Quotes About Influence

Sometimes we're better off if the mind behind the locked door makes our decisions for us

Just as Tom Gau could, through the persuasive force of his personality, serve as a Tipping Point in a word-of-mouth epidemic, the people who die in highly publicized suicides-whose deaths give others permission to die-serve as the Tipping Points in suicide epidemics.

When people are in a group, in other words, responsibility for acting is diffused.

Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.

The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are. Those three things - autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine to five. It's whether our work fulfills us.

Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.

we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It's not

In other words, in all of the city of Colorado Springs-a town of well in excess of 100,000 people-the epidemic of gonorrhea tipped because of the activities of 168 people living in four small neighborhoods and basically frequenting the same six bars.

to succeed in the world he could not be just a dog whisperer. He needed to be a people whisperer.

One of the most important things is that you have to come across as being confident in what you are doing, and in who you are. How do you do that? Speak clearly and smile.' As he said that, Nolan Myers smiled. 'For a lot of people, that's a very hard skill to learn, but for some reason, I seem to understand it intuitively.

The Rosetons were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills…The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with has a profound effect on who we are.

What my research with priming race and test performance, and Bargh's research with the interrupters, and Maier's experiment with the ropes show is that people are ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant. We need to accept our ignorance and say 'I don't know' more often.

The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what psychologist Robert Sternberg calls 'practical intelligence'. To Sternberg, 'practical intelligence' includes things like: knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.

Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.

all of us, when it comes to constructing our sense of self, borrow bits and pieces, ideas and phrases, rituals and products from the world around us — over-the-counter-ethnicities that shape, in some small but meaningful way, our identities

we cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all.

second lesson of Blink. Too often we are resigned to what happens in the blink of an eye. It doesn't seem like we have much control over whatever bubbles to the surface from our unconscious. But we do, and if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition. We can prevent the people fighting wars or staffing emergency rooms or policing the streets from making mistakes.

that power has an important limitation. It has to be seen as legitimate, or else its use has the opposite of its intended effect.

We all want to believe that the key to making an impact on someone lies with the inherent quality of the ideas we present.

The powerful are not as powerful as they seem—nor the weak as weak.

As Wilson puts it, what happens is that we come up with a plausible-sounding reason for why we might like or dislike something, and then we adjust our true preferences to be in line with that plausible-sounding reason.

Would Oppenheimer have lost his scholarship at Reed? Would he have been unable to convince his professors to move his classes to the afternoon? Of course not. And that's not because he was smarter than Chris Langan. It's because he possessed the kind of savvy that allowed him to get what he wanted from the world.

The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine.

Contagiousness is in larger part a function of the messenger. Stickiness is primarily a property of the message.