In contrast, Outliers succeeds, in Gladwell’s typical narrative salad style, as a balm on the psyche of the constitutional optimist. Have you seen that black and white image of the two faces in profile that suddenly turns into a cup, and then back into two faces, and then you realize you can make your brain look at it either way? Gladwell does something similar, but different. When I was young and unencumbered by material things I lived by the tracks. One morning a train was parked on them loaded with large brightly colored metallic objects. I stood staring at the train trying to make sense of the apparently random pattern of lines formed by the intersection of the silhouettes of the train cars and their cargo. I stood there longer than I like to admit. And then all the lines miraculously resolved themselves into a train loaded with automobiles. The point here being that unlike the faces and the cup image, once I saw that the train was loaded with automobiles the random pattern of silhouettes was irrevocably ordered, crystalized. In similar fashion, in Outliers Gladwell displays his talent for putting together crystalizing explanations. He looks at life from a weird perspective and then points out the order in the randomness, thereby irrevocably reordering our understanding of reality.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/06/guest-post-malcolm-gladwell-replies-to.html