The world is better off for having them.

Read "The Tipping Point" by Gladwell. Among other very insightful things, it describes how these kind of techniques are used in marketing.

https://amzn.com/0316346624

In this example, he made a single connection that Tipped Tellme towards success.

Would be interesting to put together a list of angel investors that similarly stand out as connectors.

Currently I am working on "Blink".

The tactic, though effective, has unfortunately become annoyingly common.

The words sympathy and empathy are like the words ashamed and embarrassed. Everyone thinks they know the difference, but when they try to explain it, they find that it's very difficult to separate the words.

At least for my own mind, I found a handy way of differentiating sympathy and empathy from a line in The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell: If I hit my thumb with a hammer, most people watching will grimace: they'll mimic my emotional state. This is what is meant by empathy. So, then, sympathy is when you don't grimace but say something like, "I hope you're OK."

The details escape me now, but some other hacker that has read Gladwell will no doubt fill in the blanks.

I have not read Thinking Fast and Slow ether but really disliked "The tipping point" by Malcolm Gladwell.

Most impressive book: Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Best of luck.

Edit: linky to online summary: http://www.wikisummaries.org/The_Tipping_Point

It's very unlikely that you'll personally meet the right person, but actually fairly likely that someone you meet will know the right person. So just talk about your idea with everybody who will listen, get those business cards into people's pockets and see what the universe brings your way.

You'll wanna get facetime with "connectors" (if you've read the Tipping Point, you'll know what I mean). An email intro from one of them to the right person is all you need.

Jane Jacobs is probably most famous for saying "eyes on the street" is the key to safety. To get eyes on the street: Walk more, tend to your front yard and be visibly out and about. Encourage other people to do the same.

I also recommend the book The Tipping Point.

You might be interested in joining r/CitizenPlanners on Reddit. I run it. I previously ran a Citizen Planners subforum on Cyburbia years ago.

Teenagers are inherently, perhaps even genetically predisposed to imitate others and try on new behaviors and attitudes during adolescence. Second, the types of the people who are more likely to engage in dramatic, easily romanticized behavior such as early cigarette smoking or suicide are also more likely to be those that others tend to gravitate toward and seek to emulate.

When Portugal legalized all drugs, they greatly lowered the 'Stickiness Factor' for those drugs.

http://www.wikisummaries.org/The_Tipping_Point#Chapter_7:_Ca...

One of his biggest is the "survivor fallacy", where he talks to five successful people, identifies a common component and announces "that's the reason they made it!" The task of looking at the entire universe (successes and failures) and seeing how often that component exists in both groups is a task Gladwell leaves to muggles.

If I have to pick a book, I'll pick "The Tipping Point", because it was his first big success, and he makes more effort to ground his thesis in reality. The more acclaim he gets, the more frothy and goofy the next book becomes.

In his latest book, he explains how a basketball team of 10-12 girls from "from Menlo Park and Redwood City, the heart of Silicon Valley... the daughters of computer programmers and people with graduate degrees... [who] worked on science projects, and read books, and went on ski vacations with their parents, and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists" were the underdogs against teams from ghetto schools, whose players grew up in poverty, dealt with the impacts of gang violence and often didn't have enough to eat.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point.

Just because you have a primed customer base at your disposal doesn't mean your duties have been downgraded to being a cashier.

You need to be personable, appear tough enough to be too much trouble to rob, reliably have good products, and simple to reach/do business with.

There's a reason why Malcolm Gladwell picked the crack business in The Tipping Point. A great book you should read if you ever want to know how analogous drug businesses are to corporate america.

I also agree with the hiring issue. Reminds me of a popular book called "The Tipping Point". It's all about finding the certain characteristics others might have that'll get your concept to become an epidemic.

Yes, revolutions will come and go with or without twitter, but to ignore the massive multiplier effect that viral social media has in situations such as this is ludicrous ... the fact that this is coming from the man who wrote 'The Tipping Point' is especially ironic.

2. "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely

3. "The Search" by John Battelle

4. "Made to Stick" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

5. "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell

That should cover your trip. I've listened to all of them and really liked all of them. "Blink" by Gladwell is also good, but not as business related.

I would love to hear any other suggestions people have in this category.

This reminds me of the suicide study discussed in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.

People seem to want to be famous, and recent events remind at-risk people that committing a mass killing is a quick way to be noticed. This is part of your #2, but I think it can be improved without abuse.

