Malcolm Gladwell is my favorite writer and one of the brightest thinkers I have come across. He was invited to give a talk at TED.com, which is a website sprung from an organization dedicated to discussing “ideas worth spreading” in the fields of Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED). The video below is from his talk in February 2004 and is about 17 minutes long.
Gladwell illustrates the lessons from his story about Howard Moskowitz pretty darn well, so I won’t add much.
I too often find myself obsessed with universals and trying to discover the rules that govern the way that all of us behave. The idea of variability and diversity is very intriguing. In truth, there may only be a handful of universals amidst a sea of beautiful diversity and variables. It seems to me that a large proportion of our conflicts and wars are due to leaders mistaking a variable truth for one that is universal, and then attempting to impose it on the masses.
Even attempting to give something as universal as “freedom” to another culture can fail based on the variable understandings and perspectives on freedom.
The older I get, the less “black and white” the world gets. While I always knew that “There’s no wrong way to eat a Reese’s”, I didn’t extrapolate that principle to many other areas of my life. There always seemed to be a right way to do this, and a wrong way to do that. The more I understand about my own perception, the less faith I have in my ability to discern things that are ALWAYS right or ALWAYS wrong.
Since taste seems to be obviously chock full of variability, where does that principle end? What is universal?
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