Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Chip Heath

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

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.

Cialdini believes that a major benefit of teaching using mysteries is that “the process of resolving mysteries is remarkably similar to the process of science.” So, by using mysteries, teachers don’t just heighten students’ interest in the day’s material; they train them to think like scientists.

If people believe they know everything, it’s hard to make the gap theory work. Fortunately, there are strategies for combating overconfidence.

Curiosity comes from gaps in our knowledge.

Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes

She came to class the next day with a plan: She aimed to make prejudice tangible to her students. At the start of class, she divided the students into two groups: brown-eyed kids and blue-eyed kids. She then made a shocking announcement: Brown-eyed kids were superior to blue-eyed kids—“They’re the better people in this room.”

The engineers were behaving like American tourists who travel to foreign countries and try to make themselves understood by speaking English more slowly and loudly. They were suffering from the Curse of Knowledge. They had lost the ability to imagine what it was like to look at a technical drawing from the perspective of a nonexpert.

These are powerful forces—family, personal experience, faith. And, thankfully, we have no control over the way these forces affect people. We can’t route our memos through people’s mothers to add credibility. We can’t construct a PowerPoint presentation that will nullify people’s core beliefs.