Tipping Point:
By Malcolm Gladwell
     

• Character is like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent,
  at certain times, on circumstance and context.  The main reason that most of us seem to have a consistent
  character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment.
  

     

• The old understanding of handling crime epidemics leads inevitably to a preoccupation with defensive
  measures against crime.  Put an extra lock on the door, to slow the burglar down and maybe encourage
  him to go next door.  Lock up criminals for longer, so that they have less opportunity to do the rest of us
  harm.  Move to the suburbs, to put as much distance as possible between yourself and the majority of
  criminals.
  

     

• Environmental Tipping Points are things that we can change: we can fix broken windows and clean up
  graffiti and change the signals that invite crime in the first place.
  

     

• Studies of juvenile delinquency and high school drop-out rates demonstrate that a child is better off in a
  good neighborhood and a troubled family than he or she is in a troubled neighborhood and a good family.
  

     
Rule of 150
As our brains evolved, they got bigger, in order to handle the complexities of larger social groups.  Humans
socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle
the complexities of that social arrangement.  Humans, on average, can only sustain about 150 genuine
relationships.
     
So if we want to, say, develop schools in disadvantaged communities that can successfully counteract the
poisonous atmosphere of their surrounding neighborhoods, the Rule of 150 tells us that we’re probably better off
building lots of little schools than one or two big ones.
     
When you have small teams, everybody knows everybody.  Peer pressure is much more powerful than the
concept of a boss.  Many, many times more powerful.  People want to live up to what is expected of them.
     
When people know each other well, they create an implicit joint memory system- a transactive memory system-
which is based on an understanding about who is best suited to remember what kinds of things.  When each
person has group-acknowledged responsibility for particular tasks and facts, greater efficiency is inevitable.
     

Smoking and Drug Control
The quintessential hard-core smoker is an extrovert, the kind of person who is sociable, like parties, has many
friends, and 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 a much greater sex drive than nonsmokers.  They are more sexually
precocious and have a greater attraction to the opposite sex.  Smoking households spend 73 percent more on
coffee and 2 to 3 times more on beer.  Smokers tend to be more honest about themselves than nonsmokers.  
One theory has it that their lack of deference and their surfeit of defiance combine to make them relatively
indifferent to what people think of them.  
     

• Newtonian theory would like to chip in here and suggest that smoking is highly addictive and that addictive
  behavior is prone to causing depression.  Depression makes an individual care less about what others
  think about them, because it reduces how much they care about themselves.  Sorry to interrupt, but as a
  highly addictive individual who tends to care little about others’ perception, I thought it worthwhile to throw in
  my two cents.  
  

     
People aren’t cool because they smoke.  They smoke because they’re cool.  Smoking isn’t cool.  Smokers are
cool.  A select few are responsible for driving this epidemic forward.
     
There is some evidence that smoking and depression have the same genetic root.  Smoking boosts similar
chemicals in the brain as antidepressants.  The only depression medicine that has shown evidence of helping
smokers quit is Zyban.
     
Every person has a nicotine threshold, or Tipping point, where they become addicted.  Some people are capable
of casual smoking for their whole lives.  Reducing the amount of nicotine in cigarettes could help prevent people
from crossing that threshold and make breaking the habit significantly easier.
     
Only 1% of those who have tried cocaine become regular users.  We have to stop fighting this kind of
experimentation.  We have to accept it and even embrace it.  We should instead be making sure that
experimentation doesn’t have serious consequences.
     
     
     Law of the Few
     
Epidemics are driven by the efforts of a handful of exceptional people:  Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.
     
Connectors  
It isn’t just the case that the closer someone is to a Connector, the more powerful or the wealthier or the more
opportunities he or she gets.  It’s also the case that the closer an idea or a product comes to a Connector, the
more power and opportunity it has as well.
     
Maven
A maven is one who accumulates knowledge and distributes it.  What sets Mavens apart, though, is not so much
what they know but how they pass it along.  The fact that Mavens want to help, for no other reason than because
they like to help, turns out to be an awfully effective way of getting someone’s attention.  To be a Maven is to be a
teacher.  But it is also, even more emphatically, to be a student.  
     
Salesmen
Salesmen have the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as
critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups.  Salesmen seem to have some kind of
indefinable trait, something powerful and contagious and irresistible that goes beyond what comes out of his
mouth, which makes people who meet him want to agree with him.  It’s energy.  It’s enthusiasm.  It’s charm.  It’s
likeability.  It’s all those things and yet something more.
     
The subtle circumstances surrounding how we say things may matter more than what we say.  Bouncing balls in
advertisements gets the viewer to nod and they become more easily persuaded.  When two people talk, their
volume and pitch fall into balance.  Babies as young as one or two days old synchronize their head, elbow,
shoulder, hip, and foot movements with the speech patterns of adults.  Salesmen almost immediately fall into
physical and conversational harmony with people.  They are able to draw others to their own rhythms and dictate
the terms of the interaction.
     
Humans engage in what is called motor mimicry.  If you show people pictures of a smiling face or frowning face,
they’ll smile or frown back.  This is what is meant, in the technical sense, by empathy.  Emotion is contagious.  We
normally think of the expression on our face as a reflection of an inner state.  Emotional contagion, though,
suggests that the opposite is true.
     
     
     Stickiness Factor
     
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.
     
Children
At three and four and five, children may not be able to follow complicated plots and subplots.  But the narrative
form, psychologists now believe, is absolutely central to them.  It’s the only way they have of organizing the world,
of organizing experience.
     
Blue’s Clues does extensive research on each and every episode that it produces in an effort to create a show
that continuously improves at helping young kids develop.  Blue’s Clues got rid of the cleverness and originality
that made Sesame Street the most beloved television program of its generation, created a plodding, literal show,
and repeated each episode five times in a row.  Test scores show that young children who regularly watch Blue’s
Clues do significantly better on IQ tests than children who do not.   
     
     
     Power of Context
     
Human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem.  For example, if someone is
alone they are far more likely to come to another’s aid than if there are multiple witnesses.
     
Broken Windows Theory
Crime is the inevitable result of disorder.  If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will
conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge.  Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of
anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes.  In a city,
relatively minor problems such as graffiti, public disorder, and aggressive panhandling, are all the equivalent of
broken windows and are invitations to more serious crimes.
     
They say that the criminal- far from being someone who acts for fundamental, intrinsic reasons and who lives in
his own world- is actually someone acutely sensitive to his environment, who is alert to all kinds of cues, and who
is prompted to commit crimes based on his perception of the world around him.

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