In fact, I have finished this book one week ago......Malcolm is a quite famous writer and this book is so-called bestseller. In short, it is a book talking about the factor of success-it seems to be those common bestseller in career. But it doesn't. It focuses on the analysis part rather than teaching you how to be successful (well, someone may believer the latter one is more important.)
In his case studies, he found that success is not just about genius and hardworking, but accumulation of minor advantage. It may be your birth date, some chances in education (saying, Steve Job and Bill Gate had chance to learn about PC when PC was rare in those days.), and also culture. In his book, he didn't deny the importance of IQ, appearance and hardworking. He mentions a "10000 hours rule", i.e. mastering of any skill (saying, good programmng skill, mathematics, basketball playing) takes you 10000 hours to be mature. However, he claims that factors like IQ (for scholars), height (for basketball players) have threshold values (saying IQ show relations with university admission rate). After exceeding the threshold, they just play minor roles to decide your achievement (IQ of Einstein is not very high indeed).
Somehow, it is quite gloomy. You cannot achieve much because you lack those minor advantages when you was young. And you can hardly compare with those "successful" people now. In another way, it may be a remedy for some people- You fail not because you are stupid- you are just out of luck. In another way, those successful people do not believe their achievement is solely because of industriousness and intelligence-maybe you are just lucky enough.
In a more macroscopic thought, maybe we should give more chance to those unprivileged-they are given too little chance already........