I think that if we can drastically reduce the reward for committing these acts, they'll decrease. I don't know the proper solution here, and I'm definitely not suggesting 1st amendment restrictions, but perhaps police can work with the media in a way that we can improve the reporting of these events to reduce copy cats without impacting the ability of police to investigate the crime.

That being said, we also need to determine whether any proposed cure is better than the disease. #1 and #2 enter a dangerous constitutional area, #3 has arguably caused more problems than it solved (helps organized crime), and #4 is a huge expense without proven results. The average person's risk of being involved in one of these events is vanishingly small, but you wouldn't think it from watching the news. Before jumping to solutions, we need to quantify the benefit and the cost in a way that the average person understands, and that is a very hard task.

Boyce Rensberger - 5:20pm 10/08/2013

Gladwell is the same Gladwell as when I was his editor at The Washington Post. At first, I fell for his approach and brought him over to the science pod from the Post's business staff. Then I realized that he cherry picks research findings to support just-so stories. Every time I sent him back to do more reporting on the rest of the story, he moaned and fumed.

When I read his proposal for "The Tipping Point," I found it to be warmed over epidemiology. It was based on a concept and a perception so old it was already an ancient saying about straw and a camel's back. But gussied up in Malcolm's writing style, it struck the epidemiologically naive as brilliant. Brilliant enough to win an advance of more than $1 million.

The Four-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris - Really made me think about life and the work I do

Tribes by Seth Godin - Love this book.

The Dip by Seth Godin - read it before, reread it again this year

Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina - really had to struggle to get past the beginning, was fantastic once I did

Find Your Great Work by Michael Bungary Stanier - I liked this one a lot, motivational

The Power of Less by Leo Babauta - no surprises here, I enjoyed the book, it reads like you would expect it to. Some new insights that aren't on the blog

Superfreakonomics by Stephen Levitt and Dubner

Blink, The Tipping Point and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (I liked The Tipping Point the best out of those 3)

Free by...Chris Anderson (?) I forget. Very interesting.

Team Up by Pete Mockaitis - Great read about accountability groups, subset of a mastermind group IMO.

Collapse by Jared Diamond - Very interesting looks at patterns in civilizations. Some people I spoke to get bored after a few examples, it is a little repetitive but I enjoy the parallels

My old faves are of course Gettings Things Done, 7 Habits, Greatest Salesman in The World, and How to Win Friends and Influence People.

More details here:
http://sidsavara.com/personal-development/best-personal-deve...

I regularly (and will be posting a bunch in the next couple weeks) post reviews of books I read here:
http://sidsavara.com/product-reviews

I read the Tipping point and found it quite an interesting book, but I've not bought anymore of his books after I had read his profile/sources linked above.

After his book 'David and Goliath' received numerous bad reviews for oversimplifying things and pinning causes on things that don't make sense, Gladwell lashed out at his critics and basically said that his books are not written for experts. [3]

Almost all of Gladwell's books are written in a style that categorically states that the subjects of his writing have a predetermined cause and effect. He doesn't leave much to chance, uncertainty or some other unknown cause. Everything is certain. His stories and narrations always imply a cause. That's the real secret of his writing.

[1] https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2016/11/14/the-tipping-po...

[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sorry-malcolm-glad...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/29/malcolm-gladwe...

I've read the book. It's entertaining, but I don't think it's as well-developed as Blink or The Tipping Point. I think Gladwell is a good writer who serves a previously unfilled role as a popular popularizer of academic work. However, every time I read his work, I wish that experts of the fields he reports on would also write popular expositions that could be consumed by an audience like that of the New Yorker.

I know that the evidence backing some of what I was reading was sketchy at best. Asian children score higher on math tests because their ancestors labored in rice fields? Please. It doesn't detract from the entertainment value of the book, but I would think twice before believing what I read in the book was indicative of reality.

As for your theory argument, I would have to disagree in many different cases. Suppose that you only chose to include data points that support your argument. Then people have every right to pick an alternate data point, claim that your study is faulty and that you're being irresponsible. This is exactly what many of his detractors are pointing out, and it is a point that is often missed.

The primary argument against the book and the Gladwell style of investigation is that he tends not to include or even discuss studies or points or examples that do not support his argument. This is understandable, since he is attempt to speak to a popular audience and does not have the space to discuss every relevant study if he wants to run through all of his cases, but by doing this, he makes many smart people feel like he is trying to pull the wool over their eyes.

