Connectors are the people who link us up to the world, who introduce us to our social circles. These are people who know a lot of people, the kind of people who know everyone. Sprinkled across every walk of life are a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack of making friends and acquaintances. We all know someone like this

Connectors, Mavens & Salesmen 

The word ﻿Maven ﻿comes from the Yiddish, and it means 'one who accumulates knowledge'.Mavens not only obsess on getting information. What sets them apart is that once they figure something out they want to tell people about their find. They are more socially motivated. It must be noted that these kinds of people do not want to persuade but are more motivated to educate and to help. To be a Maven is to be a teacher, but it is also, even more emphatically, to be a student. Mavens are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know.

Mavens

For social epidemics to start, some people are actually going to have to be persuaded. For everyone, in the end, to eventually fall in line is something we normally credit to peer pressure. But peer pressure is not always an automatic and unconscious process. It means, as often as not, that someone went out to one of his peers and pressured them.The people applying the peer pressure with the skills of persuading the skeptics are the salesmen.

Salesmen

In a social epidemics, Mavens are data banks: they provide the message. Connectors are the social glue: they spread it. Salesmen have the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing. All three groups are the critical groups to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics.

Conclusion

Malcom Gladwell forms an interesting account of how a piece of extraordinary news can travel a long distance in a short time. These are what he calls social/word-of-mouth epidemics.  Word-of-mouth communication remains the most important form of human communication. 

In this brilliant and original book, Malcolm Gladwell explains and analyses the 'tipping point', that magic moment when ideas, trends and social behaviour cross a threshold, tip and spread like wildfire. Taking a look behind the surface of many familiar occurrences in our everyday world, Gladwell explains the fascinating social dynamics that cause rapid change.

communication

Communication

books

Books

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers—The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. He is also the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, an audio content company that produces the podcasts Revisionist History, which reconsiders things both overlooked and misunderstood, and Broken Record, where he, Rick Rubin, and Bruce Headlam interview musicians across a wide range of genres. Gladwell has been included in the TIME 100 Most Influential People list and touted as one of Foreign Policy's Top Global Thinkers.

Malcolm Gladwell

The Tipping Point

"sooner or later, life makes philosophers of us all."

The New York Times bestselling author of The Geography of Bliss embarks on a rollicking intellectual journey, following in the footsteps of history’s greatest thinkers and showing us how each—from Epicurus to Gandhi, Thoreau to Beauvoir—offers practical and spiritual lessons for today’s unsettled times. We turn to philosophy for the same reasons we travel: to see the world from a dif­ferent perspective, to unearth hidden beauty, and to find new ways of being. We want to learn how to embrace wonder. Face regrets. Sustain hope. Eric Weiner combines his twin passions for philosophy and global travel in a pil­grimage that uncovers surprising life lessons from great thinkers around the world, from Rousseau to Nietzsche, Confucius to Simone Weil. Traveling by train (the most thoughtful mode of transport), he journeys thousands of miles, making stops in Athens, Delhi, Wyoming, Coney Island, Frankfurt, and points in between to recon­nect with philosophy’s original purpose: teaching us how to lead wiser, more meaningful lives. From Socrates and ancient Athens to Simone de Beauvoir and twentieth-century Paris, Weiner’s chosen philosophers and places provide important signposts as we navigate today’s chaotic times. In The Socrates Express, Weiner invites us to voyage alongside him on his life-changing pursuit of wisdom and discovery as he attempts to find answers to our most vital questions.

philosophy

Philosophy

mindfulness

Mindfulness

The New York Times bestselling author of The Geography of Bliss embarks on a rollicking intellectual journey, following in the footsteps of history’s greatest thinkers and showing us how each—from Epicurus to Gandhi, Thoreau to Beauvoir—offers practical and spiritual lessons for today’s unsettled times. We turn to philosophy for the same reasons we travel: to see the world from a dif­ferent perspective, to unearth hidden beauty, and to find new ways of being. We want to learn how to embrace wonder. Face regrets. Sustain hope. Eric Weiner combines his twin passions for philosophy and global travel in a pil­grimage that uncovers surprising life lessons from great thinkers around the world, from Rousseau to Nietzsche, Confucius to Simone Weil. Traveling by train (the most thoughtful mode of transport), he journeys thousands of miles, making stops in Athens, Delhi, Wyoming, Coney Island, Frankfurt, and points in between to recon­nect with philosophy’s original purpose: teaching us how to lead wiser, more meaningful lives. From Socrates and ancient Athens to Simone de Beauvoir and twentieth-century Paris, Weiner’s chosen philosophers and places provide important signposts as we navigate today’s chaotic times. In The Socrates Express, Weiner invites us to voyage alongside him on his life-changing pursuit of wisdom and discovery as he attempts to find answers to our most vital questions.

