It's sort of an odd example, though, since Gladwell himself consistently succeeds.

ETA: Given the downvote, maybe I should clarify that I don't mean that Gladwell succeeds at being the kind of writer that I would want to read. I mean that he consistently succeeds at writing best-selling books. The "igon-value" thing was cringe-inducing, but it plausibly hasn't done any significant harm to his sales. Apparently, you can be careless in that way and still succeed fantastically, again and again, with his target audience.

So, in that sense, he's not a good example for the claim that "people who success many times in the row, tend to employ eigenvalues rather than use igon value." (Though, of course, his existence doesn't disproves the claim, either.)