I’m halfway through The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and I’m loving it as much as I thought I would. But things got weird today and think it’s one of these (smaller) epidemics like he’s describing.

“Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.”

“The point of all of this is to answer two simple questions that lie at the heart of what we would all like to accomplish as educators, parents, marketers, business people, and policymakers. Why is it that some ideas or behaviors or products start epidemics and others don’t? And why can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own?”

“…when the epidemic tips, when it is jolted out of equilibrium, it tips because something has happened, some change has occurred in one (or two or three) of those areas. These three agents of change I call the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.”

Here’s the weird thing. Are you ready?

As you know, over the weekend I finished reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By Philip K. Dick. Why did I start reading that book? Because I was at Barnes & Noble and saw the book on the shelf, remembered that it was on my TBR list, and picked up. An impulse buy, really. Not a planned read.

I jump in and start reading, remember that I watched the movie, look online for it, don’t remember the specifics. Oh yes! There was a sequel recently and we had to watch the old one again before we watched the new one when it came out. I remember looking for the original to watch, but I don’t remember the specifics of the new one, Blade Runner 2049 other than it was good.

Late last night, my son texts me to ask if I had seen 2049 yet. What? Why would he ask me that? He doesn’t read my blog, so he doesn’t know I was reading the book. We talked about it this morning and I told him I had plans to watch it again.

This afternoon, I bring up Facebook on my laptop and an acquaintance of mine had posted that he watched the movie over the weekend because it had just been put up on Netflix.

How weird is that? Some change occurred somewhere to lead us all to be watching that movie or talking about it over the same weekend. Malcolm Gladwell wrote this book twenty years ago, I’m pretty sure the people he mentioned in the above quote know about these laws and were using them to lead our attention.

You can also bet that “policymakers,” aka politicians, also know these rules and are using them to direct your attention where they want it to be.

And I’ve been using some of these ideas on my blog and my social media accounts as well. I call it putting some positive vibes into the world, sharing the love of books and great movies and tv, but really I’m only directing your attention where I would want it as best I can.

It’s crazy when things like this all come together for me. The Tipping Point is a used book I’ve had on my TBR shelf for over a year. Why did I pick it up now and not one of the other thirty books staring up at me with those big pleading eyes? I don’t know!