really rough draft

Growing up, I wasn’t would you would call a “people person.” Through elementary, middle, and even high school, it was rare for me to have more than a couple of people that I actually considered friends. I wasn’t particularly uninteresting or awkward, and there were certainly a lot of people that intersected my world, but I didn’t really stick to many of them and they didn’t really stick to me. The people who know me now will laugh at the girl that I used to be, because not only is working with people part of my job, it’s also something I do easily and willingly. The tipping point, for my social life, one might say, was coming to college. I became subtly more interesting, gained a tiny more experience in dealing with people, and was exposed to a few more people than I had been most of the time in previous years. There were no life-changing moments, but something changed (in my life, at least) pretty significantly.

This is the premise of Malcom’s Gladwell’s bestselling book, The Tipping Point. In it, Gladwell argues that a couple of simple rules are all that in takes to explain a number of huge phenomena. He weaves a story around anecdotes, witty titles, a smattering of science, and incredibly persuasive writing. Gladwell calls his three rules “The Law of the Few,” “The Stickiness Factor,” and “The Power of Context” and claims that they are all that is needed to understand how epidemics start and spread. For the most part, the Law of the Few talks about the “who”s of epidemics, The Stickiness Factor talks about the “what” of epidemics, and the “Power of Context” talks about the “where” of epidemics, with a healthy dose of how the people in those environments impact them.

Since becoming more of a “people person” it is people that fascinate me, and Gladwell’s chapters on people and their role in this epidemic phenomena that I found both most interesting and troubling. Particularly the second and fifth chapters, on “The Law of the Few” and the second half of “The Power of Context,” respectively. Both of these chapters have a large focus on people, special people and people in groups, if I’m being specific, but I mostly picked them because they were the two I related to most when reading the book. Each of these chapters, besides being interesting, does a good job of highlighting the general themes of Gladwell’s writing that I feel a need to comment on.

The Tipping Point wasn’t the first of Gladwell’s books that I read. It was the second, and I was incredibly excited when I picked it up, because I had loved the first. Gladwell is an incredibly entertaining writer, and after picking up one of his books, I find them hard to put down. The science is transparent to a non-technical audience, the anecdotes shared are always intriguing and sometimes something more – Gladwell does a great job of telling a story that his audience will care about, even without knowing any of the players in the story. If he were to write a fiction novel, it would probably go on my must-read list.

But here’s my problem with Gladwell. A lot of the time it seems that he’s not writing anything more than fiction. I said that his stories were interesting, and that’s not something that I want to take back. However, sometimes they seem to be little more than padding around a supposedly important point that he doesn’t have enough evidence to actually back up. I also said that his science was transparent. I feel that too often, his science is transparent because it’s incredibly flimsy. As an engineer, I respect data, and a lot of the time, Gladwell just doesn’t have it. Compelling observations yes, but even observing the same thing five times in a row doesn’t make it a fact. Obviously, the study of human behavior is not the exact science that physics is, but I still feel as though Gladwell takes too many liberties. That said, I finished the book with interest, and can’t help but see the themes that Gladwell points out in my own life.

Chapter Two of Gladwell’s book “The Law of the Few” is a section detailing a few special people that Gladwell calls Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. There’s a few people in my life who I think best fit these categories. Each of these people have affected my life in various ways, but past my own life, I see the traits that Gladwell identifies as impacting many of the people around me too. I plan on summarizing Gladwell's main points through talking about each of these people. I'm not entirely sure that I feel like actually identifying them, so for anonymity's sake... I think my friends Laura and Peter are Connectors, I think Nate is a Maven, and I'd say Adam is a Salesmen.

Shortly after I moved out to Seattle for a summer internship, a couple of my newfound friends took me out for a night on the town. We met up with some of their friends from back at school, and when I was introduced, I was met with, “Oh, you go to the University of Illinois? Do you know Peter?” In fact I did know Peter, and I wasn’t particularly surprised that these random strangers did either. Just like I wasn’t particularly surprised when I went to visit my boyfriend at his dorm one night, and found a bunch of my friends from high school there, hanging out with girl named Laura that I’d met the first week of classes. Gladwell introduces Connectors as people with incredibly large social networks, people who are masters of something he terms “the weak tie,” an ability to remain acquaintances with an incredibly large number of people across time and space. These people, Gladwell claims, are incredibly important to an epidemic, because they have they contact with an incredibly large number of people, the number of people necessary for an idea to gain enough spread quick enough to take hold.

