The Tipping Point Quotes

“When we say that a handful of East Village kids started the Hush Puppies epidemic, or that the scattering of the residents of a few housing projects was sufficient to start Baltimore’s syphilis epidemic,”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“Virtually every time Sesame Street’s educational value has been tested — and the show has been subject to more academic scrutiny than any television show in history — it has been proved to improve the reading and learning skills of its viewers. Most recently, a group of researchers at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Kansas went back and recontacted close to 600 children whose television watching as preschoolers they had tracked back in the 1980s. The kids were now all in high school, and the researchers found — to their astonishment — that the kids who had watched Sesame Street the most as four- and five-year-olds were still doing better in school than those who didn’t. Even after controlling for things like parent’s education, family size, and preschool vocabulary level, the Sesame Street watchers did better in high school in English, math, and science and they were also much more likely to read books for leisure than those who didn’t watch the show, or who watched the show less. According to the study, for every hour per week of Sesame Street viewing, high-school grade point averages increased by .052, which means that a child who watched five hours of Sesame Street a week at age five was earning, on average, about one quarter of a grade level higher than a child of similar background who never watched the show. Somehow a single television show an hour long, watched over the course of no more than two or three years, was still making a difference twelve and fifteen years later.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people’s behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and context. We will always reach for a “dispositional” explanation for events, as opposed to a contextual explanation.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“Emotion is contagious. In a way, this is perfectly intuitive. All of us have had our spirits picked up by being around somebody in a good mood. If you think about this closely, though, it’s quite a radical notion. We normally think of the expressions on our face as the reflection of an inner state. I feel happy, so I smile. I feel sad, so I frown. Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in this sense, goes outside-in.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“when an epidemic tips, when it is jolted out of 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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“five or six steps. This experiment is where we get”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“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 three, the third trait—the idea that epidemics can rise or fall in one dramatic moment—is the most important, because it is the principle that makes sense of the first two and that permits the greatest insight into why modern change happens”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“But the lesson of the Power of Context is that we are more than just sensitive to changes in context. We’re exquisitely sensitive to them. And the kinds of contextual changes that are capable of tipping an epidemic are very different than we might ordinarily suspect.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“…In the end, tipping points are a reaffirmation of a potential for change and the power of intelligent action. 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, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“Much of what we are told to read and watch, we simply don’t remember. The Information Age has created a stickiness problem, but Leventhal and Wonderman’s examples suggest that there may be simple ways to enhance stickiness, and systematically engineer stickiness into a message. This is a fact of obvious importance to marketers, teachers, and managers.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“…It’s a strange thing to admit, because I didn’t want to be drawn in, I was on guard against it, but the essence of salesmen is that on some level, they cannot be resisted.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“The head of research for Sesame Street in the early years was a psychologist from Oregon, Ed Palmer, whose specialty was the use of television as a teaching tool. When the Children's Television Workshop was founded in the late 1960s, Palmer was a natural recruit. “I was the only academic they could find doing research on children's TV,” he says, with a laugh. Palmer was given the task of finding out whether the elaborate educational curriculum that had been devised for Sesame Street by its academic-advisers was actually reaching the show's viewers. It was a critical task. There are those involved with Sesame Street who say, in fact, that without Ed Palmer the show would never have lasted through the first season. Palmer's innovation was something he called the Distracter. He would play an episode of Sesame Street on a television monitor, and then run a slide show on a screen next to it, showing a new slide every seven and a half seconds. “We had the most varied set of slides we could imagine,” said Palmer. “We would have a body riding down the street with his arms out, a picture of a tall building, a leaf floating through ripples of water, a rainbow, a picture taken through a microscope, an Escher drawing. Anything to be novel, that was the idea.” Preschoolers would then be brought into the room, two at a time, and told to watch the television show. Palmer and his assistants would sit slightly to the side, with a pencil and paper, quietly noting when the children were watching Sesame Street and when they lost interest and looked, instead, at the slide show. Every time the slide changed, Palmer and his assistants would make a new notation, so that by the end of the show they had an almost second-by-second account of what parts of the episode being tested managed to hold the viewers' attention and what parts did not. The Distracter was a stickiness machine. “We'd take that big-sized chart paper, two by three feet, and tape several of those sheets together,” Palmer says. "We had data points, remember, for every seven and a half seconds, which comes to close to four hundred data points for a single program, and we'd connect all those points with a red line so it would look like a stock market report from Wall Street. It might plummet or gradually decline, and we'd say whoa, what's going on here. At other times it might hug the very top of the chart and we'd say, wow, that segment's really grabbing the attention of the kids. We tabulated those Distracter scores in percentages. We'd have up to 100 percent sometimes. The average attention for most shows was around 85 to 90 percent. If the producers got that, they were happy. If they got around fifty, they'd go back to the drawing board.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“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. They might work with you, or live near you, and go to the same churches, schools, or parties. How much, then, would they know that you wouldn't know? Your acquaintances, on the other hand, by definition occupy a very different world than you. They are much more likely to know something that you don't. To capture this apparent paradox, Granovetter coined a marvelous phrase: the strength of weak ties.
Acquaintances, in short, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are. Connectors like Lois Weixberg 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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“The critical thing about Mavens, though, is that they aren't passive collectors of information. It isn't just that they are obsessed with how to get the best deal on a can of coffee. What sets them apart is that once they figure out how to get that deal, they want to tell you about it too. “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,”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“An adult considers constant repetition boring, because it requires reliving the same experience over and over again. But to preschoolers repetition isn't boring, because each time they watch something they are experiencing it in a completely different way.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“When we read, we are capable of taking in only about one key word and then four characters to the left and fifteen characters to the right at any one time.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“Estas tres características (una: la capacidad de contagio; dos: que pequeñas causas tienen grandes efectos; y tres: que el cambio no se produce de manera gradual, sino drásticamente, a partir de cierto momento) son los mismos tres principios que definen cómo se extiende el sarampión en el aula de un colegio o cómo ataca la gripe cada invierno”
― Malcolm Gladwell, La clave del éxito

