Malcolm Gladwell, the reporter/nonfiction writer/corporate guru trampling the competition on the bestseller list right now (Outliers: The Story of Success), has written three books. For me, his second one – Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking – is his most important one.

Little, Brown & Co., the publisher, gives this telling annotation of the book: …great decision makers aren't those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.

In 2003, coincidentally while Gladwell, listed as a “Contributor” on The New Yorker masthead, was completing his work on Blink, I dramatically changed the way I made decisions. Even today, I can’t say whether it was a stroke of insight or merely a selfish choice, but I began to adopt what Gladwell calls “thin-slice” decision-making. And it has made all the difference.

Within just a few months, the judgments I made led to a significant increase in the quantity and quality of my work. I became much faster in making those judgments, less tentative in implementing them, and increasingly confident in their outcomes. It led to me meeting my wife, proposing marriage a month later, and changing careers, all in a blink of the eye. 

In the weeks before we opened our bookstore, I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Malcolm Gladwell at a trade show in Atlanta. We engaged in a brief public discussion wherein I, with no small amount of amazement, related how I had been using the techniques he described in his book and how it had been working for me. To me, it was pretty amazing that my private epiphany would, with such serendipity, be described and explained in pretty much the first big book we would ever sell.

I asked the author one final question, and his answer illustrates perfectly his modesty, not to mention his discomfort with his celebrity status. I asked, “How, especially after years of ‘deciding’ in a different way, can we trust the ‘instinctive’ decision-making style?”

He replied, “I don’t know. I’m just a reporter.”

In Part 2, I’ll tell you how Blink continues to inform my life, and with any luck, get to a substantive point I’m struggling to put into words.