Eric Weiner

The Socrates Express

The basics is what complexity is built on. Paying close attention to the basics is likely to get us out of sticky situations and even help us make better decisions in our day to day lives. We learn the alphabet before we build words, then we learn grammar and punctuation to construct sentences. Sentences added together can embody a paragraph's idea. And on joining the different ideas in our paragraphs a story is built. STORIES change and shape our world.Therefore putting attention to good spelling, grammar and the length of paragraphs contributes to the eventual production of a great story.

Never Forget The Basics

Building a career, finding a work-life balance, being creative; these things are hard. Showing up early, having good manners, following up; these are much easier and basic in comparison.  Though the basics alone are not enough to succeed - that is why they are basic - but without them, there is no starting point, no baseline. GET THE EASY STUFF RIGHT.

Get The Easy Stuff Right

Very articulate and interesting lesson on getting the easy commitments right. 

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

habits

Habits

Getting the Easy Stuff Right | No Mercy / No Malice

"There is no such thing as a great writer; there are only great re-writers."

This links with a saying from a book called 'on writing well'. In that book the author said "the essence of writing lies in the ability to re-write". 

productivity

Productivity

writing

Reading & Writing

education

Learning & Education

Writing

Second-order thinking is a tool that you can use for making decisions that are not just beneficial in the short-term but are also nondestructive over a longer period of time.What looks like an investment now might turn out to be a liability later. What looked like a good decision earlier is now a bad one. Second-order thinking is a is a mental tool that will help you examine the long-term consequences of your decisions, thereby helping you make decisions that will stand the test of time.

Second-order Thinking 

You can use second-order thinking in two ways:1. As a purely mental exercise2. You can write it down on paper Consider a decision you have to make.Look at the most immediate (first-order) effects of making the decision. Then for each effect ask yourself: "And then What?"That is how you examine the second-order of your decisions consequences.This exercise can be repeated for as many orders as you find practical.

How To Use It

Alternatively, think about the decision in different timelines. Ask yourself: what will be the consequences of this decision in:1. 5 minutes2. 5 hours3. 5 days4. 5 months5. 5 years This means you get a chance to consider the short-term, medium-term, and long-term consequences.

Alternative

A mental tool for better decision making. 

Consider the long-term consequences of your decisions.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

problemsolving

Problem Solving

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Second-order thinking | Untools

"Physicists are trying to find out how nature behaves."

"I don't know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough."

"The lesson you learn as you grow older in physics is that what we can do is a very small fraction of what there is.

In an interview with Omni Magazine, Feynman makes these statements which stood out and definitely warrant him as one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century. 

This collection from scientist and Nobel Peace Prize winner highlights the achievements of a man whose career reshaped the world's understanding of quantum electrodynamics. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is a magnificent treasury of the best short works of Richard P. Feynman-from interviews and speeches to lectures and printed articles. A sweeping, wide-ranging collection, it presents an intimate and fascinating view of a life in science-a life like no other. From his ruminations on science in our culture to his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, this book will fascinate anyone interested in the world of ideas.

This collection from scientist and Nobel Peace Prize winner highlights the achievements of a man whose career reshaped the world's understanding of quantum electrodynamics. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is a magnificent treasury of the best short works of Richard P. Feynman-from interviews and speeches to lectures and printed articles. A sweeping, wide-ranging collection, it presents an intimate and fascinating view of a life in science-a life like no other. From his ruminations on science in our culture to his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, this book will fascinate anyone interested in the world of ideas.

Richard Phillips Feynman was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model.

Richard P. Feynman

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

The big bang was first tentatively proposed by George Lemaitre in the 1920s but didn't really become an active notion in cosmology until the mid-1960s when two young astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson made an extraordinary but accidental discovery.

The Notion Of The Big Bang

The two astronomers in 1965 were trying to make a large communications antenna owned by Bell Laboratories at Holmdel, New Jersey.They were being troubled by persistent background noise - a steady, steamy hiss that made any experimental work impossible.The noise was unrelenting and unfocused, it came from every point in the sky, night and day, through every season. The astronomers tried all they could to track and eliminate the noise for over a year.

