Malcolm Gladwell of Tipping Point/ Blink fame has a new book coming out.  Outliers: The Story of Success.

“In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of “outliers”—the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.”

This piece in the New Yorker is an appetizer.  It talks about the myth of genius in scientific discovery and the fact that big ideas are perhaps not rare at all.  More than a hundred of sciences great discoveries- the telephone, calculus, evolution- were discovered simultaneously by different people.  If great ideas are in the air, does it mean that we just have to have our eyes more open to them?