Also, I think it's important to note that these stories are not actually anti-establishment, even if they have such an appearance; they don't offend any powerful interests. In fact, they're often quite the opposite (consider that Malcolm Gladwell wrote an entire book arguing that being disabled or growing up poor or whatever else is actually an advantage! The people most likely to take exception to that thesis do not have bylines in the New York Times, nor do they have the editor's personal phone number)

From the original article in 1982:

Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

Or consider a pavement. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of refuse from take-out restaurants there or even break into cars.

Broken Windows, The Atlantic Monthly, March 1982

--

The way I would put it, based on my visits to my home town of Zagreb, Croatia:

Apathy is contagious.

Persuasion is independent of "shyness" (actually, being an introvert) but a lot of it has to do with natural talent, unfortunately [1]. You can definitely improve it, but some people are just born with a higher degree of "energy transitivity". For instance, their face have more muscles and they're wired in such a way that it is easier for them to control it, among other things.

[1] Malcom Gladwell wrote about this briefly in "The Tipping Point". You can learn more on this by looking up the book "Emotional Contagion" by Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo and Richard Rapson. There's also Howard Friedman, from the University of California, who created the Affective Communication Test, which aims to give an individual a measure of his personal carisma - this transmissive or "magical" ability you speak of:
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~friedman/act.html

Also, you should give him realistic expectations. Learning to code isn't the panacea that many think it is. There are many broke but talented programmers out there, and most don't have the extra baggage associated with a felony conviction. If he doesn't truly have a passion to create software, and is just looking for a way to make money, there are more efficient things he can learn about - like the psychology behind viral marketing (The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell and Purple Cow by Seth Godin might be good for example). I know someone that couldn't write a line of code to save his life, but makes 6 figures per month creating Facebook pages around ridiculous topics and using them to drive traffic to affiliate offers and his own Adsense pages. Your friend can always hire coders when needed if creating software isn't what he actually wants to do.

I think it was in the Tipping Point by Gladwell. I'm not certain, but I read that recently and that's the only book I've read recently that has that sort of anecdote.

1. 1984 by Orwell

2. Animal Farm by Orwell

3. 40 Rules of Love by Elif Shafak

4. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

5. The Man in the high castle by Philip k Dic

6. Tuesdays with morrie by Mitch Albom

7. Broken Verses by Kamila Shamsie

8. The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell

9. Veronica Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho

10. The Little Prince by antoine saint exupery

11. A Monster calls by Patrick ness

Books that I am currently reading very very slowly ( 1-3 chapters per week )

1. The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking

2. The Wind Up Bird Chronicles by Murakami (I am really enjoying the slow reading here)

3. Zen and art of motorcycle by Robert Pirsig

Edit: Formatting

The surge becomes self-sustaining, in that as news stories of easy wealth spread and more speculators bundle into the market, it fuels more demand from new participants looking to get rich quick. This is not sustainable in the long run, and as soon as the crowd gets spooked all the dumb money will bail out very quickly, leading to a very fast crash.

The Gladwell book "The Tipping Point" is a good read about how ideas and fads take hold in societies. It's more a function of the way information spreads than about any secret knowledge about Bitcoin. Nobody can predict the future, but Bitcoin speculation is an attempt to gamble on it.

There's an investment adage that's something like "When your barista's telling you to invest in something, it's time to get out". Have had a number of non-tech/non-finance friends ask about how to invest money into Bitcoin lately, which is a signal to me that Bitcoin is becoming dangerously overheated.

Take a look at http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/515b40886bb3f7bd490... from the South China Seas bubble in the 18th Century. The first half of that curve look familiar? Guessing we will see a lot of Newtons in the not so distant future...

(Still, I have some crypto as part of my investment portfolio, about 2% of my net worth... you never know...)

Furthermore, he is extremely receptive to criticism and never presents himself as the one true source of fact.

btw, famous books by Dale Carnegie are brilliant adoption of that style.

bbtw, in many cases of such writers (compilators) the first book is the best one. The Tipping Point (and, of course, How To Find Friends) is really enjoying one.

The Tipping Point is a good book to learn why not. In-browser social networks is a not a cool thing anymore. It is just some feature of the net.

