Gladwell believes that curiosity about how other minds think charts the progression of human development from the toddler stage, in which we are under the illusion that everyone else has the same tastes and preferences as us. This very impulse led to the compilation of essays written for The New Yorker, where Gladwell became a staff writer in 1996. The essays, which inhabit the minds of a range of often overlooked characters, do not seek to persuade so much as to make others curious about the contents of other people’s minds and set them up on an adventure through this space.

The title of the book derives from Gladwell’s curiosity about what goes on in the minds of the dogs that TV-famous dog whisperer Cesar Millan cures. While many people ask Gladwell where he gets his ideas from, he feels that “the trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell” (xiii). This is a counterintuitive impulse for most adults, who cope with the overwhelming variety in the world by concluding that most things are not interesting. He also advocates looking for stories in less obvious places—for example, ones that do not directly concern storybook or media heroes.