The Books: “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference” (Malcolm Gladwell)

Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt:

Next book in my culture bookshelf:

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

I loved this book. Of course I did. That’s why it’s in my bookshelf. No unloved books here. Gladwell looks at the phenomenon known as “the tipping point”.

The “tipping point” (according to the back of the book) 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 but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate.”

In other words: a couple of hipster kids down in the East Village start wearing Hush Puppies that they find in second-hand bins in vintage stores. A season later, the runways in Milan are filled with strutting Hush Puppy wearing supermodels. Anyone remember that?? Gladwell notices the trend, and also looks into WHY. How do ideas spread, how do they “tip”, how do they go from one tiny corner of the populace … to everywhere?

He comes up with some really cool answers. He’s not just looking at fashion trends. Other things: like crime waves. The Internet and email. Sesame Street. He uses Paul Revere’s ride as an example of what he calls “the law of connectors”. Every tipping point needs to have one human being, one special human being, who acts as a “connector”. (Actually, he says that every epidemic needs to have three people to make it “tip”: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. You’ll have to read the book to hear about the other two! But we’ll touch on Connectors here.)

With all the great stuff in this book, the whole “connector” thing is what I really took away from it. It fascinated me.

I’m posting two excerpts from it – but they are both connected (pun pun pun).

One excerpt describes the “connector” phenomenon, and who such people are. The second is Gladwell’s supremely original and very exciting analysis of Paul Revere’s famous ride. Paul Revere: the ultimate connector.

My own take on this, and I’ve thought about it lots: The social impulse of Connectors is not cynical or manipulative. They are not “players”. This is essential to understand. Genius party hosts are not just Martha Stewart wannabes. People who can throw a genuinely awesome party of 100 of their closest friends are usually Connectors. Connectors genuinely love people, and genuinely love introducing their friends to each other. They love blending their different social circles. Introducing their church friends to their work friends to their childhood friends is not anxiety-provoking to a Connector. Some people like to keep all their different circles separate, but to Connectors, such a feeling of connectedness is the air they breathe. Also: a Connector is not compartmentalized. A Connector isn’t one person with his church group, another person with his work friends, and another with the guy who gives him his coffee every day. He does not have radical personality changes when he moves from group to group. You know those people who resist mixing groups? Who won’t let the girlfriend meet his softball buddies, who would NEVER invite a co-worker to a party of his childhood friends. But Connectors loooove to mix.

My friend Mitchell, who I mention here pretty much every day, is a Connector. The story that Malcolm Gladwell told about his friend Jacob in the excerpt above is very similar to the same story I could tell about Mitchell. Mitchell is at the top of a pyramid. Not just because of my love for him but because he has been instrumental in bringing all kinds of cool people into my life, who I then have gone off to have separate great friendships with. NOTHING makes Mitchell happier than to watch two of his friends form their own friendship, independent of him. To someone who is not a Connector, that would be terrifying, and that person would be very jealous. If Mitchell were not a Connector, he would be anxious that Alex and I (his friend first) now talk on the phone independently of him, and carry on a friendship completely separate from him. It’s not that we leave him out, it’s just that she and I have become friends now too … we need to talk to each other, and we don’t need to wait for Mitchell to bring us together again. Mitchell thinks it’s AWESOME that we have become friends, and says stuff like, “I just knew you guys would hit it off. I knew it!”

See the generosity there? Connectors are the definition of generosity.

Speaking of generosity, let’s go on to excerpt # 2 which is the description of Paul Revere, the Connector:

On the afternoon of April 18, 1775, a young boy who worked at a livery stable in Boston overheard one British army officer say to another something about “hell to pay tomorrow.” The stable boy ran with the news to Boston’s North End, to the home of a silversmith named Paul Revere. Revere listened gravely; this was not the first rumor to come his way that day. Earlier, he had been told of an unusual numer of British officers gathered on Boston’s Long Wharf, talking in low tones. British crewmen had been spotted scurrying about in the boats tethered beneath the HMS Somerset and the HMS Boyne in Boston Harbor. Several other sailors were seen on shore that morning, running what appeared to be last-minute errands. As the afternoon wore on, Revere and his close friend Joseph Warren became more and more convinced that the British were about to make the major move that had been long rumored — to march to the town of Lexington, northwest of Boston, to arrest the colonial leaders John Hancock and Samuel Adams, and then on to the town of Concord to seize the stores of guns and ammunition that some of the local colonial militia had stored there.

