Book Comment: The Tipping Point and It's Not How Good You Are...

Title: The Tipping Point
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
No. of pages: 304
Published: 7th January, 2002
Read: July 09, 2014
★★★

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.

Gladwell introduces us to the particular personality types who are natural pollinators of new ideas and trends, the people who create the phenomenon of word of mouth. He analyzes fashion trends, smoking, children's television, direct mail, and the early days of the American Revolution for clues about making ideas infectious, and visits a religious commune, a successful high-tech company, and one of the world's greatest salesmen to show how to start and sustain social epidemics.

I quite liked this book and had lead me to a position of another approach to a nonfiction writing. It's a substantial book and gave quite digestible and rich chapters. Facts and real-life scenarios caught my interest. Learning bites are scattered all throughout the book which can be aids in a good foundation of a marketing strategy. It gave me a good picture of how little things indeed can result to transformation.

Title: It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be

Author: Paul Arden

No. of pages: 107

Published: 1st June, 2007

Read: July 09, 2014

★★★

It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be is a handbook of how to succeed in the world - a pocket bible for the talented and timid to help make the unthinkable and the impossible possible. Advertising guru Paul Arden offers up his wisdom on issues as diverse as problem solving, responding to a brief, communicating, playing your cards right, making mistakes and creativity, all endeavours that can be applied to aspects of modern life.

This Christmas gift has been sitting in my shelf for months and it's only this August that I was able to read it obviously in one sitting. This book is a booster, a somehow idea generator, a book that i feel like I can go back to when I am demotivated, uninspired, in failures, in down times. There's quite a lot of wise words aka "quotable's" in the book. It's like a compilation of such. Though it is leaning towards the advertising, some parts can be applied generally. I like how visual the book is.