At the moment I’m plowing simultaneously through Blue Bug, Red Road, the memoir of a retired Princeton history professor who drove his 1966 Beetle from California to Wisconsin and back; Laurence Bergreen’s Over the Edge of the World, the story of Magellan’s incredibly complicated first circumnavigation in 1519; The Faustball Tunnel, the surprisingly entertaining story of a group of captured German submariners who tunnel out of their prison camp in Arizona during World War II; and a collection of David Sedaris’ essays.

But the book that’s most captured my imagination is Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, a young writer who’s already written a pair of bestsellers, The Tipping Point and Blink. This kid is good! He must have aced his research paper assignments when he was a history major at the University of Toronto. Now he’s got three bestsellers, gets $40,000 a pop for lectures and million-dollar book advances. He also has plenty of critics, who carp about his “pop sociology” approach to his subjects. He’s an outlier himself. We should all be so lucky. Of course, then there’d be no outliers.

An outlier is an exceptional person, smart, rich, and successful, who probably explodes our notions of the rewards of genius and industry by going far beyond them. Some examples Gladwell uses: Bill Joy, Bill Gates, the Beatles, Steve Jobs, Robert Oppenheimer, violin virtuosos, and Jewish lawyers born in New York City during the Depression. Gladwell is interested in how they managed to become such prominent outliers, when many others equally talented and intelligent, but born in a different time and place, and with different levels and types of support, did not

He begins with the phenomenon of Canadian hockey players, the best of whom by an outsize margin are born during the first three months of the year. Is there something about being born during the time of Canadian ice and snow that lends itself to becoming a hockey star? Yes, there is; but it’s got nothing to do with the background climate at their nativity. The answer is simply that in Canada the date for eligibility to play in the Junior Hockey League is January 1. So a boy who turns ten on January 2 is playing against others who were born all during the year. At the age of ten, a few months’ extra physical development is significant, so the older boys do better. The following year, when the winnowing begins, they get better equipment, coaching, and ice times. In short order, they’re leading the pack, and eventually dominate the upper leagues. If Canada were to institute two leagues, one cutting off in January and the other in July, she’d probably have twice as many promising hockey players.

That may seen inconsequential to anybody but hockey players and their parents, but Gladwell then considers the effect of grade-specific academic testing. Research indicates that the oldest kids in any class score between four and twelve percentile points higher then the youngest. Consider the effect of that when classes are then “tracked” for academic ability. It would be valuable to know whether students put into commercial, industrial, and secretarial classes are in fact only younger than the ones getting college-oriented material and teaching. In any case, the difference persists through university, where young students in any given class are underrepresented by over 10%. Denmark, he points out, tries to avoid this discrimination by waiting to make selection decisions until age differences have leveled out.

Gladwell clearly isn’t always right in his observations – nobody is – but his fresh take on phenomena which in many cases we’ve never noticed is very intriguing. He posits an idea called the “10,000-hour rule,” which states simply that in order to achieve mastery in any particular activity or endeavor, a person must spend at least 10,000 hours doing it. His outstanding examples of this are Bill Joy and Bill Gates, who were born at the most nearly perfect moment to encounter computers during their high school years. Joy was able to get access to the University of Michigan’s massive computer center; Gates was given a small computer by the Mother’s Association of his small private school. Both disappeared into their new passions, and emerged (we presume) 10,000 hours later to found what became multibillion-dollar companies. Same thing with the Beatles, who were a popular, but struggling high school band, till they got a regular gig in Hamburg, Germany, playing seven nights a week for up to eight hours. “We got better and we got more confidence,” said John Lennon years later – and most likely 10,000 hours later, as well.

There’s a lot more in this book: why Korean Air suffered a rash of crashes during the 1990s. They were caused by a cultural phenomenon called “power distance.” Koreans are loath to criticize or second-guess superiors even when they know they’re dangerously wrong. The United States has the lowest power distance. So now all aviation talk is in English, and second officers are encouraged to express reservations forcefully. We folks in the cabin are thus safer.

Would you like to know why Southern boys take offense more quickly and violently than Yankees? There’s apparently an explanation for that, too.