Gladwell Revisits ‘The Tipping Point
After a relatively travel-free January, I’m back on the travel circuit. Spent two days with a super-sharp and enthusiastic healthcare consulting team in Mumbai, exploring the power of narrative-led storytelling.
On Thursday, I delivered a masterclass on how to make your number stick at the fabulous ‘India Fund Raising Conference’ (IFRC) at Delhi. This was at the charming India Habitat Centre and the bonus was some lovely Delhi winter weather.
All this travel means that I didn’t get any time to work on the newsletter… and so, I’m scrambling to complete it between sessions on Friday!
And now, on to the newsletter.
Welcome to the hundred and second edition of ‘3-2-1 by Story Rules‘.
A newsletter recommending good examples of storytelling across:
- 3 tweets
- 2 articles, and
- 1 long-form content piece
Let’s dive in.
𝕏 3 Tweets of the week
| Source: X |
Boy, that spike is from just one year back! That’s one heck of a scary trajectory…
| Source: X |
Fascinating data points. No surprise that Snap users are the youngest and FB oldest. But I didn’t know that X users are younger than Instagram. (I feel younger already!).
| Source: X |
Great example of visual contrast! Reminded me of this pic from Powai.
📄 2 Articles of the week
a. ‘When impostor syndrome is a good thing; 4 steps to getting better at craft’ by Ann Handley
In this edition of her newsletter, Ann shares some thoughts on how to combat imposter syndrome.
This portion resonated a lot:
…thought there’d come a point when I’d set the career cruise control to ON… and just fly the rest of the way down the highway. (Carefree, singing at the top of my lungs. Taylor Swift’s Fearless would be a good soundtrack to pair with a voiceover here…)
But it turns out that the more you master… the more you realize what you don’t know.
The more you understand challenges… the more you challenge yourself to learn more.
The more you hone your skills… the sharper still you want to make them.
Be comfortable with imposter syndrome:
Impostor syndrome is a problem when you feel like you don’t deserve to be in the room you’re in. But it can also fuel you in new directions. It’s paradoxical—like Jumbo Shrimp or Virtual Reality. But true.
So yeah. I’ve never been completely comfortable in my work. I hope I never am.
To a reader question on how to get better at the craft of writing, this was Ann’s response:
Write four drafts of everything:
1. The Ugly First Draft. Barf it up! Get it out!
2. The-chainsaw-edit version. Move the big chunks around on dollies and hand-trucks. Is it starting to take shape? Does the logic flow?
3. Surgical-tool-edit version. Finer editing. Each word must earn its keep. A few must delight me.
4. Read-it-out-loud version. Does it sound like writing (a little uptight)? If so, revisit #3. Repeat.
I write four drafts when it matters. And it matters more than you might think!
b. ‘The Income Tax Cut Cuts in Many Ways’ by Somnath Mukherjee
There was much rejoicing in the press about the significant income tax cut in the recent Union budget. The ostensible reason is that this has been done to spur consumption.
Acknowledging that aspect, Somnath makes two key counters:
- Instead of giving people more money to consume, the government could have used the money for capex spend, which have a larger multiplier effect on economic growth,
- This cut undoes decades of work to increase India’s taxpayer base.
Both thought-provoking points.
🎧 1 long-form listen of the week
a. ‘The Tipping Point Revisited: Broken Windows’ by Malcolm Gladwell on Revisionist History
In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell published his book ‘The Tipping Point’ and it became an enduring bestseller, with the term entering the common lexicon.
In 2024, Gladwell revisits some of the arguments he made in the book and explores – was he right, or was he wrong?
In this episode of his podcast, he dives into the ‘broken windows’ theory that supposedly resulted in a drastic reduction in crime in New York.
At the beginning of the episode, Gladwell reminisces (with some friends) about the bad, old days of the early 1990s when crime in NY was bad. This is a great example of ‘show, don’t tell’:
“What did it mean to go out on a Saturday or Friday night in 1993 in New York?’
“It was kind of like a given, you know? You wear a fanny pack and once you’re out on the streets, you turn it around so it’s in front of you so you can see it.”
“Did you really do that?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, I actually, I remember I just had a flash of, remember keys? We all had keys. When I used to walk around with keys so that each one, what would I have actually done if someone had attacked me? I would put my keys between my fingers. So that if someone attacked me, I would be ready.”
Later, the city authorities implemented their famous broken windows theory where the police would catch even minor infarctions and not let things escalate. This was the theory that Gladwell wrote about in his book:
Gladwell: In this episode, I’m looking back at the question that got me started on Tipping Points 25 years ago. How in the 90s did New York become one of the safest cities in America? In 1996, I wrote an article for the New Yorker magazine trying to explain this puzzle. It was called The Tipping Point. That article led to my first book, called The Tipping Point, where I offered a more complete explanation.
So Gladwell decided to find out whether the theory still held strong? Was his original view accurate or flawed?
Gladwell was mighty surprised by what he found…
Here’s the thing though – in this newsletter edition, for a change, I don’t want to tell you what he found. The episode is such a fascinating story, that it would be remiss of me to share any spoilers*.
Enjoy listening!
*(And yes, I’m also a bit short of time this week ;p).
That’s all from this week’s edition.
Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash
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