All trends and movements have humble origins. They begin modestly, then somehow blow up into a phenomenon that gets everyone talking. But how does an idea or a product or a behavior go from nothing to something to something big? Tipping Point was the first of many bestselling books to come from the mind of award-winning journalist Malcolm Gladwell, and in it he explores the mechanics of epidemic ideas. Just like biological epidemics, social epidemics are contagious; they start as small causes that lead to enormous consequences, and they spread suddenly—not gradually over time. The Tipping Point is that moment of “suddenly”—and it’s here that Gladwell directs our gaze.

Most epidemics are spread without a pathogen. Fashion trends, ideas, crime, and unknown books can all go viral and catch everyone by surprise. In 1994, Hush Puppies (the shoe—not the deep-fried snack) were not selling well. Hush Puppies had propelled the company Wolverine’s initial success, but were now dying out. Executives were on the verge of discontinuing their suede staples when, completely unprovoked and seemingly out of nowhere, fashion designers and clothing lines began pounding down Wolverine’s doors for partnerships and promos. What sparked the sudden change in consumer hearts—at the very moment when Hush Puppies were about to be put down?

There had been no massive ad campaign trying to salvage the product. The only places you could still get them were at small mom and pop shops on the outskirts of town. The Hush Puppies resurgence can be traced back to a handful of hipsters in Manhattan who began wearing them precisely because they were no longer popular. It just took a few yuppies in New York going against the grain to take Hush Puppies from fashion faux pas to crème de la crème. The Hush Puppies bug spread across the nation. Sales went from a mere 30,000 units in 1994 to over 400,000 in 1995, and then that number doubled the following year. The shoe went from on-its-way-out to collecting fashion awards, and it all began with word-of-mouth: people seeing their friends wear them at clubs and cafes in downtown Manhattan.

Another story of tipping point dynamics also comes from New York in the 1980s and 1990s (especially Brownsville and East New York). Crime was at an all-time high. At its worst in 1992, there were 2,154 murders and over 600,000 violent and dangerous crimes. No one left their apartment after dark. The streets and front stoops were empty. But then something changed: Crime dropped precipitously—seemingly out of nowhere.

You could attribute the change to economic upturn, better police policy, or criminals aging out of vulnerable at-risk demographics—or maybe to a combination of all three. What explanations like these miss is how sudden the drop in crime was. Economic and demographic shifts are incremental.  

Stock explanations also don’t explain why it dropped so dramatically in New York and not other major US cities during that same period. There must be a better explanation out there for why there were suddenly people walking around Brownsville after dark, kids on bicycles, and elderly people sitting out on park benches once again in an area where police reported nonstop radio chatter from sundown to sunrise. Something happened, and it spread epidemically—not gradually. The difference had been a large-scale effort to replace broken windows and clean up graffiti. Buildings with in-tact windows and clean walls were far less likely to be vandalized and plundered, and people were far less likely to be hurt.

When we look at tipping point moments like these, we realize that epidemics are not always biological. There are fashion bugs and trends in everything from crime to teenage smoking. What is it that’s going on in these moments of sudden, large-scale change?

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The concept of six degrees of separation comes from a Stanley Milgram experiment in which 160 packages were mailed to random people in Omaha, Nebraska. These people were asked to send these packages to a broker near Boston. If they didn’t know him personally, they could send the package to someone they knew who lived closer to that broker in the Boston area. The subjects were asked to write their name on the package and then send it off to an old college friend or cousin or whoever they knew in the New England area, and the process would begin again: Write your name on the package and mail it to someone who might know this guy. The goal was to see how many links would be necessary to get that package from the care of random people in Omaha into the hands of that broker at such and such an address in Sharon, Massachusetts.

Very intelligent people associated with the project predicted there would be 100 names on each package, maybe more. Imagine their shock to learn that most packages only needed to pass through five to six pairs of hands. Six degrees doesn’t deliver the same shock now that it did for the original researchers because it feels like covered ground, but here’s what most people don’t know: Half the packages that made their way from Nebraska to Boston passed through the hands of the same three people. However quirky and protracted the routes that the packages traveled, every other came to one of three people somewhere along the line. This is fascinating. Not only do six degrees separate us from people in other parts of the country or globe, but there are those special people through whom many of those connections seem to flow.