The Bell Antenna

Unknown to the astronomers, just thirty miles away at Princeton University, a team of scientists led by Robert Dicke was working on how to find the very thing they were trying so diligently to get rid of. The Princeton researchers were pursuing an idea that had been suggested in the 1940s by the Russian-born astrophysicist George Gamow.

Princeton Researchers 

Gamow suggested that if you looked deeply enough into space you could find some cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Gamow also calculated that by the time it crossed the vastness of the cosmos, the radiation would reach Earth in the form of microwaves. In a more recent paper he had even suggested an instrument that might do the job: the Bell antenna at Holmdel. Unfortunately Penzias and Wilson, nor any of the Princeton team, had read Gamows paper.

Cosmic Background Radiation

The noise that Penzias and Wilson were hearing was, of course, the noise that Gamow had Postulated. They had found the Edge of the universe, or at least the visible part of it, 90 billion trillion miles away. They were "seeing" the first protons - the most ancient light in the universe - though time and distance had converted them to microwaves, just as Gamow had predicted.

The Most Ancient Light

Now, an analogy that puts this finding in perspective. If you think of peering into the depths of the universe as like looking down from the hundredth floor of the empire state building (the hundredth floor representing now and the street level representing the moment of the Big Bang), at the time of Wilson and Penzias's discovery, the most distant galaxies anyone had ever detected were on the sixtieth floor, and the most distant things - ﻿quasars - were on about the twentieth. Penzias and Wilson's finding pushed our acquaintance with the visible universe to within half an inch of the sidewalk

Alan Guth Anology

Still unaware of what caused the noise, W&P phoned Dicke at Princeton and described their problem to him in the hope that he might suggest a solution. Dicke realised at once what the two young men had found.Soon afterwards the Astrophysical Journal published two articles: one describing W&P experience with the hiss and another by Dicke's team explaining its nature.Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation, didn't know what it was when they found it, and hadn't described or interpreted its character in a paper, they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics

Rewarded Without Understanding 

One of the many explanations of different scientific wonders enclosed in this book. These ideas discuss how the Big Bang was named and the first pieces of evidence for its existence.

One of the world’s most beloved and bestselling writers takes his ultimate journey -- into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer. In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail -- well, most of it. In In A Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand -- and, if possible, answer -- the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.

One of the world’s most beloved and bestselling writers takes his ultimate journey -- into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer. In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail -- well, most of it. In In A Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand -- and, if possible, answer -- the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.

Bill Bryson

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Data can be found all around us.The number of people entering and leaving a shop throughout the day is data, test scores of students on a mathematics test is also data.

Data

Turning data into information however, comes at a cost. It requires FOCUS, EFFORT & TIME.Information is also only useful if it helps you make a decision.

Information 

The data of people entering and leaving a shop can be used to find the times of the day when to have more cashiers at paypoints in the store. And, the test scores in the mathematics test can help find which students will write higher level and which ones will write standard level examinations.

Decisions 

In the world of smartphones, all types of data flood our screens and fight for our attention. But how much of this data do we use to make our day to day decisions? If we aren't using it to make decisions then is it really worth our time? If you can't do anything with the data, it will never be information.If it's not helping you make decisions it's probably not worth your time either.

Conclusion 

A good heuristic to determine what is worth your time and what is not. 

Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect

cybersecurity

Cybersecurity

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

Data, information and decisions

Mathematics is an exciting subject. The ability to solve simple problems that continue to gradually increase in difficulty is a satisfying feat. The best way to learn maths is by far through teaching it. I found that concepts I struggled with in my earlier life are only getting clear now that I am tasked to teach them to others. Teaching in itself holds great benefits like learning to put others before ourselves and is also gratifying in that you know you are lending a helping hand towards the betterment of another individual.

Teaching 

To continually learn and become better versions of ourselves, focus needs to be put on strategies on how we learn and how we give out the knowledge we acquire. 

Teaching

The current and ongoing turbulence caused by the pandemic is a thing of wonder and should produce some amazing stories of endurance and perseverance in coming generations. In academia the turmoil wasn't any lighter. As a completing Masters student troubles and wins have come to dim and brighten some of my days. Writing is difficult! Period! But here's one interesting part about it, that is 'FLOW'. Making sure you enter a state of complete focus were even time feels slowed to perfect harmony is what academics should strive to reach while pursuing higher education. More so during trying times.

The Tipping Point

The Socrates Express

Getting the Easy Stuff Right | No Mercy / No Malice

Writing

Second-order thinking | Untools

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