Blink

I decided to take a one book break from the Small Group ministry books I've read of late. I picked up Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: the Power of Thinking without Thinking. Gladwell authored the wildly successful The Tipping Point.





Blink is a good book filled with Gladwell's argument and then a lot of anecdotal stories to illustrate his points. He further seasons the work with some psychological and behavioral research.





The basic argument is that in complex decisions, more information leads us to make poor choices, if we can make any choice at all. Go with the gut and act seems to be the maxim. He frames this by acknowledging that we do need to think through some decisions, those decisions are more likely to be of a simpler nature. We have access to so much information in this age that the additional data doesn't serve us well--we can't process it and it is often contradictory in nature. Rather than lead us to informed decisions, we end up informed but in stasis--information overload in other words.





For my own part, my gut is usually right about things, though often I make experience prove that intuition. One drawback to this approach is that we can't answer 'why' when we follow our gut. Gladwell admits this but argues that we don't usually know why when use something other than our gut. He argues that, while we can't control our first instinct, to better utilize our gift for instant preferences, we should provide better parameters and avoid stereotypes or cultural biases.





Easier said than done. If you are looking for an interesting and easy, but not life altering read, this book is for you.