Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Chip Heath

The most basic way to make people care is to form an association between something they don’t yet care about and something they do care about.

When everybody taps into the same thing, an arms race emerges. To avoid it, we’ve either got to shift onto new turf, as Thompson did, or find associations that are distinctive for our ideas.

Caples’s ads get self-interest into their headlines by promising huge benefits for trivial costs:

people don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children’s pictures.

In a sense, the study was a more elaborate version of Caples’s advice to avoid talking about abstract benefits

This finding suggests that it may be the tangibility, rather than the magnitude, of the benefits that makes people care.

Transcendence: help others realize their potential • Self-actualization: realize our own potential, self-fulfillment, peak experiences • Aesthetic: symmetry, order, beauty, balance • Learning: know, understand, mentally connect • Esteem: achieve, be competent, gain approval, independence, status • Belonging: love, family, friends, affection • Security: protection, safety, stability • Physical: hunger, thirst, bodily comfort

three strategies for making people care: using associations (or avoiding associations, as the case may be), appealing to self-interest, and appealing to identity.

This tactic of the “Three Whys” can be useful in bypassing the Curse of Knowledge. (Toyota actually has a “Five Whys” process for getting to the bottom of problems on its production line. Feel free to use as many “Whys” as you like.) Asking “Why?” helps to remind us of the core values, the core principles, that underlie our ideas.

restore the natural empathy that we have for others. “The world of business tends to emphasize the pattern over the particular,” Suri said. “The intellectual aspects of the pattern prevent people from caring.”

It provides simulation (knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act). Note that both benefits, simulation and inspiration, are geared to generating action. In the last few chapters, we’ve seen that a credible idea makes people believe. An emotional idea makes people care. And in this chapter we’ll see that the right stories make people act.

Aristotle believed there were four primary dramatic plots: Simple Tragic, Simple Fortunate, Complex Tragic, and Complex Fortunate. Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru, lists twenty-five types of stories in his book: the modern epic, the disillusionment plot, and so on.

we came to the conclusion that there are three basic plots: the Challenge plot, the Connection plot, and the Creativity plot.

The first villain is the natural tendency to bury the lead—to

to get lost in a sea of information.

The second villain is the tendency to focus on the presentation rather than on the message.

The first is decision paralysis—the anxiety and irrationality

1. Pay attention: UNEXPECTED 2. Understand and remember it: CONCRETE 3. Agree/Believe: CREDIBLE 4. Care: EMOTIONAL 5. Be able to act on it: STORY

“Is it concrete?” Rather than speculate about whether people will care, we should ask, “Is it emotional? Does it get out of Maslow’s basement? Does it force people to put on an Analytical Hat or allow them to feel empathy?”