To reiterate the previous educator's point, innate talent leads to success due to a combination of luck and skill. Moreover, there are societal conditions that favor certain talented individuals over others.

An example Gladwell provides for this is the fact that most professional male hockey players are born in the months of January to February. This is not a coincidence, but rather it is significantly influenced by the system in place beginning in the earliest years of their training.

Children who play hockey are made to train and compete with other children in their age group. Children born in the earliest months of the year, compared to December, for example, have a 9+ month advantage, as older children are generally more physically developed than their peers born later in the same year. As the years go by, the system favors these older children, and the skills-gap between the older and the younger children gets increasingly larger.

As in this example, innate talent is necessary to one's success in a field, but their luck—in terms of opportunity, timing, and so on—is also integral to their ultimate outcome.

This reference is introduced in the second section of Chapter Two, “The 10,000-Hour Rule.” The whole premise of the book “Outliers” is that successful people are not just smart or talented: they are the beneficiaries of optimal circumstances, too. And even people with innate talent still have to work on their craft for a long time in order to become proficient. Gladwell says:

The question is this: is there such a thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is yes. … Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.

He goes on to use the examples of computer software experts Bill Joy and Bill Gates, who were both very smart students who were interested in knowing how things worked. They were in the right places at the right times, when big computers were changing from card punch systems to time-share systems. And they were both so interested in computer programming that they did it all of the time. Probably more than 10,000 hours. Their work paid off … tremendously.