What makes a Connector a Connector? For one, they know lots of people. On average, their circle of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances is four to five times larger than most people’s. It’s not just that they know lots of people, but that there are certain kinds of people they tend to know.

Connectors don’t just know people from one group. They know people from multiple subcultures. If you rank Hollywood actors by how many degrees of separation there are to other actors, Rod Stieger comes out the highest, while John Wayne ranks 116th. With an impressive 179 movies to his name spanning a six-decade career, you might think John Wayne would rank higher, but he mostly did Westerns—the same kind of movies with the same actors. Rod Stiegel, on the other hand, did Westerns along with action films, dramas, comedies, documentaries, thrillers, horror films, and musicals. He was constantly interacting with a variety of people from different niches and was a kind of bridge between these different worlds.

Connectors share this same trait—they don’t just stick to one track, which allows them to connect with people from a number of different worlds. Diversifying their immersion in different worlds gives them social versatility. One Connector made a hasty tally of the worlds she is part of. She got to 8. These domains were as diverse as architecture, hospitality, park enthusiasts, doctors, lawyers, writers, and actors. Connectors don’t just collect lots of people—they collect lots of worlds.

When we talk about the importance of word of mouth, it matters tremendously what words are coming out of whose mouth. Word of mouth becomes effective when word gets to a Connector, a person with access to numerous worlds.

That decisive night in colonial America when Paul Revere rode across Massachusetts to rally the troops is now taught in grade schools around the United States. He spread a message from town to town and let leaders in each township continue to alert their minutemen. The British forces were shocked to meet large and organized American forces where they’d expected little to no resistance. What most popular histories leave out is that another man, William Dawes, had the exact same mission as Paul Revere, but he didn’t draw more than a handful to the fight. Why did Paul Revere’s cries for help go viral but William Dawes' did not?

Some historians have speculated that Dawes was riding through Loyalist regions, where more colonists were sympathetic to the Crown, but this has been disproven. The real difference was that Paul Revere was a Connector, and William Dawes was not. Revere was part of many worlds in colonial New England. He hunted, he fished, he played cards, he was part of elite social clubs, and was a regular at the local pubs and the Masonic inn. Biographers note that he was at the center of events in town.

So when Revere went town to town, he knew exactly which doors to bang on and who to contact. Those who answered the door recognized and trusted him. Dawes was just an ordinary guy with an average sphere of influence. Most of us would have met with a lack of success similar to his if we had to go to towns we’ve never visited and tried knocking on the doors of perfect strangers at two or three in the morning.

Spreading the word about something to a wide, diverse group of people is done best by Connectors. But social epidemics don’t just need connectors, they need people with the right information to give to Connectors to run with. These people are Mavens, from the Yiddish word for someone who assiduously collects information. With information becoming increasingly key to markets, economists have taken a special interest in those who corner and process the information well.

Mavens typically don’t have the same social reach as Connectors, but they make themselves such indispensable guides to any or every market niche that people take their recommendations seriously. A Connector might tell 20 people about an amazing new Indian restaurant, and only five of them go. A Maven might only tell five people about that same Indian restaurant, and all five of them go. The approaches are different, but they both get multiple people in the door, who then tell more people themselves, and so on. It’s two unique ways to spread a social contagion.

There’s something about how well-processed and astute the information is, and how authoritatively a Maven presents that information, that makes us want to lean in and really listen. Mavens are educators in their bearing—not rhetoricians. They are not trying to persuade—just to inform. What you do with their information is up to you.

Connectors spread the word widely and Mavens educate authoritatively. A third group, the Salesmen, close the deal and pull the double-minded and half-hearted into the fold.

There is a kind of synchrony that Salesmen have a knack for creating with clients. They build rapport fast—and not just at a psychological level, but also at a physiological level. Most of us are only faintly aware of the synchrony that develops between people. It’s mostly unconscious. Salesmen have just found a way to hone it better, drawing the rest of us into their rhythms of gesture and speech. They dictate the conversation’s direction and pace, and we are often lulled into going with it. We might resist it, but even the most stalwart can’t keep a good Salesman’s charm at arm’s length forever.

