While reading Gladwell's book Outliers I got the distinct impression that you could effectively argue against his thesis, that successful people are only successful because of their circumstance, without changing many words in his book.  What Gladwell fails to understand is that what makes a person an outlier isn't that they happen to have expended energy getting good at something that people want, it's that they took the time and effort to get good at something to begin with.  What makes a person an outlier is the dedication and motivation to truly become an expert at something.<p>For example, in his book Gladwell says that Bill Gates is a victim of circumstance, and gives examples of that circumstance.  One example was that Gates frequently snuck out of his parent's house in the middle of the night to ride a public bus to a local college where he worked on an unused computer terminal.  Similarly, Gladwell tells a similar story about Steve Jobs, in which he looks up Bill Hewlett's number in the telephone book, and calls him to ask if he can have some spare electronic components to construct something for a school science project.  What makes those two outliers isn't that they had the opportunity to do those things, it's that they actually did them.  In both cases, they created an opportunity for themselves, then seized the opportunity.  They didn't just created one opportunity, however, they created and took advantage of hundreds of opportunities, each time further leveraging their cumulative advantage.  If it was truly just circumstance, then everyone living within bus distance to a college with an unused computer, and everyone with a telephone and a phone book should have founded Microsofts and Apples.