Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

But when you've known someone all his life and you suddenly see him, you recognize who it is.

Malcolm Gladwell has described this phenomenon in a book called Blink, Thinking Without Thinking, the subtitle goes.

And that book is about the first few seconds of looking at something, that decisive glance that knows something in an instant.

Now, our Snap judgments are not always correct, of course, and Gladwell knows this, but many times our first instinct gives us the right answer.

Not a single one.

That was a clip from my talk with Kent Clisby, a former CIA officer and the author of the book Holistic Contextual Credibility Assessment: A Reality-Based Alternative to Deception Detection.

That book is available on Amazon.

In this episode, we talk about the well-known behavior researcher Paul Ekman.

We talk about Joe Navarro.

There are a couple reasons I've sat on this episode for so long before releasing it, and I just want to be transparent about those reasons.

For a while, I thought I actually would not release it, but eventually I decided it was an important talk, even just important to me personally.

Kent and I's conversation got me down the path of thinking and was a contributing reason for me ending up deciding to write a general audience book about reading people and reading behavior, which will be called Read People for Real.

I, I'm like you.

I mean, the biggest decisions I make in a nano split second, and I loved that, what was it called? Blink, Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink.

Yeah

About how the ability to just, boom, make a decision, and you, you sort of make a judgment is really what that was about really quickly.

Are you open-minded? Are you curious? Are you able to ask a series of questions that will allow other bits and pieces of information in so that your brain can catch up and know that this is not dangerous, this is not a waste of your time, this is not an incredible source, it is in fact a credible source? And so those are important tactics.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in his book called Blink.

He comes up with this Warren Harding error.

Warren Harding was a US president back in the early 19- presidents, and he looked like a president, and that look alone is what got him elected to office.

He was going for his ID as he stood on the steps of his own apartment building.

Diallo's story and the officer's fatal prejudgment of him is recounted in Malcolm Gladwell's 2005 bestseller, Blink.

Gladwell, and the social psychologists whose work he draws upon, explores Diallo's case as an example of that gray area between deliberate violence and an accident, propagated by non-conscious or implicit biases.

The officers did discriminate against Diallo, but the prejudice they acted on may have been driven by something more subtle than simple hatred.

Thanks for joining me.

In his book, Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, author Malcolm Gladwell shares a fascinating story.

In 1985, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles spent $10 million buying a kouros, a Greek statue of a young man.

Of course, before you spend $10 million on a piece of art, you want to make sure that you're not buying a fake.

Culturally, they were never Christians and they just never found a reason to be.

But then there's another group of people who know something about God, but they're not willing to let God into their heart.

They might pray occasionally, They might agree that the Bible might even tell you the Bible is a good book.

They might even say God's book.

So it's a bit of brainwashing because you really believe it at the end.

But I strongly recommend The Tipping Point or Blink.

Talking about fun books and page turners, I've got two things to discuss here.

Bring another one.

If you get any inkling from someone, even a gut feeling, because you're a lot smarter than you think you are.

I was talking with a friend of mine this week about Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink, and that's the main principle in the book is having that wisdom in the blink of an eye and knowing things about people before you're even really conscious you know the thing.

and just be aware i'm we're not talking about like getting followed on the street whatever i mean like these are the kinds of tactics that come out with people and in relationships where you have trusted the person you're vulnerable with the person you're intimate with the person in any context again work family you know romantic whatever it may be but just be aware and be present and And at the first sign of that, when you see that you are being jaded or if you notice that they are DARVOing, denying, attacking, reversing, victim and offender.

Leave.