Last What's Ryan Reedin' of 2025

Happy New Years (on January 2nd)!!! Hopefully you stopped by, or stop by, the main page of my website to see the new look. I wanted something that looked cleaner and used the orginal colors of my logo. I am pretty happy with how it looks now. I am sure that I will keep updating it throughout 2026 as new things happen, but that update is the first change of 2026 that I have coming.

I started working on a social media project that I will be releasing soon, so watch for that as well. I am really excited for what 2026 could bring, but it will be a healthly amount of work as well. However, when has anything I have ever done not been a good amount of work? So it isn't really new...just different.

Anyways, I just finished a book but I am going to call this my last review of 2025 since I read most of the book in '25. I posted a picture of the book on my Instagram. If you follow me there, then you know I was reading "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell is one of my favorite writers as I find his book insightful and easy to digest. His use of storytelling to help impress the points, and research, are done extremely well. The first book of his I read was "Outliers" where he talks about how people's environments/situations help lead them to success in addition to their hard work.

Recently, "The Revenge of The Tipping Point" was released and I immediately bought it. I realized I had not read the first book "The Tipping Point," so I started there.

The book is about different epidemics, and what caused them.

Before going on this does NOT have to do with diseases. If you look up "epidemics" it is labeled as "the sudden, rapid spread of a contagious disease to a large number of people in a specific region or population within a short time, exceeding normal expectations. The book focuses on events/situations that spread rapidly and the cause of those events. Only 2 of the epidemics talked about could be considered "medical." In fact the first one is about the popularity of shoes.

The subtitle of the book is "How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference." Gladwell spends the first couple chapters talking about epidemics get spread - people with influence, power of the message, and context (environment and proximity).

In the beginning of the book, Gladwell looks at Hush Puppies, a brand of shoe that was all but dead until 1994-95. During that time, they became popular in Manhatten clubs due to a small group of people wearing them out. Seeing them in the clubs sparked interested in the shoes, which lead to people going to the small shoes shops still carrying them to buy them out. They went from 30,000 pairs sold to 430,000 pairs sold. All because some people with influence wore them out in highly attended places.

Then he looks at Sesame Street and Blue's Clues for how they communicated children's education. The point of both shows was to close the educational gap between kids in well to do areas and kids in less fortunate situations. Sesame Street came out with a flurry of things in every episode. Teaching language, counting, and a number of those things in each hour long episode. The creators of Sesame Street also did a lot of studying of their own show. They originally started with fictional characters only being in fictional worlds and human characters being on "the street." After studies showed that kids got distracted by other things where there were no fictional characters, Big Bird was created and the characters participated in both worlds (fiction and nonfiction).

As retention was tested, it was shown that kids weren't retaining as much as hoped after time. That is were Blue's Clues was born. Rather than an hour of a lot of things, the show was 30 minutes and followed a story that could engage the kids. Also, rather than airing new episodes every day with reruns aired after the "season" ended, Blue's Clues aired the same episode 5 times in a row (Monday-Friday). It found that kids didn't lose interest in each airing, but got more information right during each airing.

I grew up watching Sesame Street but was too old for Blue's Clues when it came out to I kind recogize a lot of the things talked about in this part of the book.

"The Power of Context" was split into 2 seperate chapters. One about the impact of one's environment and one about the number of people in a organization. The first chapter looks at the crime rate in New York City in the 1980's and 90's. During the '80s, crime was at an all time high along with vandalism. During the '90's, the crime rate declines sharply. Although police presence increased during that time, the city focused on cleaning up the vandalism (specifically in the railroad system) and fair hoppers. Focusing on those two things, cleaned up the image of the city and found that citizens then took pride in living in a clean area instead of not caring and ultimately contributing to the filth and crime.

The second part of that is the Rule of 150. This looks at how organizations and communities are impacted by size. There are studies that show that once you surpass 150 people, your "community" is less connected because it is too big. In this chapter, Gladwell looks at the community created by the book, "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood," and how reading clubs started of women sharing their own version of that sisterhood. It also looks at the community of Hutterites, and the copy Gore-Tex, that split villages/buildings when they reached 150 people. The thought in those groups was that below 150, everyone knows everyone and everyone is empowered to work on any/all tasks need to be successful. Above 150 people, groups divide in "specialities" and then there is a heirarchy where people only work on what they are assigned. Thus slowing down the process of getting important tasks completely quickly.

The book ends with a couple chapters of Case Studies and a wrap of the ideas. Each case study look at how each of the above things influenced each event. There are countless of examples in the book, but would make this review WAY TOO LONG.

I highly recommend this book. It is a little wordy at times, and you have to be into this kind of social science/influcence writing. However, Gladwell is a great storyteller with his books and it makes reading them all the more enjoyable. There are few authors I enjoy reading and he is definitely at the top of my list. The thing that stuck out to me most was the bit about Blue's Clues and how repeating lessons could be helpful. It got me thinking about my own teaching, which is why I am reading most of the books I read.

My next book will definitely be "The Revenge of The Tipping Point" which came out last year - almost 25 years after "The Tipping Point" came out.