The Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell, 2000
Economics & business PsychologySelf-developmentPolitics & society
Why do some ideas, products and habits explode while better ones vanish? Gladwell hunts for the small, surprising levers that make change contagious.
Feels like curiosity and hope. About society.
A page from the book
We think friendship grows from shared beliefs; the data says shared calendars.
A study at the University of Utah found that if you ask someone why he is friendly with someone else, he’ll say it is because he and his friend share similar attitudes. But if you actually quiz the two of them on their attitudes, you’ll find out that what they actually share is similar activities. We’re friends with the people we do things with, as much as we are with the people we resemble. We don’t seek out friends, in other words. We associate with the people who occupy the same small, physical spaces that we do. Malcolm Gladwell.Gladwell studied history at the University of Toronto and worked as a science writer at the Washington Post before joining The New Yorker.
Books that feel like this
More by Malcolm Gladwell
Talking to Strangers
Malcolm Gladwell, 2019
Gladwell argues that our instinct to trust strangers is both society's foundation and its blind spot, and that we misread people we don't know.
Outliers
Malcolm Gladwell, 2008
Why the successful are rarely self-made: birthdays, ten-thousand-hour apprenticeships and one lucky terminal, arguing that opportunity is handed out far less evenly than we admit.
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Questions readers ask
- What is The Tipping Point like?
- Feels like curiosity and hope. About society.
- What should I read after The Tipping Point?
- If you liked The Tipping Point, try Good to Great (Jim Collins), Atomic Habits (James Clear) and Homo Deus (Yuval Noah Harari).
A taste of the feed
What if the destination matters less than who is sitting beside you?
For no matter what we achieve, if we don’t spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life. But if we spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect – people we really enjoy being on the bus with and who will never disappoint us – then we will almost certainly have a great life, no matter where the bus goes. The people we interviewed from the good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with.
Good to Great · Jim Collins
A few degrees at takeoff, a different city entirely.
The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees. Imagine you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff—the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet—but when magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart.
Atomic Habits · James Clear
What a city gains by refusing to let the world in.
For me, Savannah’s resistance to change was its saving grace. The city looked inward, sealed off from the noises and distractions of the world at large. It grew inward, too, and in such a way that its people flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been possible anywhere else in the world.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil · John Berendt
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