For the past three decades, leading business gurus on the order of Tom Peters have declared that the most essential ingredient required for success in a particular field was to have a massive level of talent, as it was talent that truly made the world go around.
But that was then, and this is now. Best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell in his new book “Outliers: The Story of Success” (Little, Brown 2008) and Fortune magazine’s Geoff Colvin in his new book “Talent is Overrated” (Portfolio/Penguin 2008) have both turned conventional wisdom upside down on what it is that actually causes monster levels of success and concluded that possessing talent is nice, but has no real correlation to high-level achievement.
Continue reading Talmage on Gladwell's Outliers.