Your summary didn't match with what I read in the NYTimes article. The point seemed to be that people have advantages in certain endeavors that are not attribu

Your summary didn't match with what I read in the NYTimes article. The point seemed to be that people have advantages in certain endeavors that are not attributable to their skill or talent. Bill Gates is a offered as a case of someone who had the advantage of privileged access to and time on computing systems (which is not a knock on his genius). Another case cited has to do with age cutoffs for Canadian youth hockey leagues. Basically, anyone born right before the cutoff tends to be the older, bigger, stronger kid in that bracket and this advantage increases over time. They practice, yes, but they also have a significant advantage stemming from a factor totally outside of their influence. The other point being that you can analyze these factors and reduce that influence, supposing you wanted to do that. I think your assessment of what the book offers is actually more of an assessment of what Giles zeroed in on. I'm not defending the book--I have no interested since the concept can be summed up in a twitter post--but thought I'd point out that I think there's a different thesis at work.