If you wanted to sum up Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink", I would tell you to see the very first "Star Wars" movie. Remember in 1977 when Luke Skywalker while piloting his fighter hears Obi-Wan Kenobi tell him to turn off his radar while attacking the evil star ship? Obi-Wan wants Luke to rely on the FORCE. In other words, give up his conscious thought patterns and go with your gut.
This is what BLINK is all about. Our ability to instantly know what is real from what is fiction. What is good from what is bad? Gladwell is telling us to go with our right (creative) brain, and for the moment to shut down our left (logical, analytical) brain, and oh he is so right.
In example after example, the author goes through diverse instances where people in just the time it takes to BLINK, can make FABULOUS decisions that turn out to be the right ones. Others using the power of their analytical minds can take days, weeks, and even months, and come to the wrong decision. There's something going on here, and Gladwell is onto it. Human beings have five million years of evolutionary history behind us, and consciousness for only the last 15,000 or 20,000 years.
Somehow, we have TURNED OFF the power of our unconscious instinctual patterns, and overridden them with our super analytical ways of logic. The result is inferior decisions to what we had before we became conscious. Hey, when a lion was chasing down our ancestors for a meal, you didn't have much time to think.
By the way, every page of this relatively short book is fascinating. You will literally not be able to put it down. Let's look at a few of the topics that Gladwell covers in depth and convincingly.
A) The J. Paul Getty Museum & the Kouros Statue
The cash-flushed Getty Museum wanted to buy a 7-foot Greek statue for $10 million. With contract in hand they call in some of the greatest experts in the world who after running exhaustive scientific tests, agree that it's the real thing and you should jump to buy it. At the same time a handful of other experts just looking at the object instantly announce it's a fake, and you should walk away. Learn who was right and why. Hint: it took 2 seconds of looking to KNOW the answer.
B) Who's a good Professor in less than 30 seconds
Remember when we went to college we would attend a lecture or two to determine if we wanted to take the entire course with a certain professor. In BLINK you will see scientific studies that prove you can come to the same decision by watching a video of the professor for 30 seconds. Who's kidding whom?
C) What if you could tell how long a potential marriage would last?
This one is mind blowing. John Gottman of the University of Washington has shown in tests that he can do this with accuracy. Watching one hour of a couple talking, and Gottman can tell with 95% accuracy if 15 years later, they will still be married. Blink goes into it in detail. Too bad, I didn't learn about this study sooner.
D) Why do some doctors get sued, and others not at all?
You would think that the risk of being sued if you are a doctor is all about making mistakes, or improper medical care. BLINK shows that its really about words like "RUSHED, IGNORED, and TREATED POORLY."
E) Can a President of the United States be elected on looks alone?
Read BLINK and you will see how an entire nation got suckered into electing Warren Warding President just for that reason, unbelievable but true. Read how and why, and be mesmerized.
F) Only 14.5% of men are six feet and over. Why are 58% of CEO's six feet, or taller?
Pretty wild when you think about it, yet true. Could there be some kind of unwritten or unconscious criteria for being a Fortune 500 CEO that involves height? There aren't enough tall people to COMPLETELY staff any one company. Why is it that the tall ones seem to rise to the TOP?
G) Blue Team versus Red Team
This is my personal favorite. The American military runs war games all the time. The good guys who are us are always the BLUE Team. The enemy is always the RED team. In preparation for the first Iraq war in the early 1990's, the government ran the exercise, and put General Paul Van Riper in charge of the bad guys, the RED team.
The bottom line is that the bad guys blew away the good guys, the Americans by using unconventional "BLINK" type thinking, while the BLUE Team relied on conventional, overwhelming force, and inside the Beltway type bureaucratic thinking. This illustrates why this book is so important. You will learn out of the box type thinking.
You will also learn when to use it, and when to go with your logical left brain type thinking. By the way in the war exercise when the bad guys, the RED Team beat the good guys the BLUE Team with ease, what did the Pentagon do? They announced that the game would be done over again, and they outlawed the techniques that the bad guys the RED Team employed.
The result, the good guys won. The problem is that nobody told the bad guys in Iraq during the second Iraq War that these techniques were outlawed, and thus our Generals as usual find themselves in some difficulty to say the least. Read BLINK, and find out how and why. This book is FASCINATING, and NOT TO BE PUT DOWN, ONCE YOU START READING IT.
Richard Stoyeck
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