It's a Friday afternoon in mid-October, one month before his new book about incredibly successful people like Bill Gates and the Beatles and Mozart--the people whom he calls outliers--arrives in bookstores, and Malcolm Gladwell is insisting that, honestly, he doesn't have anything at all in common with his subjects. At the end of the day, he says, I'm just a journalist.

Gladwell is offering this modest self-assessment while seated at the kitchen table...