The Tipping Point Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

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Brief Summary

Once you know what makes something go viral, you can take steps to get there yourself.

About the Author

Malcolm Gladwell is a Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has worked for The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of several books including The Outliers on The New York Times Bestseller List. He is the host of the podcast, The Revisionist History, and is the co-founder of Pushkin Industries. His books often focus on the implications of research in the social sciences and make use of the academic work in sociology, psychology, and social psychology. He was born in England and now lives in New York.

Topics

The Tipping Point Book Summary Preview

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the violent crime rate in New York City crept up slowly until it finally began to subside. But in 1993, the crime shot downward suddenly, and it’s been down ever since.

Paul Revere warned that “The British were coming,” and it spread like wildfire, in part sparking the American Revolution in the 18th century.

What do these significant events have in common? Contagion. They both represent ideas, messages, or public trends that “went viral.” And in the influential book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell dissects virality, and precisely the moment at which a person, thing, or product goes from merely accessible to a “household name.”

Malcolm Gladwell knows a thing or two about influential ideas. His books have ended up on the New York Times Bestseller list many times. He earned a $1-1.5 million advance for this one. So whether you’d like to sell your products or disseminate your ideas more widely, Gladwell is an excellent source. Once you know what makes something go viral, you can take steps to get there yourself.

What is the “tipping point?”

Gladwell defines the “tipping point” as the “threshold,” “boiling point,” or moment of critical mass. Launching a social media following is an excellent example of the “tipping point” phenomenon. Let’s say you have an Instagram account, and you’d like to become an influencer. At first, your growth will likely be sparse and slow as you develop content and make connections. Then, you might steadily grow a following. Perhaps you’ll get 25 new followers a day (or week), then 100, then 1,000.

But the most wildly popular social media mavens, with millions of followers, reach a “tipping point” of exponential growth. After months or even years of steady growth, one post or one news headline finally sends the influencer over the edge. That’s when you see accounts getting thousands of followers overnight and achieving bonafide viral status. Suddenly, it seems that everyone is talking about the person, and “everyone” knows who they are.

Now, let’s dig into what Gladwell says constitutes the cultural phenomenon of “contagion.”

The three characteristics of “contagious” ideas

According to Gladwell, ideas don’t become contagious by pure chance or accident. Here are the characteristics of most thoughts or trends that go viral: the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.

The Law of the Few

The Law of the Few, which we’ll get into in more detail in the next section (“Who Tips Ideas?”), suggests that a few key actors or participants are the ones who make all the difference when it comes to your idea or product reaching the tipping point of contagion. In other words, when someone has a million followers on Instagram, it’s not that millionth follower that matters most. It’s probably a more dedicated audience of a few thousand followers, supporters, and influencers who propelled that idea or account into real mainstream popularity.