Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion 'Outliers', anyone reading it??

Ok, I am picking it back up!
I wanted to list out the couple of chapters that I think are most relevant to this board, that I *did* read: The trouble with geniuses parts 1 and 2.
In part 1, he describes a quality of the successful talented person that he says is part of why a high-iq person might out-succeed a very high-iq person: creativity. I think most folks here have creativity on their radar, I know the gt program my ds is in has a strong emphasis on problem solving, divergent thinking skills, mapping out problems to see other ways to solve them. There are some learnable aspects to what Gladwell only describes but doesn't really even name...
In Part 2, he has a discussion of those more 'chance' aspects of success: family background being the very strongest. According to him, and it makes sense to me, it plays into whether someone feels capable and inclined to speak up for themselves to turn a bit of bad luck into just a bump in the road instead of a career ending mis-step. There is some aspect of creativity in this ability too, which he refers to as 'practical intelligence'. The tale of Oppenheimer is used to illustrate this pretty dramatically. I think the chapters stand alone enough that one could skip straight to them...
no pressure!