Malcolm Gladwell's Latest Book, 'Outliers: The Story of Success'

I've been reading a lot about Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Outliers: The Story of Success

I'm very intrigued by it because it seems to fly in the face of another book I read recently by Marcus Buckingham. (By the way, if you haven't read Buckingham, run to your bookstore or library.)

Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance is the latest of his I read, and his premise is this: strengths rely on three things before you can really consider them to be a strength: talent, knowledge and skill. If you don't have this combination, then essentially you're wasting your time and talent.

Gladwell's new book, by what I know about it, seems to contradict that. Talent is overrated, he says. You just need to work harder to get where you're going.

I don't know who is right. I do know that the latter empowers me a bit more than the former.