The Malcolm Gladwell Quicklet Bundle - Malcolm Gladwell

This bundle features 4 Quicklets, executive summaries and analyses of bestselling works by Malcolm Gladwell: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw. Quicklets are perfect for time-strapped professionals who want to be conversant on major works but haven’t yet found the time to read the full texts.

Buy today and get more than 25% off the price of all three separately!

Outliers explores why some people succeed and others do not. Gladwell shows you how to identify small factors that lead to succeed. Additionally, the Quicklets team examines Gladwell’s controversial claim that success is caused more by environment than individual characteristics.

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GREAT EXCERPT FROM THE TIPPING POINT

Any one person wearing an alligator shirt doesn’t change much. The right group at the right time is the key to pushing that idea over the tipping point. Gladwell argues that it’s all so mysterious to most of us because our brains aren’t really set up to grasp how all of our individual actions play off of the individual actions of others and cause the sweeping changes that fly around us. We’re only set up to understand the causes and effects that happen right in front of us. The stuff we can see and touch.

Why does a tornado happen? Why are some things spring fashion trends and not others? According to Gladwell, we don’t think about these questions very often, and we have a hard time understanding why even when we do think about it.

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GREAT EXCERPT FROM OUTLIERS

And, as we find with the case of Christopher Langan, being a genius does not necessarily guarantee success. The genius, whose IQ is 30% higher than Einstein’s, is a college dropout without much prospect for the future.

His explanation is based on the fact that in Canada, the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey is January 1. Therefore, a kid who is born in the earlier part of the year could potentially be playing against a kid 364 days younger than him, which produces a huge advantage in physical maturity. The same goes for European soccer.

In Chapter 3, we meet Christopher Langan. He’s a genius in almost every way society defines the word. His score on an IQ test was off the charts and 30% higher than Einstein’s.

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GREAT EXCERPT FROM BLINK

We can affect our snap judgments by controlling the environment in which they are made...Gladwell argues that we can’t consciously control our snap judgments. However, this does not mean that we can’t control them at all. We are able control the environment in which our snap judgments are made – therefore indirectly controlling them.

At times a thin-slice of experience does not accurately reflect the situation as a whole. For instance, Gladwell uses the advent of New Coke in the 1980’s. New Coke received great reviews during blind taste tests. However, when put on the market, people did not like the new recipe because it was too sweet.

In this section Gladwell tells us that insurance specialists are able to tell if a doctor is likely to get sued for malpractice, strictly based on the doctor’s interactions with his or her clients. It turns out that people don’t sue their doctors based on the quality of care, but on how well the doctor treats them personally.

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GREAT EXCERPT FROM WHAT THE DOG SAW

And in a different chapter when Gladwell discusses the two types of serial killers, knowing which category a murderer falls into goes a long way towards finding him.