This synchrony between people—now a well-documented phenomenon—is a kind of mimicry, and this mimicry is a kind of social emotional contagion. If you smile at someone and that person sees you and smiles back, you have passed on a happiness virus that affects them at a bodily level. You’ve spread your infectious happiness to another.

We typically think of emotions as an inside-out process, but studies show our neurological bent to empathy and mirroring the expressions of others. This tells us that there is also an outside-in process at work when it comes to emotions. In other words, emotions don’t just spring up from our depths—people can reach our depths with their emotions and change ours. It’s precisely this outside-in process that good Salesmen have mastered, making them effective social contagions.

What does a bestselling book from the 1990s called The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood have in common with the 18th-century evangelist John Wesley? At first glance, nothing, but both leveraged the power of groups very effectively to create tipping points.

When Rebecca Wells’ Ya-Ya Sisterhood came out in 1996, it sold 15,000 copies. The following year those numbers doubled. By early 1998, there had been 48 printings and 2.5 million copies had been sold. Wells was regularly a guest on a number of national talk shows, and took to the road doing book clubs across the country. She noticed that at first there were multiple groups of half a dozen women showing up to a reading, and then multigenerational groups of women were showing up: older women from the World War II generation, their middle-aged daughters, and their daughters in their twenties. Even some teenage girls made appearances with their mothers and grandmothers.

The story of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood was in and of itself a winning, stirring piece of fiction centered around mother-daughter dynamics. It has that Stickiness Factor. Without being a quality idea with proper staying power, Connectors, Salesmen, and Mavens can only do so much—and probably not enough to tip the scales in favor of a social epidemic. There was, however, another factor that fueled the book’s popularity: The Power of Context.    

We often fail to understand how influential our social environment is. The nudges and pressure from those around us—even if they don’t say a word—is profound. We see this in religious movements. The evangelist John Wesley wasn’t the most outstanding orator or theologian. He was not a great Salesman. But he did have a knack for structuring and organizing a movement like no one else. He was an itinerant minister, traveling almost half a million miles on horseback—not over his lifetime, but over the course of a year. He would find the most exuberant convert in each town and train them in the methods: weekly meetings of small groups who agreed to maintain strict codes of conduct, and he would come back and visit with each of them along his circuit. Wesley’s methods were well-laid out, earning his members of the movement the moniker “Methodists.”

Like the multigenerational clusters of women who sprang up around the sticky ideas in the ­Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Wesley created mini religious societies that allowed people’s newfound faith to take deeper root as they watched the faith of those around them being put into action. Both movements fostered the power of being “in this together.” They leveraged the Power of Context.

An epidemic is a sudden massive surge, yes, but it is born from a groundswell of many micro movements. You could speak to a giant crowd and/or go person by person, but in either case, those people are usually not connected to one another, so that crucial “in-this-together” bit is absent, which saps its staying power.

Tipping points are moved along best by certain kinds of people: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. But there are also certain environments needed to give the idea staying power. Local social networks are part of that. As Rebecca Wells discovered during her book tour, the power of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood was not the book itself. The power was in the experiences of closeness among multiple generations of women. Dragging individuals out to book clubs would not have stuck, but the clusters it generated (and then clusters of clusters) led to its becoming a national phenomenon.

To recap, there are three rules that Tipping Points observe:

-The Law of the Few

-The Stickiness Factor

-The Power of Context

The Law of the Few teaches us that there are very particular kinds of people who spread social contagions: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.

The Stickiness Factor reminds us that no matter how well Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen hype something up, the idea or service or product will just be a flash in the pan if it doesn’t hold up on its own merit. It needs staying power, or stickiness, if it hopes to maintain a hold in public consciousness.

The final law is the Power of Context, which reveals the need for the right environment for a social contagion to spread.

By understanding Tipping Points, we are more in touch with how the world works, and how the world changes. By understanding these mechanics, we can use these principles of relating to each other for good.

These insights are just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of The Tipping Point here. And since we get a commission on every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.