“We are all, at heart, gradualists, our expectations set by the steady passage of time. But the world of the Tipping Point is a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than possibility. It is—contrary to all our expectations—a certainty.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“Moine’s argument is that what separates a great salesman from an average one is the number and quality of answers they have to the objections commonly raised by potential clients. He sat down with Gau, then, and tape-recorded all of Gau’s answers and wrote them up in a book. Moine and Gau calculate that there are about twenty questions or statements that a planner needs to be prepared for. For example: “I can do it myself” is one, and for that the script book lists fifty potential answers. “Aren’t you concerned about making the wrong moves and having no one there to help you?” for instance. Or “I’m sure you do a good job at money management. However, did you know most wives outlive their husbands? If something should happen to you, would she be able to handle everything by herself?”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“It’s energy. It’s enthusiasm. It’s charm. It’s likability. It’s all those things and yet something more. At one point I asked him whether he was happy, and he fairly bounced off his chair.

The features of our immediate social and physical world—the streets we walk down, the people we encounter—play a huge role in shaping who we are and how we act.

The quintessential hard-core smoker, according to Eysenck, is an extrovert, the kind of person who is sociable, likes parties, has many friends, needs to have people to talk to....

He craves excitement, takes chances, acts on the spur of the moment and is generally an impulsive individual.... He prefers to keep moving and doing things, tends to be aggressive and loses his temper quickly; his feelings are not kept under tight control and he is not always a reliable person.

Heavy smokers have been shown to have a much greater sex drive than nonsmokers. They are more sexually precocious; they have a greater “need” for sex, and greater attraction to the opposite sex.

They rank much higher on what psychologists call “anti-social” indexes: they tend to have greater levels of misconduct, and be more rebellious and defiant. They make snap judgments. They take more risks.

Interestingly, smokers also seem to be more honest about themselves than nonsmokers.

The problem, of course, is that the indiscriminate application of effort is something that is not always possible. There

There are times when we need a convenient shortcut, a way to make a lot out of a little, and that is what Tipping Points, in the end, are all about.

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

“Psychiatrists talk about criminals as people with stunted psychological development, people who have had pathological relationships with their parents, who lack adequate role models.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“This is an epidemic theory of crime. It says that crime is contagious—just as a fashion trend is contagious —that it can start with a broken window and spread to an entire community.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“In a city, relatively minor problems like graffiti, public disorder, and aggressive panhandling, they write, are all the equivalent of broken windows, invitations to more serious crimes:”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“The studies show essentially that a child is better off in a good neighborhood in a troubled family than he or she is in a troubled neighborhood in a good family.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“The world - much as we want it to - does not accord with our intuition.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“HMS Somerset”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“Gosh darn it,” Gau said, “if you don’t try, you’ll never succeed.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“The word Maven comes from the Yiddish, and it means one who accumulates knowledge”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference