Last night we had friends over for an impromptu dinner. They’re a young married couple, both of whom are in grad school. One of them has an internship at National Semiconductor in Santa Clara. He asked if I’d ever read anything by Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point and of Blink. Gladwell’s great at taking the cultural pulse. We are so instinctive about the way we see people and things, our judgments are made on impulse.

Also during dinner, it came up how concerned we are about how our gadgets look. Whether it’s Motorola’s pagers and phones, or Apple’s Mac computers, we want to look at attractive objects. This stands to reason why it is so important to consider how we look.

People are judging each other in the ‘blink of an eye.’ We spend so much time focusing on the things around us that perhaps we don’t spend enough time focusing on taking care of ourselves.

If a person buys an Apple computer based on a more superlative operating system as well as how the machine looks, then that same person should be just as interested in how he or she takes care of their inner-self and outward appearance.