We have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest.
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.
Our unconscious thinking is, in one critical respect, no different from our conscious thinking: in both, we are able to develop our rapid decision making with training and experience.
David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants.
The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours.
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.
That’s not because journalists know more about Japan. It’s because they knew less: they had the ability to sort through what they knew and find a pattern.
This is the real lesson of Blink: It is not enough simply to explore the hidden recesses of our unconscious. Once we know about how the mind works – and about the strengths and weaknesses of human judgment – it is our responsibility to act.
The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with. For a young would-be lawyer, being born in the early 1930′s was a magic time, just as being born in 1955 was for a software programmer, or being born in 1835 was for an entrepreneur.
So what does correlate with brain size? The answer, Dunbar argues, is group size. If you look at any species of primate-at every variety of monkey and ape-the larger their neocortex is, the larger the average size of the groups they live with.
The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.
Minor, seemingly insignificant quality-of-life crimes, they said, were Tipping Points for violent crime.
To look closely at complex behaviors like smoking or suicide or crime is to appreciate how suggestible we are in the face of what we see and hear, and how acutely sensitive we are to even the smallest details of everyday life. That’s why social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because it is the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable.
The power of knowing, in that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves.
The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.
In the end, Tipping Points are the reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action.
That late bloomers bloom late because they simply aren’t much good until late in their careers.
We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration.
You can take a pitchman and make a great actor out of him, but you cannot take an actor and always make a great pitchman out of him,” he says. The pitchman must make you applaud and take out your money. He must be able to execute what in pitchman’s parlance is called “the turn” – the perilous, crucial moment where he goes from entertainer to businessman.
The point about Connectors is that by having a foot in so many different worlds, they have the effect of bringing them all together.