Malcolm Gladwell - The Tipping Point (2000)

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A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

Malcolm Gladwell
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.

Malcolm Gladwell
If you play an audiotape of a yawn to blind people, they'll yawn too.

Malcolm Gladwell
What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because, that's the basic context in which all persuasion takes place.

Malcolm Gladwell
Starting epidemics requires concentrating resources on a few key area. The Law of the Few says that Connectors, Mavens, and Salesman are responsible for starting word-of-mouth epidemics, which means that if you are interested in starting a word-of-mouth epidemic, your resources ought to be solely concentrated on these three groups. No one else matters.

Malcolm Gladwell
Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.

Malcolm Gladwell
To be someone's best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting.

Malcolm Gladwell
The answer is that 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.

Malcolm Gladwell
If we think about emotion this way - as outside-in, not inside out - it is possible to understand how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others. Some of us, after all, are very good at expressiing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us.

Malcolm Gladwell
What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus.

Malcolm Gladwell
That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.

Malcolm Gladwell
There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.

Malcolm Gladwell
If you want to bring a fundamental change in people's belief and behavior.... You need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured.

Malcolm Gladwell
Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement.

Malcolm Gladwell
There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible.

Malcolm Gladwell
Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.

Malcolm Gladwell
If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes.

Malcolm Gladwell
The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.

Malcolm Gladwell