Blink - The power of thinking without thinking
One of the better aspects of life these days is the amount of time available to read books, articles and the tremendous scope to increase knowledge base. In the infinite options to read books, one has to spend quite a lot of time just to choose the kind of book that will be of interest. A lot of good stuff has been said about Malcolm Gladwell. I can only say that there are books and then there are Malcolm Gladwell books. Malcolm Gladwell was included in the list of ten most influential thinkers in the world. That itself says volumes about the influence his work has. With one of the better ways to put forward an argument and back that up with evidence and loads of research examples, the author is a master at getting a grip on the reader. One is left with little choice but to agree and people like me even test the hypothesis only to be more convinced in the end. Reading Blink is sheer delight and it shook my fundamental belief about decision-making – well thought out decisions are better than snap judgments. This also happens to be the central hypothesis.
With an apt tagline (“the power of thinking without thinking”), the author emphasizes the “power of glance” in more than one ways by taking examples from different aspects of life such as identifying fake statues in art museums, assessing success or failure of a marriage by thin slicing, and predicting winners in tennis matches. In all these, people have used rapid cognition to make important decisions at least as accurately those that have been well thought out. In what has been described in the book as adaptive unconscious, the black box inside the mind, the author also explains different instances where the snap judgments end up as wrong decisions, what are the reasons and what we can do to improve them. This book has given me enough food for thoughts to review my decision-making. If you are interested into insights on the power of adaptive unconscious and decision-making, this is definitely the book that you want to read right away. You can go to author’s website to read some excerpts and see for yourself.
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