What is really interesting - is an emerging market of the Android-powered devices. The hardware is powerful and cheap enough, and the platform is open and simple (unlike the Nokia's crap).

The next generation of the social communications should be something like "texting 2.0" - texting with easy integration of a rich content from phone's camera on the fly. Just because teens loves texting, taking photos and their mobile phones.

There are a couple of books that had a big impact on me whose titles I long ago forgot. Periodically searching has not uncovered them.

One was a history of the deep south. Another was a book about about raising money for non profits.

I grew up in the deep south. Reading a history of it helped me understand my life and my country better. The second book had some pithy passages. One of my takeaways was "Don't say no for them." In other words, don't fail to ask because you assume the answer is no.

There were some other pithy, wise bits in the book that boil down to "If you really care about this project and the people it impacts, you need to get over being a thin skinned crybaby and keep at it in spite of repeatedly dealing with rejection, etc." I think the story was repeatedly told that someone would come to her all upset about something and she would say something like "I will put on my best therapist hat and tell you to get over it."

It was a surprising attitude to run into. The author was very practical. She also talked about the fact that she kept doing what she did because when things went well, there was no better feeling. I have done a lot of volunteer work in my life and there is a whole lot of touchy feely stuff that goes along with such work. This book was a breath of fresh air.

So you would not have read The Tipping Point, The World is Flat, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and other seminal business works. You would have missed some great memoirs, books about current leaders that might be useful in making valuable decisions on who to elect to lead our country, and a hell of a lot of well written history; all for the sake of being different.

As an aside: it seems very rational to pay social influences. I'm not entirely sure which pop-sci book it was (something I must have read on the train) but there's an interesting section on this in iirc. "The Tipping Point".

This is a must-read.

The smallest details can sometime have a surprisingly large impact.

It's not always clear why certain startups are successful and others fall by the wayside, maybe the success or failure of a website just depends on getting the hundreds of little details just right ?

As site developers, we need to think more about the psychological and sociological side of things, we should think of ourselves as community builders not just tool makers.

As Gore grew, it was apparent that this structure did not work with more than a couple of hundred people. So now, teams are limited to about 200 people (approximately Dunbar's number). I imagine Valve will run into this social limit as well once they grow well beyond their current 260 employees.

Given that Gore still exists, has 9000 employees and is profitable after 60 years is testament that such a structure can work for small as well as larger organisations over a longer period of time.

I first learned about this organisational structure in Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point. There are multiple descriptions online, here's one that seems interesting: http://ecgi.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=61902009302412510712411...

To oversimplify the ideas in his book, Godin says that the old methods of marketing are essentially dead. The only way to market efficiently is to build compelling ideas directly into the product rather than saving the innovation for the advertising.

In addition, I'd recommend reading "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell. It's a stimulating, accessible book that presents the fundamentals of how ideas spread through a populace. Pay close attention to the idea of stickiness and see what you can do to ensure that your product is sufficiently sticky.

Yep. Gladwell talks about the marketing aspect of some of these ideas in this book The Tipping Point. Actually, despite being a "pop science" book, there's a lot of good stuff in The Tipping Point, in terms of providing good starting points to start exploring. Reading his book was one of the things that got me interested in this field. From there, I started reading the stuff by Duncan Watts and Albert-László Barabási and then some of the more technical stuff. It turns out that network science underlies and unifies all sorts of stuff. It's really proving to be fascinating... well, to me, anyway.

I never fell for Tony Robbins-type pop psychology, but I loved books like "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini and "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell.

I thought I was getting useful, non-obvious, actionable information. I'm disappointed that the lessons from those books might be BS as well.

I'm have not read 'The Tipping Point' but surely it makes similar arguments. The question I would like to know answered is if the Telegraph is helping the situation through improved discussions on teen suicide and the need to help youth suffering from depression or will they spawn copy cat effects by broadcasting nationally/world wide of a suicide craze. I certainly hope that the youth in the community are helped and that this fad is stopped.

Business & Management

1. Innovator's Dilemma and Innovator's Solution by Clayton Christensen

2. Built to Last and Good to Great by Jim Collins. Built to Last is more applicable for startups.

3. Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks. Anyone who has to manage a team of programmers and hasn't read this will fail utterly, unless they've already failed before (or been on a failing team). There's a lot that's counterintuitive about software project management.

