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

by Malcolm Gladwell

The shoes passed a certain point in popularity and they tipped. 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?

The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves,

or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics.

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

The second distinguishing characteristic of these two examples is that in both cases little changes had big effects.

These three characteristics — one, contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment —

are the same three principles that define how measles moves through a grade-school classroom or the flu attacks every winter. Of

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

Yawning is incredibly contagious. I made some of you reading this yawn simply by writing the word “yawn.”

We are trained to think that what goes into any transaction or relationship or system must be directly related, in intensity and dimension, to what comes out.

when a virus spreads through a population, it doubles and doubles again, until it has (figuratively) grown from a single sheet of paper all the way to the sun in fifty steps.

As human beings we have a hard time with this kind of progression, because the end result — the effect — seems far out of proportion to the cause.

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?

Crack, the CDC said, was the little push that the syphilis problem needed to turn into a raging epidemic.

There is more than one way to tip an epidemic, in other words. Epidemics are a function of the people who transmit infectious agents, the infectious agent itself, and the environment in which the infectious agent is operating.

equilibrium, it tips because something has happened, some change has occurred in one (or two or three) of those areas. These three agents of change I call the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.

what we are really saying is that in a given process or system some people matter more than others.

Economists often talk about the 80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the “work” will be done by 20 percent of the participants.

When it comes to epidemics, though, this disproportionality becomes even more extreme: a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work.

a town of well in excess of 100,000 people — the epidemic of gonorrhea tipped because of the activities of 168 people living in four small neighborhoods and basically frequenting the same six bars.

The HIV epidemic tipped in the early 1980s, in short, not just because of the enormous changes in sexual behavior in the gay communities that made it possible for the virus to spread rapidly.

It also tipped because HIV itself changed. For one reason or another, the virus became a lot deadlier. Once it infected you, you stayed infected. It stuck.

This idea of the importance of stickiness in tipping has enormous implications for the way we reg...

We tend to spend a lot of time thinking about how to make messages more contagious — how to reach as many people as po...

how to make sure a message doesn’t go in one ear and out the other.

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.

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

if you ask someone why he is friendly with someone else, he’ll say it is because he and his friend share similar attitudes. But if you actually quiz the two of them on their attitudes, you’ll find out that what they actually share is similar activities.

We’re friends with the people we do things with, as much as we are with the people we resemble. We don’t seek out friends, in other words.

who introduce us to our social circles — these people on whom we rely more heavily than we realize — are Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.

What makes someone a Connector? The first — and most obvious — criterion is that Connectors know lots of people. They are the kinds of people who know everyone.

It wasn’t that his connections hadn’t helped him. It was that he didn’t think of his people collection as a business strategy. He just thought of it as something he did. It was who he was.

Anyone who has ever acted, in other words, can be linked to Bacon in an average of under three steps.

Tjaden found that when he listed all Hollywood actors in order of their “connectedness,” Bacon ranked only 669th.

Martin Sheen, by contrast, can be connected to every other actor in 2.63681 steps, which puts him almost 650 places higher than Bacon.

The best-connected actor of all time? Rod Steiger.

John Wayne, for example, made an extraordinary 179 movies in his sixty-year career and still ranks only 116th, at 2.7173. The problem is that more than half of John Wayne’s movies were Westerns, meaning that he made the same kind of movie with the same kind of actors over and over again.

But take someone like Steiger: he has made great movies like the Oscar-winning On the Waterfront and dreadful movies like Car Pool. He won an Oscar for his role in In the Heat of the Night and also made “B”

Rod Steiger is the best-connected actor in history because he has managed to move up and down and back and forth among all the different worlds and subcultures and niches and levels that the acting profession has to offer.

But in the case of Connectors, their ability to span many different worlds is a function of something intrinsic to their personality, some combination of curiosity, self-confidence, sociability, and energy.

Why is this? Granovetter argues that it is because when it comes to finding out about new jobs — or, for that matter, new information, or new ideas — “weak ties” are always more important than strong ties. Your friends, after all, occupy the same world that you do.

Connectors like Lois Weisberg and Roger Horchow — who are masters of the weak tie — are extraordinarily powerful. We rely on them to give us access to opportunities and worlds to which we don’t belong.

Horchow liked the food, and so when he went home he turned on his computer, pulled up the names of acquaintances who lived nearby, and faxed them notes telling them of a wonderful new restaurant he had discovered and that they should try it.

This is, in a nutshell, what word of mouth is. It’s not me telling you about a new restaurant with great food, and you telling a friend and that friend telling a friend. Word of mouth begins when somewhere along that chain, someone tells a person like Roger Horchow.

Paul Revere was a Connector. But he was also — and this is the second of the three kinds of people who control word-of-mouth epidemics — a Maven.

The word Maven comes from the Yiddish, and it means one who accumulates knowledge. In recent years, economists have spent a great deal of time studying Mavens,

“A Maven is a person who has information on a lot of different products or prices or places. This person likes to initiate discussions with consumers and respond to requests,” Price says.

Because you know what, the power of positive thinking will overcome so many things. There are so many people who are negative. Someone will say, you can’t do that. And I’ll say, what do you mean I can’t do that?

There are in these two studies, I think, very important clues as to what makes someone like Tom Gau — or, for that matter, any of the Salesmen in our lives — so effective. The first is that little things can, apparently, make as much of a difference as big things.

In the headphone study, the editorial had no impact on those whose heads were still. It wasn’t particularly persuasive. But as soon as listeners started nodding, it became very persuasive.