The idea about my next blog might be surprising for some people. It is about a case study from the book “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell:
A Harvard University economists asked a group of smokers to guess how many years of life, on average, smoking from the age of twenty-one onward would cost them. The answer surprised me. They guessed nine years. The real answer is somewhere around six or seven. Smokers are not smokers because they underestimate the risks of smoking. They smoke even though they overestimate the risk of smoking.
That is just a point I wanted to mention – now to the essence of this post.
The anti-smoking movement has railed against the tobacco companies for making smoking cool and has spent untold millions of dollars of public money trying to convince teenagers that smoking is not cool. Gladwell argued that this is not the point. Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool. And because of the cool guys, who smoked, the others smoked too.
Fortunately, when teens first experiment with cigarettes, they are all chippers. They only smoke occasionally.
It makes me amazed, how the author writes about small things in life that changes the bigger ones.
A Harvard University economists asked a group of smokers to guess how many years of life, on average, smoking from the age of twenty-one onward would cost them. The answer surprised me. They guessed nine years. The real answer is somewhere around six or seven. Smokers are not smokers because they underestimate the risks of smoking. They smoke even though they overestimate the risk of smoking.
That is just a point I wanted to mention – now to the essence of this post.
The anti-smoking movement has railed against the tobacco companies for making smoking cool and has spent untold millions of dollars of public money trying to convince teenagers that smoking is not cool. Gladwell argued that this is not the point. Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool. And because of the cool guys, who smoked, the others smoked too.
Fortunately, when teens first experiment with cigarettes, they are all chippers. They only smoke occasionally.
It makes me amazed, how the author writes about small things in life that changes the bigger ones.