“The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is The Tipping Point.”
The Tipping Point:
How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference
By Malcolm Gladwell
The Tipping Point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small group of people change the world.
The Tipping Point is made up of these three characteristics:
1) Contagiousness: The best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into best sellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, 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.
2) Little Changes Can Have Big Effects: As Mr. Gladwell points out in his book, the major decline New York City’s crime rate dropped in the early 1990’s not because of one big major change but because of smaller causes that were incremental. The crack trade leveled off. The population got a little older. The police force got a little better. Yet the effect was dramatic.
3) Change Can Happen In One Dramatic Moment: Of the three, this idea that epidemics can rise or fall in one dramatic moment is the most important, because it is the principle that make sense of the first two and that permits the greatest insight into why modern change happens the way it does.
So the question becomes, how can we deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own.
Tipping Point Radio is about “infecting” people with life changing ideas that will be contagious enough to change the world.
Metamorphosis Be With You,
Craig
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference.
Direct quotes come from: the back cover, and pages 7, 8, 9, 14, and 259.
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