Gladwell is saying that it's not just being in the right place at the right time.

First of all, in the examples he's citing, we're talking about EXTREME success. His examples are people who were able to take advantage of seismic shifts in an industry or the creation of whole new industries. The people who were best positioned to succeed in these new environments were the people whose youthful obsessions gave them the status of grizzled veterans in a completely wide open field.

So Gladwell is saying that it's being it the right place, at the right time (the dawn of a new industry or drastic change in an existing one), at the right age (early 20's), and with the skills of an expert, and you have to be lucky enough to be presented with an opportunity and smart enough to take it.

The key for me is that, except for the musicians, the people obsessively acquiring skills while they're young are doing it because they love it, not necessarily because they're planning to make a career out of it. Then the world shifts in their favor and they find themselves experts in a field that didn't really exist even five years previously. The flip side are kids who did something obsessively and gained skills, but they were skills the world already had in abundance or perhaps they were novel skills but the world simply didn't shift to their advantage.

The world is undergoing a seismic shift right now. I have the feeling that things are going to change dramatically over the next 5 years or so. What skills have the kids born in 1990 been obsessively acquiring? How will the world look when we emerge from the current economic crisis and what industries will be spawned or changed?

DD