The Tipping Point is such an interesting book to me. I never really took the time to think about how things truly do spread like wildfire, especially among my generation. For instance, I remember how quickly Livestrong bracelets became insanely popular when I was younger within a matter of days. It went from this weird little yellow band a couple of football players started wearing, to being ostracized for being the only weirdo who wasn’t wearing one only a few short days later.
That’s the thing about epidemics- they sneak up on you, which is what this book tries to- and successfully- conveys. I liked the example the author used in the beginning of the book about the Hush Puppies. Those shoes were a dying breed, save for a few hipsters living in New York City. All it took was one or two designers to showcase the shoes in their collections, and suddenly the company started quadrupling their sales.
Perhaps the most interesting part is that it only takes 1 person to start an epidemic. Take, for example, Gaetan Dugas. He was referenced in the book as the French-Canadian flight attendant that was rumored to have had over 2,500 sexual partners in North America, which led to him being linked to at least 40 of the earliest cases of HIV in America. He had a monumental part in the spread the disease between New York to California. It all comes back to the Law of the Few, which states that exceptional people perpetuate a trend, and through socialization and connections, spread it to the masses. Just like the Hush Puppies phenomenon and Gaetan Dugas.
Perhaps the most successful way to spread an epidemic is by word-of-mouth. In the book, it talks about a man named Roger Horchow who faxed his friends about a great restaurant he went to with his daughter. That’s the first step to creating a word-of-mouth epidemic. However, to continue, that restaurant has to hold up it’s end of the deal. It has to keep serving tasty food that keep the customers coming back for more. For an epidemic to continue, the message has to have that “stickiness” factor. Is what you heard so interesting and amazing that you just HAVE to get out there and try it? If it is, then you’re probably taking part in spreading an epidemic.
It was interesting that the author brought up the idea of crime as an epidemic. He talks about how the crime rate in NYC in the 1990s dropped off for seemingly no reason. Nothing significant had changed, but the crack cocaine trade slowly declined. The economy was recovering, so people who may have turned to crime got jobs instead. All of these reasons, paired with the Law of Context, resulted in a drastic decrease in crime. It’s so interesting that small, incremental changes have such large effects.
Overall, this book was fun to read. It opened my eyes to a lot of things in society that I probably wouldn’t have noticed without reading this book.
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