“The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.” 

Malcolm Gladwell

In 2000, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Gladwell describes The Tipping Point as, “the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into best sellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.” Gladwell asserts that viruses have three characteristics – “one, contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and three, that change happens not gradually but in one dramatic moment – are the same three principles that define how measles moves through a grade-school classroom or the flu attacks every winter.” I am revisiting The Tipping Point over the next few weeks in an effort to consider how the characteristics of epidemics, and our actions around them, may be utilized for good.

Gladwell introduces “rules” of Tipping Points – the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, the Power of Context. The text is the explanation of each “rule.” My investigation will center on the relationship between wide-awakeness and Tipping Points, what those of us who think about concepts like wide-awakeness might learn from Tipping Points, and what a Tipping Point for wide-awakeness might look like.