In The Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell offers a powerful insight: people highly skilled in packaging a message for others pay little attention to their own likes and dislikes. They know their own preferences have very little to do with what works. Instead, they test a range of ideas, and they use the one that works best, even if they don’t like it.
How I wish this book had been available before we published Putting the Tarot to Work!
I’ve written before about how much I loved the cover of PTTTW: the acid green background, the orange text, the piles of money, the grinning visage of the cigar-smoking character we dubbed “Mr. Big.” I gotta be honest: that book has that cover because I was a passionate advocate for it. To me, that cover felt right.
Because the editorial panel was severely divided over whether or not the cover would work, we did some cover testing. Metaphysical audiences were emphatic. They hated the cover. They said they wouldn’t buy a book with that cover. They said Mr. Big embodied everything they hated about men and capitalism and “get rich quick” schemes.
And, convinced that my preferences had to be right, I didn’t listen. I can be a very persuasive guy … and I led a bunch of folks into putting the wrong cover on my first book.
While Malcom’s second book, BLINK, is pretty much a vague article idea dressed up like a book because an author who writes a best seller these days can dress up a vague article idea like a book and sell it regardless, this first book offers real insight. Once you grasp the concept that your own preferences aren’t good predictors of other people’s preferences … you start to see the world in a very different way.
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