Jordan Rippy

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the small, seemingly unimportant details that caused major movements such as Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues to “Tip”. It’s a great read that highlights the importance of the small details in any major cultural, economic, or behavioral shift. This is a great book for anyone. It sheds light on some aspects of communication and marketing that cause an idea or product to “stick”. Some take-aways from my reading:

• “[John] Wesley realized that if you wanted to bring about fundamental change in people’s belief and behavior, a change that would persist and serve as an exampl to others, you needed to create a community around them, where those new beliefs could be practiced and expressed and nurtured.”

• “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.”

• “Persuasion often works in ways we do not appreciate.”

• “The lesson of stickiness is that there is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.”

• “The power of context says that what really matters is little things.”

• “If you add up the meaning of the Stanford prison experiment and the New York subway experiment, they suggest that it is possible to be a better person on a clean street or in a clean subway than in one littered with trash and graffiti.”

• “The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us.”

• “When each person has group-acknowledged responsibility for particular tasks and facts, greater efficiency is inevitable.”

• “If anyone wants to start an epidemic…he or she has to find some person or some means to translate the message of the innovators into something the rest of us can understand.”