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

by Chip Heath

PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY

To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize.

The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.

PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS

We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive.

For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity.

PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS

We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information.

PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY

We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves—a “try before you buy” philosophy for the world of ideas.

PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS

We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions.

PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES

mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment.

This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.

You don’t have to speak in monosyllables to be simple. What we mean by “simple” is finding the core of the idea.

Avoid burying the lead. Don’t start with something interesting but irrelevant in hopes of entertaining the audience. Instead, work to make the core message itself more interesting.

schemas enable profound simplicity

Schemas help us create complex messages from simple materials.

If a message can’t be used to make predictions or decisions, it is without value, no matter how accurate or comprehensive it is.

People are tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more.

A great way to avoid useless accuracy, and to dodge the Curse of Knowledge, is to use analogies.

The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern.

we have to understand two essential emotions—surprise and interest—that are commonly provoked by naturally sticky ideas.

Surprise gets our attention.

Interest keeps our attention.

Surprise is the opposite of predictability. But, to be satisfying, surprise must be “post-dictable.” The twist makes sense after you think about it, but it’s not something you would have seen coming.

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.

Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages.

the most successful of these pieces all began with a mystery story.

Mystery is created not from an unexpected moment but from an unexpected journey.

That’s second-level unexpectedness. In this way, we jump from fleeting surprise to enduring interest.

Curiosity, he says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.

“Story works by posing questions and opening situations.”

Our tendency is to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts.

We can pose a question or puzzle that confronts people with a gap in their knowledge. We can point out that someone else knows something they don’t. We can present them with situations that have unknown resolutions, such as elections, sports events, or mysteries. We can challenge them to predict an outcome (which creates two knowledge gaps—What will happen? and Was I right?).

make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from “What information do I need to convey?” to “What questions do I want my audience to ask?”

The simple act of committing to an answer makes the students more engaged and more curious about the outcome.

that as we gain information we are more and more likely to focus on what we don’t know.

it may be necessary to highlight some knowledge first. “Here’s what you know. Now here’s what you’re missing.” Alternatively, you can set context so people care what comes next.

Concrete language helps people, especially novices, understand new concepts. Abstraction is the luxury of the expert. If you’ve got to teach an idea to a room full of people, and you aren’t certain what they know, concreteness is the only safe language.

Trying to teach an abstract principle without concrete foundations is like trying to start a house by building a roof in the air.

people are better at remembering concrete, easily visualized nouns (“bicycle” or “avocado”) than abstract ones (“justice” or “personality”).

The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory.

Novices perceive concrete details as concrete details. Experts perceive concrete details as symbols of patterns

It can feel unnatural to speak concretely about subject matter we’ve known intimately for years. But if we’re willing to make the effort we’ll see the rewards: Our audience will understand what we’re saying and remember it.

Concreteness creates a shared “turf” on which people can collaborate. Everybody in the room feels comfortable that they’re tackling the same challenge.

If we’re trying to persuade a skeptical audience to believe a new message, the reality is that we’re fighting an uphill battle against a lifetime of personal learning and social relationships.

authorities are a reliable source of credibility for our ideas.

The first kind is the expert—the kind of person whose wall is covered with framed credentials: