Abook arrives every now and then that dares to flip people's thinking upside down. One such book is Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which swims bracingly against the thundering tide of conventional wisdom.
Rather than entrust readers with magic spells for future success and happiness, it looks backwards. Its erudite and addictively readable author proposes that who we are and how we do in life is rooted in our culture, our upbringing and even the month we were born.
If you find the idea of being bound by your birth, ancestry and childhood influences depressing, you would be better off seeking assistance from a self-help book instead.
However, if you yearn for a bright window into the world in which we live and gripping insights that unravel the logic behind why some people dazzle, and the rest of the world's seething masses do not, read on.
The dictionary suggests that an outlier is something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body. It can also mean a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample. In the eyes of the author, outliers are places or people that lie outside everyday experience. They are also people to whom the normal rules do not apply.
'[They are] men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary ... geniuses, business tycoons, rock stars and software programmers,' Gladwell writes.