Whew, I just wrapped up Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, which completes an intellectually amusing trilogy of sorts bound by the common theme of observing ordinary phenomena to deduce obvious yet fascinating patterns to lead to massive gamechangers. As more of a quick note to myself, below is my own rundown of the core idea or “golden nugget” if you will of each of Gladwell’s bestselling books:
The Tipping Point: over time and through the interconnectedness of people, ideas, organizations, certain concepts primed per some moment in time/history/context become massively popular, spreading like viruses in epidemic fashion
Blink: through well experienced, judicious, and carefully honed sense of “thin slicing” of a situation, you can gain equal or more information and thus make accurate decisions, than via tedious, laborious extensive research studies and quantitative analyses
Outliers: genius is not just luck or self-made per the typical myth we tell ourselves, but is in fact ecological, or dependent upon some specific patterned history of events and contexts (social, economic, political, educational, etc.)