Thanks Chris for your thoughts on Gladwell's latest book. I too like his writing style as well as his wonderful presentation at TED. He is not always exhaustive with the topics he covers as you also pointed out (and I don't think he tries to be) but it is a delight the way he pieces different information together. Sounds like he pulled it off again. I'm now looking forward to read Outliers myself.

Cheers,
Hans

His style of writing is very simple and precise. I haven't finished the book yet, but I went to his talk few weeks ago. Got a general sense of what the book is about. I was a little bit disappointed that he completely rejected the idea of genetics without any apparent investigation.

As a Chinese myself, I think the language is the main reason why Asians are better in arithmetic. (Absolutely terrible in logic & game theory!) The idea doesn't make sense to me because the northern half of China is too cold or dry to produce rice. Thailand and Vietnam are major rice producers, and it doesn't seem to help with their math.

The author of "The Immortal Game" David Shenk has also been working on a book about success. According to his blog, his book would be far more evident based and data driven.

I'm glad to hear that we can all work to be happier. I feel that the first step toward happiness legacy is to take Jerry Springer Show off the air...