I’m reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point right now, and one of the things I find intriguing about it is that much of the contents are applicable, after the fact, to the phenomenon of the book itself. How did a book comparing social trends to diseases become a bestseller? Did the fact that the book, in a sense, tries to distill the elements which cause things to be “bestsellers” (in their respective fields), contribute to its being a bestseller? And if it’s simply the fact that the book is interesting, then why is it interesting?
I’ve been planning to read The Tipping Point for well over a year now — ever since seeing it recommended on about half a dozen blogs within a few weeks, simultaneously being referred to Gladwell.com by a co-worker.
The first article I read on Gladwell.com, a few years ago, was the article about ketchup.
Ketchup is not the first thing that comes to mind when one tries to think of potential interesting topics. Yet the article was exactly that; interesting, and thought-provoking. Why?
The second thing I heard from Gladwell was not an essay but a recording of a talk he had made at some convention or another, wherein he talked about office chairs. Specifically the Aeron chair, but still — office chairs are also not an intuitively interesting topic. Yet the talk was interesting, all the same. Why?
A few ideas present themselves. Although Gladwell often portrays himself in the Tipping Point as not being particularly charismatic, not a Salesman or a Connector, perhaps he’s one of those people who are so passionately interested in things that we become interested in spite of ourselves. Alternatively, perhaps most people really are interested in things like ketchup and the design of office chairs — we just don’t know it. Or rather, we’ve never considered them in a way that could be potentially interesting.
What makes something “interesting” anyways?
It’s necessarily subjective; the first response I can think of to the question is “Interesting to whom?” But the success of Gladwell’s book and his essays on topics that are not necessarily what we’d normally think of as interesting, implies that there are some things that a lot of people are interested in. Furthermore, they are things that one would not necessarily assumed people would find interesting.
If we were to assume that self-interest was the reason people find topics interesting, that would fail to explain it. It is difficult to see how an essay about ketchup and mustard appeals to the reader’s self-interest. Also, if self-interest, the “What’s in it for me?” model, were the sole contributor to what is interesting, then why aren’t more people passionately interested in financial markets and investing? After all, people are interested in money, right?
That might make a good example; after all there are two different ways you could be interested in money. You might just be interested in having more of it. Or, it could be that you’re interested in it’s history — how money works, how inflation and interest affects the value of it, how financial markets really work, and why, and how they came to exist.
Trivia is a good example. Why are people interested in trivia? If you go to the reference section of a large bookstore, you can find shelves full of lists of different sorts of trivia, facts, lists, and other generally useless information. Why are there so many? Simple economics would suggest that all these books exist because people buy this sort of book; in other words, people find trivia interesting. Most of this sort of information is called “trivia” for a reason — it is trivial. It cannot possibly make you a more effective worker, a better parent, or a more capable human being. From reading the book jackets of such publications, it’s clear that one of the ideas behind knowing such things is that you might use them in conversation… that is, that you, yourself, might be more interesting because you know them.
This still doesn’t answer the question of why such bits of information are interesting in the first place.
Some quick definitions of “interesting” found on the web: arousing or holding attention. Exciting curiosity. To be of importance or consequence.
All of these, to me, still seem somewhat circular. If something holds my attention, then why? If a topic makes me curious about it, then why? Why would I be more curious about some topics than others? What makes one thing worthy of curiosity, and another unworthy? If something is important — if it matters — what prompts me to think of it that way?
The only thing that I can suppose is that things which we call interesting are things that are thought-provoking — they make us think. It might not be earth-shaking philosophical thinking, but they are new thoughts, or a different sort of thought than we are used to thinking. I suppose that for some people — maybe a lot of people — the actual feeling, the actual experience of thinking this new or different thought is inherently pleasing for its own sake. That could be why, for most of us, ketchup was never an interesting topic until it was presented in a way that was thought-provoking — that is, why do we have many different kinds of mustard, but only one type of ketchup?
In other words, I propose that, for many people, it actually feels good for our brain to work. I don’t mean “work” like difficult calculus or problems, like we usually think of as “brain work,” but just working in the sense of thinking new or different things. If this is actually a pleasant experience, then it stands to reason that we might seek out topics and ideas that are “interesting.” We don’t think of it in any other terms other than “I think this subject is interesting.”
What we might really be saying is, “For some reason, these ideas are fun to think about.”
