biggest stumbling blocks that kids have to success is that they give up before they have put in the necessary time investment."

A good if not brilliant student, Gladwell says he was more interested in "fashioning" his own experience. "I sort of did what I wanted. That didn't always correspond with what the teacher wants."

After an initial interest in business (he pursued a career in advertising), Gladwell moved into journalism during the mid-1980s, flirting briefly with right-wing politics at the American Spectator. He got his big break at the Washington Post, where he logged the 10,000 hours of practice that transformed his writing. "The Post was a crucible of meaningful work. I arrived a poor writer, and an even worse reporter. I emerged a good writer and an excellent reporter."

Increasingly drawn to longer-form journalism, Gladwell moved to the New Yorker, which offered the autonomy he has always craved. "I had the freedom to engage ideas in more detail and to express more of my own personality." For Gladwell, this means developing his role as middleman between the general reader and academia (which he also dubs the "Theory Industry").

"It's the old cliché which I keep repeating: I think people are experience-rich and theory-poor. I am in the business of trying to help with the 'theory-poor' part. Intellectuals make sense of things. Intermediaries like me translate for a broader audience. We have a nice little intellectual food chain going on."

This is why Gladwell refuses to define himself as an Outlier. "I am conscious of the fact that I am writing about other people's ideas and other people's accomplishments. So I don't think I fall into that exclusive category."

Someone who is more likely to qualify, however, is American president elect, Barack Obama. Although the Canadian Gladwell wasn't eligible to vote, he can hardly contain his excitement. He finds one aspect of Obama's background especially intriguing.

"In terms of my discussion about the subtleties of racial heritage [in Outlier's final chapter], Obama is more than interesting. The first black man to become President is not of African-American heritage. Nor was Colin Powell. They are outsiders That's a powerful testament to just how debilitating the American slave experience was."

Gladwell balances this rather depressing interpretation with a more optimistic story. He cites the Bronx school that is transforming the lives of disadvantaged African-American children through the simple expedient of time: longer lessons, extended working days and shorter holidays. Where there is understanding, Gladwell says, there is hope.

"The first half of the book is a little bit bleak. Success is random and not nearly as self-directed as we think. The second half is more uplifting. By the end, I want people to think that we can have more control through the cultural choices that we make and the kind of institutions that we set up."

If we do that, Gladwell argues, we stand a chance of becoming outliers ourselves.

The extract

Outliers: The Story of Success, By Malcolm Gladwell (Allen Lane £16.99)

'...People don't rise from nothing... The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities'