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

by Malcolm Gladwell

ran into a stylist from New York who told them that the classic Hush Puppies had suddenly become hip in the clubs and bars of downtown Manhattan.

How does a thirty-dollar pair of shoes go from a handful of downtown Manhattan hipsters and designers to every mall in America in the space of two years?

First of all, they are clear examples of contagious behavior.

They infected them with the Hush Puppies “virus.”

Somehow a large number of people in New York got “infected” with an anti-crime virus in a short time.

Of the three, the third trait—the idea that epidemics can rise or fall in one dramatic moment—is the most important,

modern change happens the way it does. The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point.

The second of the principles of epidemics—that little changes can somehow have big effects—is

I give you a large piece of paper, and I ask you to fold it over once, and then take that folded paper and fold it over again, and then again, and again, until you have refolded the original paper 50 times.

the height of the stack would approximate the distance to the sun.

The Tipping Point is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point. There

when the number of professionals dropped below 5 percent, the problems exploded.

Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen, who play a critical role in the word-of-mouth epidemics that dictate our tastes and trends and fashions.

Why is it that some ideas or behaviors or products start epidemics and others don’t? And what can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own?

All it took, he said, was the demolition of a handful of housing projects and the abandonment of homes in key downtown neighborhoods to send syphilis over the top. It takes only the smallest of changes to shatter an epidemic’s equilibrium.

These three agents of change I call the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.

of AIDS, the French-Canadian flight attendant Gaetan Dugas, who claimed to have 2,500 sexual partners all over North America, and who was linked to at least 40 of the earliest cases of AIDS in California and New York.

not sexual appetites that set them apart. It’s things like how sociable they are, or how energetic or knowledgeable or influential among their peers.

The Stickiness Factor says that there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makes.

When people are in a group, in other words, responsibility for acting is diffused. They

The Power of Context says that human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem.

The Law of the Few CONNECTORS, MAVENS, AND SALESMEN

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.

are Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.

In the paragraph below is a list of around 250 surnames, all taken at random from the Manhattan phone book. Go down the list and give yourself a point every time you see a surname that is shared by someone you know.

remain a little bit on the outside. He simply likes people, in a genuine and powerful way, and he finds the patterns of acquaintanceship and interaction in which people arrange themselves to be endlessly fascinating.

Horchow collects people the same way others collect stamps. He remembers the boys he played with sixty years ago, the address of his best friend growing up, the name of the man his college girlfriend had a crush on when she spent her junior year overseas.

He has mastered what sociologists call the “weak tie,” a friendly yet casual social connection.