The Tipping Point

Last week I finished reading The Tipping Point. When I started it I was looking for something analytical; I didn't want to read more fiction. It had actually been a long time since I'd read a book for pleasure. Law school threw more than a few wrenches in that pasttime.

And then, this may sound bizarre, but I was a little afraid of reading again. I can't explain it, but being off the horse for so long just made it seem impossible to get back on. How do you choose a book? What if it's not any good? When should I make time to read - before bed, in the middle of the day? Reading used to make up so much of who I was and how I defined myself, I couldn't just skate back into that.

But, somehow I did it. Even though most of my reading time was to and from work on the metro (when I could get a seat). It was nice, though. It made going to work a little less painful. And no matter how much work numbed my mind during the day, I could take a few seconds to think about what I was reading and destress with it on the way home.

It's a book about change. In particular, it's a book that presents a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does. For example, why did crime drop so dramatically in New York City in the mid-1990's? How does a novel written by an unknown author end up as national bestseller? Why do teens smoke in greater and greater numbers, when every single person in the country knows that cigarettes kill? Why is word-of-mouth so powerful? What makes TV shows like Sesame Street so good at teaching kids how to read? I think the answer to all those questions is the same. It's that ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease. They are social epidemics. The Tipping Point is an examination of the social epidemics that surround us.

It's a very interesting read, and I think there's a lot of truth in it. Sometimes I felt like Gladwell was beating me over the head with his point, but his stories are great. It's amazing how people pick things up from one another.

The author talks about three kinds of people: Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen. As I was reading about these groups the author has made I could really envision people in my life who fall in to these. I could see how the scale tips.

I picked up another book by the author called Blink.

It's a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, "Blink" is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good.

Hopefully this one will be as good as the first.