Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Chip Heath

The Kidney Heist is a story that sticks. We understand it, we remember it, and we can retell it later. And if we believe it’s true, it might change our behavior permanently—at least in terms of accepting drinks from attractive strangers.

The Tipping Point has three sections. The first addresses the need to get the right people, and the third addresses the need for the right context. The middle section of the book, “The Stickiness Factor,” argues that innovations are more likely to tip when they’re sticky.

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

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.

“All happy families resemble each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” All creative ads resemble one another, but each loser is uncreative in its own way.

When people know the desired destination, they’re free to improvise, as needed, in arriving there.

No plan survives contact with the enemy.

What we mean by “simple” is finding the core of the idea.

In fact, we’ll follow our own advice and strip this book down to its core. Here it is: There are two steps in making your ideas sticky—Step 1 is to find the core, and Step 2 is to translate the core using the SUCCESs checklist.

inverted pyramid” structure—the most important info (the widest part of the pyramid) is at the top.

In fact, psychologists have found that people can be driven to irrational decisions by too much complexity and uncertainty. In 1954, the economist L. J. Savage described what he perceived as a basic rule of human decision-making. He called it the “sure-thing principle.”

uncertainty—even irrelevant uncertainty—can paralyze

This behavior isn’t “rational,” but it is human.

To understand the answers to these two questions, we have to understand two essential emotions—surprise and interest—that are commonly provoked by naturally sticky ideas.

Here is the bottom line for our everyday purposes: If you want your ideas to be stickier, you’ve got to break someone’s guessing machine and then fix it.

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.

The best way to get people’s attention is to break their existing schemas directly.

To hold people’s interest, we can use the gap theory of curiosity to our advantage. A little bit of mystery goes a long way.

“What information do I need to convey?” to “What questions do I want my audience to ask?”

What makes something “concrete”? If you can examine something with your senses, it’s concrete. A V8 engine is concrete. “High-performance” is abstract.

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. And, 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.

The moral of this story is not to “dumb things down.” The manufacturing people faced complex problems and they needed smart answers. Rather, the moral of the story is to find a “universal language,” one that everyone speaks fluently. Inevitably, that universal language will be concrete.

“pocketable radio”

“put a man on the moon within the decade.”

Concreteness makes targets transparent.

When Boeing prepared to launch the design of the 727 passenger plane in the 1960s, its managers set a goal that was deliberately concrete: The 727 must seat 131 passengers, fly nonstop from Miami to New York City, and land on Runway 4-22 at La Guardia.

To be simple—to find our core message—is quite difficult. (It’s certainly worth the effort, but let’s not kid ourselves that it’s easy.) Crafting our ideas in an unexpected way takes a fair amount of effort and applied creativity. But being concrete isn’t hard, and it doesn’t require a lot of effort. The barrier is simply forgetfulness—we forget that we’re slipping into abstractspeak. We forget that other people don’t know what we know. We’re the engineers who keep flipping back to our drawings, not noticing that the assemblers just want us to follow them down to the factory floor.

What makes people believe ideas? How’s that for an ambitious question? Let’s start with the obvious answers. We believe because our parents or our friends believe. We believe because we’ve had experiences that led us to our beliefs. We believe because of our religious faith. We believe because we trust authorities. 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.

A citizen of the modern world, constantly inundated with messages, learns to develop skepticism about the sources of those messages. Who’s behind these messages? Should I trust them? What do they have to gain if I believe them?

The company wants to sell you shampoo. Your friend doesn’t, so she gets more trust points. The takeaway is that it can be the honesty and trustworthiness of our sources, not their status, that allows them to act as authorities. Sometimes antiauthorities are even better than authorities.

They must have “internal credibility.”

details make it seem more real, more believable.

It’s more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.

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. • Only one in five said they had a clear “line of sight” between their tasks and their team’s and organization’s goals. • Only 15 percent felt that their organization fully enables them to execute key goals. • Only 20 percent fully trusted the organization they work for. Pretty sobering stuff. It’s also pretty abstract. You probably walk away from these stats thinking something like “There’s a lot of dissatisfaction and confusion in most companies.”

Humanizing the statistics gives the argument greater wallop.

Statistics aren’t inherently helpful; it’s the scale and context that make them so.

Statistics are a good source of internal credibility when they are used to illustrate relationships.

When it comes to statistics, our best advice is to use them as input, not output.

Their power comes from their concreteness rather than from numbers or authority.

For an example that unites all three of the “internal credibility” sources—details, statistics, and the Sinatra Test—we

“testable credential.”

since they essentially allow your audience members to “try

before the...

We may remember things better because they evoke more emotion, not because they are more frequent. We may remember things better because the media spend more time covering them (perhaps because they provide more vivid images), not because they are more common. The availability bias may lead our intuition astray, prompting us to treat unusual things as common and unlikely things as probable.

People remember things better because they evoke more emotion, not because they are more frequent.

The availability bias may lead our intuition astray, prompting us to treat unusual things as common and unlikely things as probable.

Using testable credentials allows people to try out an idea for themselves.

This chapter tackles the emotional component of stickiness, but it’s not about pushing people’s emotional

buttons, like some kind of movie tearjerker. Rather, the goal of making messages “emotional” is to make people care. Feelings inspire people to act.

People tend to overuse any idea or concept that delivers an emotional kick. The research labeled this overuse “semantic stretch.”