ultimately garnered a lot of attention, became a cult favorite and set him on his way.
"Blink" was an interesting premise - but pretty decisively rejected by "Thinking Fast & Slow" which Nobel winner Daniel Kahneman wrote precisely to address what he felt was misleading and badly researched work by Gladwell.
"Outliers" has got a lot of attention, but the "10,000 hour" thing has been attacked from a lot of angles as a gimmicky simplification designed to sell books, which, of course, it has done very effectively.
I think Gladwell is a smart dude and I don't mean to say above that he's on par with MNS, just that both made a big splash out of the gates and have subsequently tried to match that, sometimes to detriment of just doing good work.