What happened next has become part of historical legend, a tale told to every American schoolschild. At ten o’clock that night, Warren and Revere met. They decided they had to warn the communities surrounding Boston that the British were on their way, so that the local militia could be roused to meet them. Revere was spirited across Boston Harbor to the ferry landing at Charlestown. He jumped on a horse and began his “midnight ride” to Lexington. In two hours, he covered thirteen miles. In every town he passed through along the way — Charlestown, Medford, North Cambridge, Menotomy — he knocked on doors and spread the word, telling local colonial leaders of the oncoming British, and telling them to spread the word to others. Church bells started ringing. Drums started beating. The news spread like a virus as those informed by Paul Revere sent out riders of their own, until alarms were going off throughout the entire region. The word was in Lincoln, Massachusetts, by one a.m., in Sudbury by three, in Andover, forty miles northwest of Boston, by five a.m., and by nine in the morning had reached as far west as Ashby, near Worcester. When the British finally began their march toward Lexington on the morning of the nineteenth, their foray into the countryside was met — to their utter astonishment — with organized and fierce resistance. In Concord that day, the British were confronted and soundly beaten by the colonial militia, and from that exchange came the war known as the American Revolution.

Paul Revere’s ride is perhaps the most famous historical example of a word-of-mouth epidemic. A piece of extraordinary news traveled a long distance in a very short time, mobilizing an entire region to arms. Not all word-of-mouth epidemics are this sensation, of course. But it is safe to say that word of mouth is — even in this age of mass communications and multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns — still the most important form of human communication. Think, for a moment, about the last expensive restaurant you went to, the last expensive piece of clothing you bought, and the last movie you saw. In how many of those cases was your decision about where to spend your money heavily influenced by the recommendation of a friend? There are plenty of advertising executives who think that precisely because of the sheer ubiquity of marketing efforts these days, word-of-mouth appeals have become the only kind of persuasion that most of us respond to anymore.

But for all that, word of mouth remains very mysterious. People pass on all kinds of information to each other all the time. But it’s only in the rare instance that such an exchange ignites a word-of-mouth epidemic. There is a small restaurant in my neighborhood that I love and that I’ve been telling my friends about for six months. But it’s still half empty. My endorsement clearly isn’t enough to start a word-of-mouth epidemic, yet there are restaurants that to my mind aren’t any better than the one in my neighborhood that open and within a matter of weeks are turning customers away. Why is it that some ideas and trends and messages “tip” and others don’t?

In the case of Paul Revere’s ride, the answer to this seems easy. Revere was carrying a sensational piece of news: the British were coming. But if you look closely at the events of that evening, that explanation doesn’t solve the riddle either. At the same time that Revere began his ride north and west of Boston, a fellow revolutionary — a tanner by the name of William Dawes — set out on the same urgent errand, working his way to Lexington via the towns west of Boston. He was carrying the identical message, through just as many towns over just as many miles as Paul Revere. But Dawes’s ride didn’t set the countryside afire. The local militia leaders weren’t altered. In fact, so few men from one of the main towns he rode through — Waltham — fought the following day that some subsequent historians concluded that it must have been a strongly pro-British community. It wasn’t. The people of Waltham just didn’t find out the British were coming until it was too late. If it were only the news itself that mattered in a word-of-mouth epidemic, Dawes would now be as famous as Paul Revere. He isn’t. So why did Revere succeed where Dawes failed?

The answer is that the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts. Revere’s news tipped and Dawes’s didn’t because of the differences between the two men. This is the Law of the Few, which I briefly outlined in the previous chapter. But there I only gave examples of the kinds of people — highly promiscuous, sexually predatory — who are critical to epidemics of sexually transmitted disease. This chapter is about the people critical to social epidemics and what makes someone like Paul Revere different from someone like William Dawes. These kinds of people are all around us. Yet we often fail to give them proper credit for the role they play in our lives. I call them Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.

Here is the explanation for why Paul Revere’s midnight ride started a word-of-mouth epidemic and Willaim Dawes’s ride did not. Paul Revere was a Connector. He was, for example, gregarious and intensely social. He was a fisherman and a hunter, a cardplayer and a theatre-lover, a frequenter of pubs and a successful businessman. He was active in the local Masonic Lodge and was a member of several select social clubs. He was also a doer, a man blessed — as David Hackett Fischer recounts in his brilliant book Paul Revere’s Ride — with “an uncanny genius for being at the center of events.” Fischer writes:

When Boston imported its first streetlights in 1774, Paul Revere was asked to serve on the committee that made the arrangement. When the Boston market required regulation, Paul Revere was appointed its clerk. After the Revolution, in a time of epidemics, he was chosen health officer of Boston, and coroner of Suffolk County. When a major fire ravaged the old wooden town, he helped found the Massachusetts Mutual Fire Insurance Company, and his name was first to appear on its charter of incorporation. As poverty became a growing problem in the new republic, he called the meeting that organized the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, and was elected its first president. When the community of Boston was shattered by the most sensational murder trial of his generation, Paul Revere was chosen foreman of the jury.

