I read this book after talking to a friend about Gladwell. He told me it sounded a lot like Syed. After reading Syed, I agree. Syed continues on Gladwell's premise that people are not ever naturally good at anything, but that there are always circumstances that contributed to the talent. Basically, that anyone can do anything if they put in the required time to get better at it. He goes on to say that some will still be better, but that if everyone played as much hockey as Wayne Gretzky for example, Gretzky would not seem as great as he currently does.

In some sense, it is encouraging to think that people can become much better by just practicing (correctly), however, it seems to boil down to automaticity. Rather, people get better at table tennis because they practice so much they make it automatic and no longer think about it. In fact, the very act of thinking too much about it will cause one to choke! So it almost reinforces the drill and practice mentality.

It can be thought, however, that the automaticity of learning to do math equations more quickly gives the mathematician the ability to think differently because they are not spending so much time thinking about doing the simple math. In most students' future lives, though, they probably need to do more thinking about how to solve something, rather than being able to do something quickly (I can always look up the quadradic equation if I need it - as long as I know I need it).