In his new book "Outliers" Malcolm Gladwell sets out to prove that The Beatles and Bill Gates have more in common than one might think.

The book is named after a term used by scientists to describe phenomenon that "lie outside of normal experience."

"And that's what this book is about: people who are a little bit extraordinary and trying to figure out what makes them tick," Gladwell told CTV's Canada AM.

In his new book, the author of "Blink" and "The Tipping Point" argues that Gates and The Beatles actually followed a very similar route to success -- and the common denominator was hard work.

"They're both examples of what's called the 10,000 hour rule, which is this idea psychologists have come up with that says it takes 10,000 hours of practice to be good at something," Gladwell told CTV's Canada AM.

"It's almost impossible to be a chess grandmaster or a medical specialist or a great hockey player without practising for 10,000 hours."

Gates basically lived in front of his computer from the time he was 13 until he finished high school, Gladwell said, banking the necessary 10,000 hours of practice time to surpass the threshold for large-scale success.

The Beatles, he said, worked eight-hour shifts seven days a week in Hamburg, Germany, playing sets in a strip club for months at a time, before becoming an "overnight success."

But success goes much deeper than simple work ethic, Gladwell argues. Generation, date of birth, country of origin, family -- these are the factors that really contribute to how well people do in life.

Gladwell goes deep in his investigation, searching for common threads among the successful and their surroundings, and trying to determine how and why they reached the level they did -- with fascinating results.

The "extraordinary" people he turns his lens on range from star hockey and soccer players to top lawyers and Silicon Valley executives. He even investigates why Asians seem to be so darned good at math.

In the case of successful hockey and soccer players, genetics, geography and muscle mass all took a back seat, surpringly, to the time of year they were born, and the Jan. 1 cutoff date for age-class eligibility in both sports.

"So when people go to recruit all-star teams for rep squads when kids are eight and nine years old, they try to find the best players," Gladwell said.

"But actually they're picking the oldest players because when you're eight, if you're born in January and you have eight or nine months on someone born at the end of the year, it's a big difference and that advantage never goes away. These kids get special coaching and more practice and more games until by the time they're 19, 20, 21 years old, they actually are better than everyone else."

In the case of Silicon Valley executives it isn't the month that is important, but the year. Gladwell said a high proportion, including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Bill Joy, were born in 1955. That meant they were starting their careers in the mid 1970s, just as the personal computer was being born.

When looking into whether Asians actually lived up to the stereotypical notion that they have an advantage when it comes to mathematics, Gladwell discovered their culture did seem to make a difference.

"It has to do with attitudes about work," Gladwell said.

"The culture that creates a lot of Asian countries is a rice farming culture, and rice farmindg is one of the most demanding, labour intensive forms of agriculture ever. And my argument is that cultural legacy, when you sit in front of a math problem, is wonderfully useful and we can show how Asian kids actually approach math in a very different way."