…After the Boston Tea Party, in 1773, when the anger of the American colonists against their British rulers began to spill over, dozens of committees and congresses of angry colonists sprang up around New England. They had no formal organization or established means of community. But Paul Revere quickly emerged as a link between all those far-flung revolutionary dots. He would routinely ride down to Philadelphia or New York or up to New Hampshire, carrying messages from one group to another. Within Boston as well, he played a special role. There were, in the revolutionary years, seven groups of “Whigs” (revolutionaries) in Boston, comprising some 255 men. Most of the men — over 80 percent — belonged to just one group. No one was a member of all seven. Only two men were members of as many as five of the groups: Paul Revere was one of those two.

It is not surprising, then, that when the British army began its secret campaign in 1774 to root out and destroy the stores of arms and ammunition held by the fledgling revolutionary movement, Revere became a kind of unofficial clearing house for the anti-British forces. He knew everybody. He was the logical one to go to if you were a stable boy on the afternoon of April 18th, 1775, and overheard two British officers talking about how there would be hell to pay on the following afternoon. Nor is it surprising that when Revere set out for Lexington that night, he would have known just how to spread the news as far and wide as possible. When he saw people on the roads, he was so naturally and irrepressibly social he would have stopped and told them. When he came upon a town, he would have known exactly whose door to knock on, who the local militia leader was, who the key players in town were. He had met most of them before. And they knew and respected him as well.

But William Dawes? Fischer finds it inconceivable that Dawes could have ridden all seventeen miles to Lexington and not spoken to anyone along the way. But he clearly had none of the social gifts of Revere, because there is almost no record of anyone who remembers him that night. “Along Paul Revere’s northern route, the town leaders and company captains instantly triggered the alarm,” Fischer writes. “On the southerly circuit of William Dawes, this did not happen until later. In at least one town it did not happen at all. Dawes did not awaken the town fathers or militia commanders in the towns of Roxbury, Brookline, Watertown or Waltham.”

Why? Because Roxbury, Brookline, Watertown and Waltham were not Boston. And Dawes was in all likelihood a man with a normal social circle, which means that — like most of us — once he left his hometown he probably wouldn’t have known whose door to knock on. Only one small community along Dawes’s ride appeared to get the message, a few farmers in a neighborhood called Waltham Farms. But alerting just those few houses wasn’t enough to tip the alarm.

Word-of-mouth epidemics are the work of Connectors. William Dawes was just an ordinary man.

1st excerpt from The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, by Malcolm Gladwell.

Suppose that you made a list of the forty people whom you would call your circle of friends (not including family and co-workers) and in each case worked backward until you could identify the person who is ultimately responsible for setting in motion the series of connections that led to that friendship. My oldest friend Bruce, for example, I met in first grade, so I’m the responsible party. That’s easy. I met my friend Nigel because he lived down the hall in college from my friend Tom, whom I met because in freshman year he invited me to play touch football. Tom is responsible for Nigel. Once you’ve made all the connections, the strange thing is that you will find the same names coming up again and again.

I have a friend named Amy, whom I met when her friend Katie brought her to a restaurant where I was having dinner one night. I know Kate because she is the best friend of my friend Larissa, whom I know because I was told to look her up by a mutual friend of both of ours — Mike A. — whom I know because he went to school with another friend of mine — Mike H. — who used to work at a political weekly with my friend Jacob. No Jacob, no Amy. Similarly, I met my friend Sarah S. at my birthday party a year ago, because she was there with a writer named David who was there at the invitation of his agent, Tina, whom I met through my friend Leslie, whom I know because her sister, Nina, is a friend of my friend Ann’s, whom I met through my old roommate Maura, who was my roommate because she worked with a writer named Sarah L., who was a college friend of my friend Jacob’s. No Jacob, no Sarah S.

In fact, when I go down my list of forty friends, thirty of them, in one way or another, lead back to Jacob. My social circle is, in reality, not a circle. It is a pyramid. And at the top of the pyramid is a single person — Jacob — who is responsible for an overwhelming majority of the relationships that constitute my life. Not only is my social circle not a circle, but it’s not ‘mine’ either. It belongs to Jacob. It’s more like a club that he invited me to join.

These people who link us up with the world, who bridge Omaha and Sharon, who introduce us to our social circles — these people on whom we rely more heavily than we realize — are Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.