Of course, even if an idea reaches the critical number of people, it doesn’t go anywhere if someone doesn’t collect and process said information. Gladwell coins another term for the type of people who hoard information constantly, passing it out as necessary. He calls them Mavens, and reading his description, I couldn’t think of anyone else but my friend Nate. Nate is the guy I call pretty much anytime I have a question, it doesn’t matter what it happens to be about, I’ve gotten good advice about technology, design, business, and law. Nate has an opinion about everything, and he can back it up with at least two distinct references. He’s also happy to go to dinner to talk about any issue more thoroughly. In fact, I can’t really imagine making any major decision these days without consulting Nate. I know that even if he disagrees with me, I’m going to receive a lot of good information to think about. People like Nate, claim Gladwell, are what gives an idea enough weight to actually mean something.

Nate isn’t always someone I agree with, even after consuming his wealth of knowledge. But Adam is. I met Adam late one Wednesday night, after a meeting for an organization that I had just joined. He asked if I would be interested in taking on some responsibilities in the organization. I tentatively said yes. Less than twenty-four hours later, not only had my responsibilities quadrupled, I was ecstatic about it, and hoping for more. This is what Adam did to people. He was contagious, and he could convince you of just about anything. Gladwell calls people like my friend Adam “Salesmen” and I couldn’t agree more. For an epidemic to stick, you need more than just the spread of an issue, and more than just information about that issue. You need the issue to matter, and that is what Adam did. He made me care about something that I had been completely unaware of an hour before, and care in a way that it suddenly became the center of my life.

I can’t deny the effect that each of these people have had on my life, and I don’t want to. Have they gotten me involved in social “epidemics” because of their presence? This I’m not sure about. Certainly, Adam was able to get me into something that I didn’t care about before, but it was mostly for his benefit (the work I was doing was, in reality, his work that he had delegated). Nate is, definitely, my go-to source for information, and I’m sure that I’ve learned things from him that I wouldn’t otherwise. And I know perfectly well that Laura and Peter have touched many, many more lives than I probably ever will. And yet, I can’t think of a single epidemic that I have been a part of because of their effect on my life. Maybe these people aren’t perfect examples of Gladwell’s special “Few,” but I guess I sense motivation issues behind the whole question. Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen certainly could start an epidemic – if they were so inclined.

In this section I also have a few critiques of Gladwell and some of his methods. I guess my issue is that I see these people in my life, after the topic is on my mind because I've been reading about them. Would I otherwise? Most of the chapter is anecdotes about a few people, and while stories are a very nice place to start, I feel that after introducing them, Gladwell generally doesn't switch to hard data, he just makes his conclusions off of his stories. I'm not sure that these three types of people aren't superimportant in causing epidemics (after all, they have had noted effects on my life), but I feel like I could probably make up a fourth or fifth and get people nodding along with me that these people exist and have an important role in epidemics. I don't disagree with Gladwell, but I also don't tend to assume that we have the whole picture from seven or eight datapoints.

Gladwell spends a later chapter of his book talking about the "Rule of 150." This is something I feel a little safer getting behind. Despite Maxwell's prevalent writing style of story after story, this was something I was familiar with before reading the book, that I've seen in a number of contexts. Personally, it's one of the main topics that came up at an interview I did last year with a University alumni who now works at a data visualization company out in California. It feels less like a cool concept that Gladwell popped some pretty names on and more like an actually verifiable finding with data behind it.

However, on a quick note first, whhhat does this have to do with context?

(Paragraph on Ari visiting and what we talked about)

(Paragraph on what Gladwell actually says)

(My life as a “people person”, and how does this relate?)

Finally, I want to conclude the review by hopefully drawing some conclusions between the special types of people and their impact on the groups talked about the later chapter. Probably another quick mention of my likes and dislikes of Gladwell if I don't feel like I'm beating a dead horse. Overall, I think I'd recommend the book, because it's a fun read, but only if you've got someone to sit down and think critically through it with you.