My good friend Santos runs Level 10 CrossFit here in Oroville.  He loans me books from time to time, and I usually read them, but The Tipping Point took me a lot longer than usual to get to.  Not sure what took me so long, but I’m glad I finally picked it up.  Malcolm Gladwell is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.  His slow meandering through what seems like the most unrelated aspects of life finds a common thread that brings you to a new understanding of what it means to be human. 

The ultimate premise of the book is the idea of the tipping point.  That in every situation where word-of-mouth, or grassroots, or epidemic movements occur, there is a tipping point.  For a while, it goes slowly, till it reaches a threshold.  At that point, it has found it’s tipping point.  And it tips.  That is a really basic description of the idea, but Gladwell unpacks this idea in places most people would never think to look.  He connects dots where I would never think to connect.  And he shows us, very convincingly I might add, that

Tipping points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action.  Look at the world around you.  It may seem like an immovable, implacable place.  It is not.  With the slightest push – in just the right place – it can be tipped.

Rhonda, Bella and I returned home from Florida on Tuesday the 27th.  We went to Clearwater Beach for our friend Marci and Todd’s wedding, and turned it into a week long vacation.  You can check out the first part of our trip blog post and pictures here.

On Saturday evening, we went to the rehearsal on the beach, and it was beautiful.  Bella walked down the beach hand in hand with the ring bearers, Josiah and Carson.  It was awesome.  But by Sunday evening, thunderstorms had destroyed any hope of a beach wedding.  Luckily, the bride and groom just wanted to get married (after 8 years!), so we quickly moved everyone to the restaurant where the reception was held and did the ceremony there instead.  Their vows were moving, and it was great to see them finally married.

On Monday, we ventured up to Orlando and spent some time in the Magic Kingdom.  Bella did not like the characters, and I don’t know if she smiled all day.  But we could tell that she like it because her eyes were peeled, just taking it all in.  We got to stay at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress Resort in Orlando thanks to one of my new friends, mister priceline.com.  We had never stayed in any hotel that was that amazing.  We were only there for Monday night, but we got a late checkout and were able to go swim under the waterfalls and go down the water slides in one of their 3 pools.

Then, we drove back to Tampa and flew back to the west coast.  Bella did great on the flights.  She never got too noisy, and the take-offs and landings didn’t even phase her.  If you’d like to see some pictures and comments, click read more! Read more

This short little novel wraps a story around three unlikely characters that find their way.  It is a really easy read, but has a hundred life lessons in hardly that many pages.  It is definitely worth the read.

My favorite part is about this scale.  Where everything that is wrong with the world is heaped up on one side.  And the little bit of good can never outweigh the bad.  However, since each person that does the little bit of good that they can do, it starts to move the scale.  And eventually, there will be ‘the one’.  Now, this ‘one’ isn’t like Neo in the Matrix.  This is just another person that is doing their little bit of good, just like all the rest.  And you would never even know it when it happened, but that little bit of good is the little bit that tips the scale so that the good is outweighing the bad.

We can’t do everything, but together, we can do more than we ever imagined.