The Tipping Point
The Tipping Point: How little things can make a big difference by Malcom Gladwell.
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
This book answers: Why is it that some ideas or behaviours or products start epidemics and others don’t?
There are 3 main rules to make something tip: Law of the few, the stickiness factor and the power of context.
The bedrock underlying successful epidemics is the fact that people can radically transform their behaviour in the face of the right kind of impetus.
🎨 Impressions
Tipping Point was Gladwell's debut book, however the last one of his I read. It didn't disappoint. This is a compelling read, challenging our view on the world with how and why things change. With the rise and fall of new products all the time, and with the age of information, it is interesting to learn more about how these ideas spread.
How I Discovered It
In my opinion, all Malcolm Gladwell books should be at the top of everyone's reading list.
Who Should Read It?
If you have an idea but are unsure how to get it to reach the masses or if you enjoy entrepreneurism and how ideas spread. Learn how one idea takes-off but others don't.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
Ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread just like viruses do.
Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push—in just the right place—it can be tipped.
It takes only the smallest of changes to shatter an epidemic's equilibrium.
📒 Summary + Notes
Ideas, Contagion and Epidemics
Tipping Points: the name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything changes all at once. This requires these characteristics:
Contagiousness
Little causes have a big effect
Change happens dramatically, not gradually
We have in our minds a very specific, biological notion of what contagiousness means. But contagiousness in other words is an unexpected property of all kinds of things, and we have to remember that if we are recognise and diagnose epidemic change. This is because we are trained to think what goes into a transaction or relationship or system must be directly relates in intensity and dimension to what comes out.
We have to abandon this expectation about proportionality. We need to prepare ourselves for he possibility that sometimes big changes follow from small events and sometimes these changes can happen very quickly.
Therefore, why is it that some ideas or behaviours or products start epidemics and others don't? And what can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own.
1. Law of the Few
When it comes to epidemics, a tiny, disproportionate percentage of people do the majority of the work. The success of a social epidemics is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rate set of social gifts.
Connectors: Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in six steps. It means a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked through those special few. They manage to occupy many different worlds and subcultures and niches. Connectors and their ability to span many different worlds, is a function of something intrinsic in their personality, and a combination of curiosity, confidence, sociability and energy.
Mavens: We rely upon people to connect us with new information. They keep the marketplace honest. Mavens have the knowledge and social skills to start word-of-mouth epidemics. They want to help others and this is a very effective way to get someone's attention.
Salesmen: These are persuasive people, who are more subtle and more insidious and therefore much harder to insulate ourselves against. They draw others into your rhythms and dictate the terms of the interaction.
2. The Stickiness Factor
Stickiness means that a message makes an impact.
We need to know how knowledge or an idea/product will fit into our life. Once the advice or message became practical and personal it became memorable.
We all want to believe that the key to making an impact on someone's lies within the inherent quality of the ideas we present. But, without altering the content they were able to tip the message by tinkering on the margin, with the presentation of their ideas.
There is a simple way to package information, that under the right circumstances, can make to irresistible. All you have to do is find it.
3. The Power of Context
When people are in a group, responsibility if diffused. The key to getting people to change their behaviour is to care about their neighbour in distress sometimes lies with the smallest details of their immediate situation The power of context says that human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than may think.
Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur. Eg, it is something physical like graffiti that makes us start to engage in a certain kind of behaviour, not a certain kind of person but a feature of the environment.
All of us naturally think in terms of absolutes when it comes to personality: this person is a certain way or not. We think only in terms of inherent traits and forgot the role of the situation, this deceiving ourselves about the real causes of human behaviour.
We are powerfully shaped by our external environment, the features of our immediate social and physical world - the street we walk down, the people we encounter - play a huge role in shaping who we are and how we act.
The Role of Groups
When people are asked to consider evidence or make decisions in a group they come to very different conclusions then when they are asked the same questions by themselves. Once we are part of a group we are more susceptible to peer pressure and social norms and any number of kinds of influence that can plat a critical role in sweeping us up in the beginnings of an epidemic.
Small, close-knit groups have the power to magnify the epidemic potential of a message or idea. It is easier to remember and appreciate something if you discuss it for two hours with your best friends. It becomes a social experience, an object of conversation.
There is the benefit of unity, everyone in a complex enterprise share a common relationship: peer pressure is more powerful than a concept of a boss. But this becomes near impossible beyond 150 people. Therefore in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.
Summary:
The world - much as we want it to - does not accord with our intuition.
The bedrock underlying successful epidemics is the fact that people can radically transform their behaviour in the face of the right kind of impetus.
We like to think of ourselves as autonomous and inner-directed, that who we are and how we act is something permanently set by our genes and our temperament. Whereas we are actually powerfully influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context and the personalities of those around us.
Merely by manipulating the size of the group, we can dramatically improve its receptivity to new ideas. By tinkering with the presentation of information, we can significantly improve its significant. Simply by finding and reaching those few special people who hold so much social power, we can shape the course of social epidemics In the end Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of our potential for change and the power of intelligent action. Look at the world around you. It may seem like a immovable and implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push - in just the right place - it can be tipped.
