How is success achieved? Is it hard work, as mythologized in the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches stories, or is it more of brilliant insights by prodigies who seem to soak in knowledge, distill same, and turn the world around? Or is it something else?

In Outliers – The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell – in his typlical Gladwellian way – looks at ways success is achieved in very non-intuitive ways. Yet you’ll come away agreeing with him, for the most part.

Success in hockey? Look at the hockey leagues of Canadian youths. You first enter when – in the calendar year – you turn 10. So, those born on Jan. 1 (already 10) or Dec. 31 (9 years old at sign up) are in the same league/bracket. Guess who dominates? Yeah, the older kids – the difference between 30 and 31 years old is nothing; between 9 and 10 – when you’re still growing – the extra year/few months is a huge difference.

And those “better” kids will then get into the higher bracket the next year, with more skating time, better instruction and so on. So they keep getting “better.” Yet they aren’t better than the younger players overall, they are just born at the right time of the year. Time-shift the entry time up six months, and suddenly most of the better players will be from the third quarter of the calendar year.

Gladwell writes in Outliers – as he does in his other books and “New Yorker” essays – very cleanly, free of jargon. In other words, a pleasure to read. It’s not as deep in some points as I would have liked, but extremely accessible.

The insights – the tying disparate information together – are done very simply, and it’s remarkable Gladwell is, through a series of very non-linear examples, to pretty much make one question about how we learn and succeed. It goes beyond base ability, hard work and good schools.

Note: Gladwell does not really define “success.” It’s not an analysis of what constitutes success; to Gladwell, success is bettering oneself/things somehow: Better reading scores, fewer airline crashes, using street smarts instead of raw IQ to gain one’s goals. This isn’t a book that outlines how to make cool million or two.

The only quibble I have with the book – that it skipped over some very obvious points – is also one of its main strengths. If Gladstone had gotten down in the weeds to get to the bottom of all of this or that issue’s problems, it would have bogged down. And been a very different book.

I like this one.