Tip Tip Boom

Most recently I was introduced to the novel “The Tipping Point,” by Malcolm Gladwell. To sum it up briefly the book goes into grave detail about the small things that can cause a product to become more popular with time. While the book is a catering tool for public relations and marketing professionals I took it as a means of better understanding people. Gladwell describes three types of people, connectors, mavens and salesmen.

Connectors are the popular well known people around the world; they have the ability to walk into a room not knowing anyone and leave knowing almost everyone. Connectors find joy in knowing large groups of people, and helping to link those people to each other. As a person that enjoys constant travel and exploration, I find it necessary to connect with the people I meet in different parts of the world. Thankfully I have the help of the various forms of social media and internet e-mail to make that easier, seeing as how I’m not the type to sit down long enough to write a letter. Thanks to facebook I am the master of keeping in touch!

While knowing large groups of people is important, knowing large amounts of information is probably the way to go. Here’s the thing, someone said (I’m not sure who) that, “it’s not about what you know, but who you know.” Is it possible to know the bare minimum and still excel do to my networking base? Ofcourse it is, it happens every day. There are countless amounts of students who struggle to find jobs after college because they simply do not know the right people. Dare to place the blame?

If it necessary to blame someone, I’d say go with the curriculum that negates to teach students the importance of the salesmen. While knowledge is power and book smarts doesn’t really trump being well connected, there is still hope. Now that I really think about it the blame should be placed on the competitive parents that didn’t make their kids sell their own candy back in elementary and high school, for those are the early stages of the salesmen.

Understanding people comes with understanding yourself; you must first be able to recognize core values from within in order to assess the same value in others. Fortunately for me I had to sell my own candy as a child thus building on the candid blocks of persuasiveness. My family moved around a lot when I was younger, with every new location I felt obligated to fit in and connect with the people around me. I would like to think I’m knowledgeable, despite my grade point average and inability to recall many things; I simply counteract that with my ability to research.