Amanda Penn, Author at Shortform Books

Malcolm Gladwell’s “Connectors”: People Who Spread Ideas

Who are Malcolm Gladwell’s connectors? How are they crucial to the spread of ideas and important for business? Connectors are people who seem to know everyone. You can find Connectors in every walk of life. Connectors are sociable, gregarious, and are naturally skilled at making — and keeping in contact with — friends and acquaintances. The term comes from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. We’ll cover the role of Tipping Point‘s connectors in business and why they’re crucial to the spread of ideas, services, and products.

Social Channel Capacity: 150 Real Relationships Is Your Max

What does “channel capacity” mean? How much information is the brain able to store? What does this mean about the number of relationships we’re able to maintain? Channel capacity is a term in cognitive psychology that says humans have limited space in our brains for certain kinds of information: by and large, we can only remember six or seven things — whether objects, numbers, categories, or sounds — before we get overwhelmed and start to lose track. Similarly, social channel capacity states that we have a limited emotional capacity. We can only maintain deep relationships with a limited number of

The Things They Carried: Themes—The 4 Most Important Points

What are the most prominent The Things They Carried themes? What happens in the book to illustrate these themes? The Things They Carried themes are trauma, brutalization, shame, and the power of storytelling. These are the most important themes in this Vietnam War classic. We’ll cover the most important The Things They Carried themes and look at how they played out in the book.

Sticky Ideas: Make Your Message Personal + Practical

What are “sticky” ideas? How can you make ideas sticky, so they’re adopted by thousands, or even millions, of people? Sticky ideas are ideas that make an impact and stand out from the white noise of all the other ideas we come across in a day. In marketing, the stickier the idea, the more likely it is to sell a product or service. We’ll cover the principles of sticky ideas and look at some powerful “sticky idea” examples.

Purpose of the Stanford Prison Experiment: Evil In All Of Us

What was the purpose of the Stanford Prison Experiment? What were its findings? What does it say about our tendency to overestimate the importance of personality traits over social pressures? We’ll cover the purpose and findings of the Stanford Prison Experiment and discuss its implications.

Negative Role Models: Why Their Habits Are Contagious

What effect do negative role models have on kids? How do “permission-givers” affect children and teens when it comes to smoking? We’ll explore why negative role models can be so influential. Understanding the mechanisms behind this influence may be the first step toward change.

Environmental Context: Subtle Cues Change Your Behavior

How does our environmental context, the changes in our setting, affect our behavior? Can subtle changes in our environments determine whether or not an idea or product catches on? We’ll cover the science behind how your environmental context affects your behavior and look at a surprising example of the ways subtle changes in our environmental context and affect you.

3 Powerful Tipping Point Examples

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell explains how social epidemics — spreading ideas, messages, behaviors, and products — function like viruses, growing gradually until they reach a critical mass (the tipping point) and explode. What are some good tipping-point examples? We’ll look at two powerful tipping-point examples from Gladwell’s book and discuss how epidemics occur in both the medical and social worlds.

Teen Smoking: 2 Solutions to Stop the Epidemic

What are the causes of teenage smoking? How can we prevent teenage smoking? We’ll use the principles of epidemics to explore possible solutions to the problem of teen smoking.

Syphilis Epidemic: How Small Changes Become Disasters

In the mid-1990s, a syphilis epidemic exploded in Baltimore. The disease had been present in the city previously, but the confluence of a few, relatively minor factors created a tipping point; all three rules of epidemics were at work. What are the three rules of epidemics? How do these rules transcend medical epidemics and apply to the spread of ideas? Learn how the lessons from Baltimore’s syphilis epidemic apply to your life–small factors can make a big difference.