4. Peter Drucker's work. Kinda long and repetitive, but some good insights.

Marketing

1. All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin. I like this better than Purple Cow, Guerilla Marketer's Handbook, and The Big Red Fez. Most of those have fairly obvious stuff.

2. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

3. Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore

Technical

1. Building Scalable Websites by Cal Henderson

2. High Performance MySQL by Jeremy Zawodny

3. Pragmatic Programmer by...well, it's mentioned elsewhere here.

There are lots of other technical books I like, but most of them aren't directly relevant to the startup I'm building

Long article that says little and manages to contradict the few points it makes. Read 'The Tipping Point' instead. If not, be prepared to read about a dozen different rephrasings of

>Defeat in the mountains of the Hindu Kush or on the plains of Mesopotamia has long been a harbinger of imperial fall.

Whether it is worth or not, it depends on how you define worth.

I used to buy the hype cycle out of recommended books by "the internet" (reddit, HN, blogs, etc), for example: the tipping point, wisdom of the crowd, paradox of less, this book, get things done, etc.

But then I figured out that I want to (and should) do my own thing, not to follow someone else's lead.

I sold mine last month and am now trying to get rid the other books as well.

Keep in mind that while it is 6 years old, most of the content are "concepts" of various topics from startups, competition, hackers/recruiting, etc.

I had a 400MHz Titanium Powerbook back in 2001, and by 2003 it was a 1Ghz PowerBook G4 due to the seventeen times I had to send in various computers that were replaced. One of them even melted (http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/laptops/another-melted-g4-mac-lap...). So with my MacBook Pro having only a few minor problems (the power button has fallen inside the case, and the isight randomly stops working), I'd say the quality has improved significantly.

The networking systems in the Finder are so bad that when I use Vista, I actually breathe a sigh of relief that I can "map" network drives and have automatic discovery. Leopard somewhat fixes this, though.

As far as the iPhone debacle, I'm really amazed at how poorly Apple is handling the situation. Maliciously destroying their products and punishing their most geeky customers is retarded. Those geeky customers are the ones the non-geeky potential customers go to for advice. Hasn't Steve Jobs read The Tipping Point? When you've pissed off Brian Lam, you're really in trouble.

Couple comments here and what's written in Paul's post allude to our capitalistic consumption-based society. I think Annie sums the state of our world's affairs up pretty well, and you can see the relation to different aspects of your lives and big business at, http://storyofstuff.com/.

My problem is the lack of solutions that I see offered by those that raise objections to the status quo. Its good to make others aware, but always go the extra mile and offer a suggestion to change what you feel is so messed up.

That is what is missing in our 2008 elections. Just look at Obama and Hillary sputter about what they intend to do, with great passion. However, they never actually say how America will get out of Iraq and what will become of the Iraqis, how to fund the health care and education programs they propose, or what solution they’ll put in place to get the economy rolling again. All I hear is why race and sex matter so much in this election, and how historic it will be when a woman, or black man becomes president.

Those are not reasons to be America’s president! I don’t care what color, size, sexual preference, or country of origin our next president has. I want to know how they’re going to fix this mess.

As a startup founder, I keep confidence by following several principles:

1) "Success is merely others recognizing what you knew you had inside you the whole time."
- Will Smith

2) "Plan your solutions for the worst, and leave hope to others."
- Craig Benson, founder of Cabletron

3) "Champions take chances and pressure is a privilege."
- Sharapova speech after winning the last Australian Open

If I am reading this correctly, you currently have around 200 employees and presumably started with less than that. If that is correct, break it up into two separate groups smaller than 150. Any time any part of the company grows beyond about 150 people, repeat. (Read "The tipping point" for longish explanation why. Short version: The typical human brain is designed for a "tribe" size of about 150.)

1. Positioning, 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing/Branding, Focus, Marketing Warfare

2. Purple Cow, All Marketers are Liars, Permission Marketing (I didn't like "The Big Moo", "Free prize inside" or "Small is the new Big").

3. Founters At Work

4. Wikinomics, Wisdom of Crowds, The Tipping Point (Blink! was alright). I am looking forward to reading "The Long Tail" and "The starfish and the spider"...has anyone read them yet?

6. Why We Buy

7. Hackers and Painters

8. The E-Myth revisited

9. The Art of the Start

10. On War, The Art of War by Machiavelli and Sun Tzu (not exactly for startups, but definitely useful)

11. Crossing the Chasm