Little Things Matter and Stay Focused

Malcolm Gladwell is a genus. It doesn't mean he is necessarily high in IQ or knows how to tackle rocket science problems. He notices the things that people usually take for granted and pieces them together into nice theories that mean to be educational for many. Before reading this book, I erroneously took a peep at the comment on douban, and found someone calling him a fraud. I stopped reading the comment and kept on flipping through the book. And I am glad I did. While the Outliers gives a hang of his style and impress me with the author's meticulous research power, this one carry on all the strength with equally, if not stronger and more riveting evidence to back up his points of view. Many have already summon up the pith nicely, so instead, I will write about the reading experience and how it was thought provoking in a different way for me.

He clearly has his distinctive pattern in writing. Having read 3 of his 5 books, I found all of them concise and clear in logic and examples, and they don't jump around much. His writing procedure is almost transparent, first the structure is built up, then he fills them in with key measures, and backs the measures with stories. Even though every book is written with stories abound, they are layered in a logical way. For readers, it is certainly an enjoyable reading experience. I point the writing pattern out, because like many second language learners, I too face the problem of wring. More often than not, we want to be different, we don't want to be pinned down by a pattern and we want to avoid telling flat stories. In this case, Gladwell shows us it's not so much about the language or the style, it's about the amount of research and more importantly, the logic in unraveling them.

And then there are the stories in the book. His books are usually filled with stories that aren't far away from everyday life. In Outliers, Gladwell started the book with a story of his ancestors which might seem to be easily found for everyone through family vine, however, thinking about the process, not everyone knows where their great grandparents were and what they did then that relate to who we are and what we do. I've heard the story of how my parents meet a million times, and like many youngsters, we are inclined to blame our parents when encountered personal issues. However, if you put yourself into a bigger picture, things that happened 3 or 5 generations ago contributed to who you are now, it sound a lot more complex and profound. Back to The Tipping Point, there is a similar example Gladwell used in the book, the circle of 40 friends he had and how when it was boiled down into a single person Jacob who is an ultimate connector of all his friends, and to put it profoundly, responsible for his entire social life. It is the writer's duty to take the reader on a journey of his own thought. It is difficult cos many writers including great writers like Hawthorne or Shakespeare don't bent over backward to consider if anyone could 'get' what they write. And artists are known to 'live in their world', believe me, I've met a few who are unable to communicate like a normal person in a social context. However, people like Gladwell who puts a clear structure and actively provides thought provoking theories that are interesting and they are in the clear genre, and it doesn't hamper them to be bestsellers.

Besides patterns, I constantly found myself relating to the stories. The one story under the Stickiness Factor, the fear experiment to educate the students from Yale University to get the tetanus shot. The idea to make something stick follows a myth, there are people like Chip and Dan Heath who researched thoroughly on how some ideas stick and wrote the book 'Made to Stick', countless creative forth have made a career out of the industry, not to mention AMC's drama series Mad Men who have attracted viewers around the glob. Gladwell shows us that there is no magic to make an idea stick, and in his example, you need to make something relevant, put it close as it could be into your daily life. It reminds me of all the new year resolution that I routinely made, and how some of them inevitably failed but some of them stays for a long time and turn into lifelong habits. For example, if I vow to run more in new year, it would very unlikely to happen with my busy schedule, the traffic in my neighbourhood, the polluted air in my city, and there are a million things more fun to do than actually putting on my sneakers and exercise after a day of work. In this case, when we know the Stickiness Factors, we know better to make it work: set aside certain time in a day only for running, buy better gears, sign up a gym, set up a goal...the simple notion behind it: to make it relevant and put it into your schedule.

The Tipping Point is definitely a must read, and I can't wait to finish the rest of his books.