What the dog saw – Malcolm Gladwell

Finished all of Malcolm Gladwell’s books with “What the dog saw and other adventures”. This one is collection of articles on various topics that came out in New Yorker magazine. Like most articles in the magazine, each story goes into painstaking details which can be a drag at times, but the details are sometimes fascinating. I still have the suspicion though – whether all of this is authentic science, what is truth and what is fiction. But he definitely knows how to write non-fiction in the most engaging way.

I have terrible memory when it comes to books I read – so started keeping some notes on things I found interesting.

the trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell. the other trick to finding ideas is figuring out the difference between power and knowledge. you don’t start at the top if you want to find the story. you start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world. people at the top are self conscious about what they say (and rightfully so) because they have position and privilege to protect – and self-consciousness is the enemy of "interestingness".

I was earlier wondering if senior leaders had blogged or explained the thought processes in a more direct manner, establish the rapport with employees, whether that can lead to people understanding it better. This kind of explains why that cannot happen. On the other hand, listening to that middle who does actual work might work well as well to know what is working and what is not.

like most great innovations, it was disruptive. and how do you persuade people to disrupt their lives? not merely by ingratiation or sincerity, and not by being famous or beautiful. you have to explain the invention to the customers – not once or twice but three or four times, with a different twist each time. you have to show them exactly how it works and why it works, and make them follow your hands as you chop liver with it, and then tell them precisely how it fits into their routine, and finally sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as the gadget is, it’s not at all hard to use.

Kind of relevant to what I do these days. We explain our work horribly, bury it in mountain of buzz words, colorful pictures – it never works. It has to be broken down to basic detail, tell them exactly how something works – it sounds very easy, but we make it very complicated.

relationship we have to the products we buy. about the slow realization among advertisers that unless they understood the psychological particulars of that relationship – unless they could dignify the transactions of everyday life by granting them meaning – they could not hope to reach the modern customer.

I am somehow interested in marketing, I don’t have any talent in that area, but mainly from the psychological aspect of it. Most effective of them are trying to understand people better and exploit that (somewhat like mind hack) to sell products. So it is interesting to see that they connect hair color to certain message that a person is conveying to society, nutritional drink to mother’s desire to see their child compete better in sports etc.

when you are first taught something, you think it through in a very deliberate, mechanical manner. but as you get better, the implicit system takes over: you start to hit a backhand fluidly, without thinking. the basal ganglia, where implicit learning partially resides, are concerned with force and timing, and when that system kicks in, you begin to develop touch and accuracy, the ability to hit a drop shot or place a serve at hundred miles per hour. this is something that is going to happen gradually, you hit several thousand forehands, after a while you may still be attending to it, but not very much. in the end, you don’t really notice what your hand is doing at all. under conditions of stress however th explicit system sometimes takes over. that’s what it means to choke. it is when you start to think about your shots again. you lose your fluidity and touch.

It is one of those paradoxes in life – you need to think to improve and once you have, thought could actually be a hindrance.