Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

by Chip Heath

checklist for creating a successful idea: a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story.

The villain is a natural psychological tendency that consistently confounds our ability to create ideas using these principles. It’s called the Curse of Knowledge.

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

The first sentence, called the lead,

reporters make is that they get so steeped in the details that they fail to see the message’s core—what readers will find important or interesting.

Giving students two good alternatives to studying, rather than one, paradoxically makes them less likely to choose either. This behavior isn’t “rational,” but it is human.

Cervantes defined proverbs9 as “short sentences drawn from long experience.”

You tap the existing memory terrain of your audience. You use what’s already there.

Associations arethe key... Creat associations in consumer 's minds

the surprise brow is our body’s way of forcing us to see more.

when we’re angry our eyes narrow so that we can focus on a known problem. In addition

So, a good process for making your ideas stickier is: (1) Identify the central message you need to communicate—find the core; (2) Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message—i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn’t it already happening naturally? (3) Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience’s guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.