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

by Malcolm Gladwell

“A Maven is someone who wants to solve other people’s problems, generally by solving his own,”

The idea, then, that Big Bird no longer wants to be called Big Bird but instead wants to be called Roy is almost guaranteed to befuddle a preschooler.

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.

What this study is suggesting, in other words, is that the convictions of your heart and the actual contents of your thoughts are less important, in the end, in guiding your actions than the immediate context of your behavior. The words “Oh, you’re late” had the effect of making someone who was ordinarily compassionate into someone who was indifferent to suffering—of turning someone, in that particular moment, into a different person.

Weird as it sounds, 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.

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.

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