Holy crap. What an ugly irrelevant book cover. I know my mother always told me that I should never judge a book by its cover, but – heck, I’m not gonna even try to lie – I would never have even considered picking up this book if my boyfriend had not waxed friken lyrical about this book. And went to the bookstore. And bought it for me. And put it in my handbag. And then continued to wax lyrical about it.
Yes. He possesses the wonderful faculty of open mindedness to look past minor blemishes such as the fugly blue glitter spots and see the wonderful substance within. He also owns the original beautiful white hard cover version that makes you think of intelligent scientific papers and not of self-help books and the finger painting exercises that come from it. That is why he is totally ok with the book, I told myself. That is why he likes the book so much. Right? Wrong. The beautiful white cover is not the reason why said boyfriend liked the book so much. It might have been the reason why he picked it up in the first place, but the fact of the matter is that it actually is a really good book.
You read right. It is a good book, a well written one that is well researched and is interesting. After getting past that god-awful cover, I happily jumped onto the Blink gravy train and into the world of our horrible judgemental selves or, what Gladwell calls, thin-slicing.
Thin-slicing is basically the snap judgements that we make every second of the day; the decisions that we make that are totally unfounded, the ones that are based on stereotypes and what someone else told us. Blink takes us on a solid exploration into this unconscious human behaviour. It makes you rethink about how you interact with others and how little control you have over it. In fact, what it really does explain about our mind is that our conscious thinking is relatively retarded in comparision to our unconscious thin-slicing selves.
This is all well and good, but I have a nut to crack with the publishers: I understand that the whole intent of the book is for the dear reader to realise that the level of sanity that we class the grubby man with an old beanie on the sidewalk or the degree of academic excellence we place on someone with slanty eyes is almost always set in the first instance of meeting/seeing/walking past/hearing of.
And that after a moment in time, we should realise that we have made these snap judgements, judgements – unfounded or not – that were made with little or no prior knowledge. Because of this, we have walked past so many individuals and have not given the time of day to possible valuable experiences; we have basically missed out on opportunities in enriching our lives. I am presuming that Blink was written in attempt to shorten our aforementioned retarded conscious response time so that we miss less of these opportunities.
So in understanding that, I don’t understand why the publishers have insisted on getting a designer to create the most irrelevant fugly cover they could possibly put on such a well-written book. People will walk past and will never get to understand why they chose to walk past because, quite simply, they never gave the fugly book the time of day.
Poor Gladwell. He makes such a great case in trying to explain how we think and how we can improve communication through this understanding. It’s just too bad his publishers never took the time to read it.
Tags: Blink, Books, International bestseller, lifestyle, Malcolm Gladwell, Power of thinking, snap judgement, thin slicing, thinking
