It's interesting that the author attributes the outliers' success partially to their circumstances, as if each of these individuals was somehow fated to pursue their exact paths regardless of the time period they lived in.

It seems at least as plausible to me that part of their talent lay in recognizing the opportunity which they pursued. It reminds me mostly of how many scientific breakthroughs are pursued at the same time by many thinkers in the field. The climate is right for that kind of breakthrough, and talented individuals recognize the potential breakthroughs - and then make them. You could read breakthroughs two ways: 1) the individuals were "lucky" to have lived right before the breakthrough was made, or 2) the individuals were talented enough that they would have had a reasonable change of making a breakthrough, and the timing just influenced which breakthrough was made by them.

Furthermore, there seems to be a difference between attributing outliers' success to external factors and explaining a population's success via cultural factors. Cultural factors are not external to the population in the same way that luck is external to an individual outlier, so at first glance, it seems like these chapters do not speak to each other much.

Wish I could mod parent up. Playing these sorts of tricks with people only works as long as they trust you, and it's essentially manipulation. I suppose you might argue that the ends justify the means, but in my experience the teachers that have had the most influence on me were ones that were genuinely interested in a topic, and honest enough to share their experiences without trying to influence me they way they thought best.

In the end, we're all just different from each other, and rather than trying to trick them into learning the way you want them to, I suspect it's better to show them your excitement about a topic and then just learn to accept it if they go another direction.