Malcolm Gladwell on TED: What We Can Learn From Spaghetti Sauce

Posted on December 10, 2007
Filed Under Business & Entrepreneurship, Ideas |

I have been listening to The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell on audio book this week. Gladwell is a masterful story teller, has written a few bestsellers including Blink and inspired the book Made to Stick. So, needless to say when I found his talk on TED today I was excited to hear what he had to say.

Notice how he draws you in with small curiosity gaps with his story? He promises wise insight and begins telling of seemingly insignificant things (diet Pepsi and pickles). He makes you want to listen to the very end so he can satisfy your curiosity. In The Tipping Point he explains why the childrens show Blue’s Clues was so enormously successful, more so than any other childrens show before it. It is because it leads with clues that little kids can understand. He calls this the stickiness factor, which of course inspired the authors of Made to Stick. He uses the same concept to make his TED talk sticky too. And it is well worth the eighteen minutes.

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