The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell was an okay book, not as great as I was anticipating it do be. It started slow, but picked up about a hundred pages in. There were some interesting points made throughout the book, interesting insights into the way certain things caught fire and snowballed from a seemingly insignificant thing to a huge deal, while others never got off the launch pad. Not sure how practical these insights are into the average life, but still interesting.

One of the points made by the author deals with the Power of Context. Consider this example from the book:

Consider the following brain teaser. Suppose I give you four cards [each] labeled with [one of] the letters A and D [on one side] and [one of] the numerals 3 and 6 [on the other side]. The rule of the game is that a card with a vowel on it always has an even number on the other side. Which of the cards would you have to turn over to prove this rule to be true?

The answer is two: the A card and the three card. The overwhelming majority of people given this test, though, don’t get it right. They tend to answer just the A card, or the A and the six…

But now let me pose another question. Suppose four people are drinking in a bar. One is drinking Coke. One is sixteen. One is drinking beer and one is twenty-five. Given the rule that no one under twenty-one is allowed to drink beer, which of those people’s IDs do we have to check to make sure the law is being observed? Now the answer is easy…the beer drinker and the-sixteen year-old.

[They] are exactly the same puzzle…[with the latter] framed in a way that makes it about people instead of about numbers, and as human beings, we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world.

This was one of the few passages in the book that jumped out at me, made me go hmmm. This could, in fact, be applied to everyday life. If you’re struggling with making a point to a co-worker, client, etc. or if you’re trying to spread an idea, invention, point of view with little success, try changing the context of your message. Put it into terms that the receiver of your message can better understand.

Hmmm, isn’t that what word problems in math class were meant to do? How many people actually liked those word problems better than the straight-up math problems?