I picked this book up on a whim

books:

	• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Malcolm Gladwell Back Bay Books, 2007 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 967 reviews view larger image
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Two seconds make all the difference

Gladwell offers an intriguing look at how the subconscious or intuition of a person works in different situations, as well as how it can be trained and the importance of sometimes taking a step back before acting on a situation. This is a relatively quick read with some intriguing ideas offered in it. If you like this book, you may find it useful to track down some of the writings by people he references as they go into more depth than Gladwell does.

Almost...

First, let me say that this is a good book. It's well worth your time to read. I don't think that it's as good as the Tipping Point though. This one seems to go a little longer than what is necessary maybe. It seems to be like Mr. Gladwell is trying to stretch it out a bit. The good thing about all of it though, is that it is a very quick read, and you won't have a lot of time invested into it. So definitely pick this one up, you won't regret it!

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I picked this book up on a whim - good decision

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell is subtitled The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Because that pretty much summarizes my life, I decided to read it even though it's an "intellectual" book and I usually steer away from too much heavy reading. I'm glad I made an exception.

Blink had my attention from the beginning. Gladwell has assembled interesting vignettes from normal worldly life and used them to illustrate his point about the value and dangers of making snap judgments. He doesn't advise us to discard all cognitive reasoning or experience as background for coming to a decision, but he points to many past decisions that could have been better if reams of information, scientific facts, and expert opinions had been ignored. Thin slices of experience, as opposed to lengthy studies or long periods of familiarization, often produce more satisfying and productive decisions.

Gladwell presents many examples of better decisions through snap judgments. A quick analysis of couples by observers produced a higher accuracy rating in the chances of their marriages making it as opposed to lengthy studies of their compatibility, small talk patterns, and body language. A singer's music CD inadvertently fell into the hands of the co-president of a large record company who loved it and passed it around. The singer's success was almost immediate because he was thin-sliced by top executives who knew and liked good music and knew how to promote it. But then market research firms published opinions by mainstream listeners from around the country who found him lacking and unlikely to find a core audience or to gain significant radio air-play. People who had never seen him, and only listened to a couple of his songs, completely stalled his career.

Large symphony orchestras, traditionally mostly male, have improved their performance by hiring females who audition from behind screens, masking their sex. Innovative military commanders who rely on experience and seat-of-the-pants decisions have regularly trounced better prepared forces with superior equipment and manpower.

Gladwell points out that all is not good with this technique if some fundamental safeguards are not applied. Four police officers in the dark entrance of a Bronx tenement pumped 41 shots into a scared and unarmed Guinea immigrant. When heart rates go up, cognitive reasoning goes down, according to Gladwell. Only seven seconds passed from the time the officers first saw the victim, called out to him, thought they saw a gun, pulled their guns and fired 41 shots into him. Quick decisions were made with fatal results. Mind-reading abilities were probably impaired by elevated heart rates causing a series of misjudgments to be made.

I highly recommend this book for a look into the world of decisions. We have to make them every day and we have to live with those made by others. Gladwell presents a well-researched study that is fascinating.

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Great book

This book is a great buy and the seller is very good. Lightning fast shipping.

Very good book

This is a very good book. (Sorry to repeat myself...) I really appreciate the other side of the coin. Thinking has been drilled into my head and I tend to totally ignore anything else. If it isn't a fact that I can define, it can't be not real or true. But there is some value in intuition. Some things are under the radar of our thought, (and should be, or we'd be overwhelmed), but they can be important. Intuition is our way of communicating that to ourselves.

This book has gotten some criticism - of course people should think. But there has not been much written on the power of intuition. When a person is knowledgeable about a subject, and they feel like something is wrong, they should trust, or at least acknowledge and respect that feeling. You can't just trust your intuition (make a guess) and go with it if you don't know anything about the thing you are "guessing" about. But if you do know about something, say you are an expert on US Currency (or someone who handles money alot), and you see a $20 bill that something seems wrong, should you act on that instinct, or do you say - "I can't see anything specifically wrong with it, so it must be ok."? If you were a foreigner, and came to the US, and looked at a $20 bill and said - something seems wrong about this, of course you can't go with that feeling, because you don't know anything about a $20 bill.

Anyways, read the book. It's worth it.

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