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The Tipping PointThere's something automatic, reflexive, about his level of involvement in the marketplace. It's not an act. It's very similar to the social instinct of Horchow and Weisberg. At one point Alpert launched into a complicated story of how to make the best use of coupons in renting videos at Blockbuster. Then he stopped himself, as if he realized what he was saying, and burst out laughing. "Look, you can save a whole dollar! In a year's time I could probably save enough for a whole bottle of wine." Alpert is almost pathologically helpful. He can't help himself. "A Maven is someone who wants to solve other people's problems, generally by solving his own," Alpert said, which is true, although what I suspect is that the opposite is also true, that a Maven is someone who solves his own problems — his own emotional needs — by solving other people's problems. Something in Alpert was fulfilled in knowing that I would thereafter buy a television or a car or rent a hotel room in New York armed with the knowledge he had given me. "Mark Alpert is a wonderfully unselfish man," Leigh MacAllister, a colleague of his at the University of Texas, told me. "I would say he saved me fifteen thousand dollars when I first came to Austin ...» |
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