The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

by Malcolm Gladwell

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.

Wesley realized that if you wanted to bring about a fundamental change in people’s belief and behavior, a change that

would persist and serve as an example to others, you needed to create a community around them, where those new beliefs could be practiced and expressed and nurtured.

If you belong to a group of five people, Dunbar points out, you have to keep track of ten separate relationships: your relationships with the four others in your circle and the six other two-way relationships between the others. That’s what it means to know everyone in the circle. You have to understand the personal dynamics of the group, juggle different personalities, keep people happy, manage the demands on your own time and attention, and so

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

most of us in the Early and Late Majority don’t want to make a revolutionary statement or take risks with fashion at

Smokers aren’t smokers because they underestimate the risks of smoking. They smoke even though they overestimate the risk of smoking.

But that’s not the point. Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool.

The answer has always been that language is a skill acquired laterally—that what children pick up from other children is as, or more, important in the acquisition of language as what they pick up at home.

Instead she took the small budget that she had and thought about how to use it more intelligently. She changed the context of her message. She changed the messenger, and she changed the message itself. She focused her efforts.

The problem, of course, is that the indiscriminate application of effort is something that is not always possible. There are times when we need a convenient shortcut, a way to make a lot out of a little,

Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions.

examples of Salesmen and Connectors, of Paul Revere’s ride and Blue’s Clues, and the Rule of 150 and the New York subway cleanup and the Fundamental Attribution Error,

We are actually powerfully influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context, and the personalities of those around us.

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.