The Lancaster Chamber of Commerce and Industry recently announced the speaker for its Annual Dinner to be held May 26. The Chamber has historically been able to attract former Presidents, foreign heads of state, and Nobel laureates. This year, bestselling author and writer for The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell will be speaking.
Gladwell has written five books, all of which I’ve read and generally enjoyed. For those of you unfamiliar with Gladwell’s work, he typically writes about explanations for subjects that had not commonly been considered.
His first book, Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, discusses social epidemics, interactions in society, and general human behavior.
Blink, The Power of Thinking without Thinking, is by far my favorite of his books. There are …show more content…
Gladwell directs his readers to Harvard’s implicit-association test (IAT). The IAT will take two alternatives, say young and old, and asks you to sort positive words and negative words along with old pictures and young pictures. Based on your reaction time to responding and based on how the words are sorted, it gives you feedback on what you subconsciously (or possibly consciously) feel about a certain characteristics. There are tests on gender, sexuality, race, age, religion, disability, and many others. Anyone interested in determining some known or unknown biases, the website provides an interesting introspection. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
Outliers: The Story of Success may be Gladwell’s most famous work. In it, he discusses the “10,000 Hour Rule” and describes, among other things, that the Beatles became such adept musicians because of the countless hours they spent playing in local clubs in Hamburg, Germany. The book discusses ways in which good fortune (i.e. an unexpectedly vast number of Canadian professional hockey players were born in January) and hard work (see 10,000 hours) contribute to
Gladwell has written five books, all of which I’ve read and generally enjoyed. For those of you unfamiliar with Gladwell’s work, he typically writes about explanations for subjects that had not commonly been considered.
His first book, Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, discusses social epidemics, interactions in society, and general human behavior.
Blink, The Power of Thinking without Thinking, is by far my favorite of his books. There are …show more content…
Gladwell directs his readers to Harvard’s implicit-association test (IAT). The IAT will take two alternatives, say young and old, and asks you to sort positive words and negative words along with old pictures and young pictures. Based on your reaction time to responding and based on how the words are sorted, it gives you feedback on what you subconsciously (or possibly consciously) feel about a certain characteristics. There are tests on gender, sexuality, race, age, religion, disability, and many others. Anyone interested in determining some known or unknown biases, the website provides an interesting introspection. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
Outliers: The Story of Success may be Gladwell’s most famous work. In it, he discusses the “10,000 Hour Rule” and describes, among other things, that the Beatles became such adept musicians because of the countless hours they spent playing in local clubs in Hamburg, Germany. The book discusses ways in which good fortune (i.e. an unexpectedly vast number of Canadian professional hockey players were born in January) and hard work (see 10,000 hours) contribute to