Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Chip Heath

The first clue is the classic urban-legend opening: “A friend of a friend. . .” Have you ever noticed that our friends’ friends have much more interesting lives than our friends themselves?

In other words, the best social science evidence reveals that taking candy from strangers is perfectly okay. It’s your family you should worry about.

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.

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.

The tappers and listeners are CEOs and frontline employees, teachers and students, politicians and voters, marketers and customers, writers and readers. All of these groups rely on ongoing communication, but, like the tappers and listeners, they suffer from enormous information imbalances. When a CEO discusses “unlocking shareholder value,” there is a tune playing in her head that the employees can’t hear.

“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 inverted pyramid is great for readers. No matter what the reader’s attention span—whether she reads only the lead or the entire story—the inverted pyramid maximizes the information she gleans.

“The longer you work on a story, the more you can find yourself losing direction. No detail is too small. You just don’t know what your story is anymore.”

Lots of us have expertise in particular areas. Becoming an expert in something means that we become more and more fascinated by nuance and complexity. That’s when the Curse of Knowledge kicks in, and we start to forget what it’s like not to know what we know.

For instance, physicists now know that electrons don’t orbit the nucleus the way that planets do. In reality, electrons move in “probability clouds.” So what do you tell a sixth grader? Do you talk about the motion of planets, which is easy to understand and nudges you closer to the truth? Or do you talk about “probability clouds,” which are impossible to understand but accurate? The choice may seem to be a difficult one: (1) accuracy first, at the expense of accessibility; or (2) accessibility first, at the expense of accuracy. But

Surprise makes us want to find an answer—to resolve the question of why we were surprised—and big surprises call for big answers. If we want to motivate people to pay attention, we should seize the power of big surprises.

“Well, the Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it is preceded by the Huh? experience.”

“Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.”

How will it turn out? question is powerful enough to keep us watching

Curiosity, he says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge. Loewenstein argues that gaps cause pain. When we want to know something but don’t, it’s like having an itch that we need to scratch. To take away the pain, we need to fill the knowledge gap. We sit patiently through bad movies, even though they may be painful to watch, because it’s too painful not to know how they end.

Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it. It also makes it harder to coordinate our activities with others, who may interpret the abstraction in very different ways. Concreteness helps us avoid these problems.

For fifty years, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has helped protect environmentally precious areas in the world using the simplest possible method: It buys them. It buys land at market prices, making it off-limits to environmentally damaging uses, such as development or logging.

It had appeal to donors and benefactors, because the results of their gifts were so clear. A big gift bought a big piece of land. A small gift bought a small piece of land. As one donor commented, TNC produced “results you could walk around on.”

“If you say, ‘There’s a really important area to the east of Silicon Valley,’ it’s just not exciting, because it’s not tangible. But when you say, ‘The Mount Hamilton Wilderness,’ their interest perks up.”

Other environmental groups in the Bay Area started campaigning to preserve the area. Sweeney says, “We’re always laughing now, because we see other people’s documents and they’re talking about the Mount Hamilton Wilderness. We say, ‘You know we made that up.’” People who live in cities

The Nature Conservancy created the same effect with its landscapes. The Mount Hamilton Wilderness is not a set of acres; it’s an eco-celebrity.

Novices perceive concrete details as concrete details. Experts perceive concrete details as symbols of patterns and insights that they have learned through years of experience.

because they are capable of seeing a higher level of insight, they naturally want to talk on a higher level. They want to talk about chess strategies, not about bishops moving diagonally.

Stephen Covey, in his book The 8th Habit, describes a poll of 23,000 employees drawn from a number of companies and industries. He reports the poll’s findings: • Only 37 percent said they have a clear understanding of what their organization is trying to achieve and why.

Only one in five was enthusiastic about their team’s and their organization’s goals.

“If, say, a soccer team had these same scores, only 4 of the 11 players on the field would know which goal is theirs. Only 2 of the 11 would care. Only 2 of the 11 would know what position they play and know exactly what they are supposed to do. And all but 2 players would, in some way, be competing against their own team members rather than the opponent.”

Mother Teresa once said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” In 2004, some researchers at Carnegie Mellon University decided to see whether most people act like Mother Teresa.

These results are shocking. The mere act of calculation reduced people’s charity. Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel.

Caples says companies often emphasize features when they should be emphasizing benefits. “The most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments (the world’s best seed!) that they forget to tell us why we should buy (the world’s best lawn!).”

An old advertising maxim says you’ve got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children’s pictures.

These studies suggest that there’s no such thing as a passive audience. When we hear a story, our minds move from room to room. When we hear a story, we simulate it.

It turns out that a positive mental attitude isn’t quite enough to get the job done. Maybe financial gurus shouldn’t be telling us to imagine that we’re filthy rich; instead, they should be telling us to replay the steps that led to our being poor.

Telling stories with visible goals and barriers shifts the audience into a problem-solving mode. Clearly,

SIMPLE UNEXPECTED CONCRETE CREDIBLE EMOTIONAL STORIES.