Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Chip Heath

Simple ideas: short sentences (compact) drawn from long experience (core).

Most technology and product-design projects must combat “feature creep,” the tendency for things to become incrementally more complex until they no longer perform their original functions very well.

We’ve seen that compact ideas are stickier, but that compact ideas alone aren’t valuable—only ideas with profound compactness are valuable. So, to make a profound idea compact you’ve got to pack a lot of meaning into a little bit of messaging. And how do you do that? You use flags. You tap the existing memory terrain of your audience. You use what’s already there.

We’ve made it easier for you to learn a new concept by tying it to a concept that you already know.

Psychologists define schema as a collection of generic properties of a concept or category. Schemas consist of lots of prerecorded information stored in our memories.

Schemas help us create complex messages from simple materials.

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

Generative metaphors and proverbs both derive their power from a clever substitution: They substitute something easy to think about for something difficult.

Proverbs are the Holy Grail of simplicity. Coming up with a short, compact phrase is easy. Anybody can do it. On the other hand, coming up with a profound compact phrase is incredibly difficult.

The first problem of communication is getting people’s attention.

The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern. Humans adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patterns. Consistent sensory stimulation makes us tune out: Think of the hum of an air conditioner, or traffic noise, or the smell of a candle, or the sight of a bookshelf. We may become consciously aware of these things only when something changes: The air conditioner shuts off. Your spouse rearranges the books.

Surprise gets our attention.

Interest keeps our attention.

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.

Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure.

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.

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

In 1994, George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University, provided the most comprehensive account of situational interest. It is surprisingly simple. 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.

THE SITUATION: Imagine that you’re the fund-raising manager for a local theater company. Your job is to help raise donations to support the theater. It’s now the end of the year, and you’re preparing a summary presentation for the theater’s board of directors.

PUNCH LINE: 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.

If curiosity arises from knowledge gaps, we might assume that when we know more, we’ll become less curious because there are fewer gaps in our knowledge. But Loewenstein argues that the opposite is true. He says that as we gain information we are more and more likely to focus on what we don’t know.

Knowledge gaps create interest. But to prove that the knowledge gaps exist, 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.

Unexpectedness, in the service of core principles, can have surprising longevity.

What makes something “concrete”? If you can examine something with your senses, it’s concrete. A V8 engine is concrete. “High-performance” is abstract. Most of the time, concreteness boils down to specific people doing specific things. In the “Unexpected” chapter, we talked about Nordstrom’s world-class customer service. “World-class customer service” is abstract. A Nordie ironing a customer’s shirt is concrete. 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.

Using concreteness as a foundation for abstraction is not just good for mathematical instruction; it is a basic principle of understanding. Novices crave concreteness.

This is how concreteness helps us understand—it helps us construct higher, more abstract insights on the building blocks of our existing knowledge and perceptions. Abstraction demands some concrete foundation. Trying to teach an abstract principle without concrete foundations is like trying to start a house by building a roof in the air.

look at the two sides of Velcro material, you’ll see that one is covered with thousands of tiny hooks and the other is covered with thousands of tiny loops. When you press the two sides together, a huge number of hooks get snagged inside the loops, and that’s what causes Velcro to seal. Your brain hosts a truly staggering number of loops. The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory.

Great teachers have a knack for multiplying the hooks in a particular idea.

It’s easy to lose awareness that we’re talking like an expert. We start to suffer from the Curse of Knowledge,

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.

Rather, the moral of the story is to find a “universal language,” one that everyone speaks fluently. Inevitably, that universal language will be concrete.

Concreteness makes targets transparent. Even experts need transparency.

Concrete Brings Knowledge to Bear: White Things Grab a pencil and a piece of paper and find a way to time yourself (a watch, a spouse who likes to count, etc.). Here is a do-it-yourself test on concreteness. You’ll do two brief fifteen-second exercises. When you’ve got your supplies ready, set your timer for fifteen seconds, then follow the instructions for Step 1 below. STEP 1 INSTRUCTIONS: Write down as many things that are white in color as you can think of. STOP. Reset your timer for fifteen seconds. Turn the page for the instructions for Step 2.

STEP 2 INSTRUCTIONS: Write down as many white things in your refrigerator as you can think of. Most people, remarkably, can list about as many white things from their refrigerators as white anythings. This result is stunning because, well, our fridges don’t include a particularly large part of the universe. Even people who list more white anythings often feel that the refrigerator test is “easier.” Why does this happen? Because concreteness is a way of mobilizing and focusing your brain.

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.

Let’s pose the question in the broadest possible terms: What makes people believe ideas?

These are powerful forces—family, personal experience, faith.

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. It would seem that there’s nothing much we can do to affect what people believe. But if we’re skeptical about our ability to affect belief, we merely have to look at naturally sticky ideas, because some of them persuade us to believe some pretty incredible things.

When we think of authorities who can add credibility, we tend to think of two kinds of people. The first kind is the expert—the kind of person whose wall is covered with framed credentials:

Celebrities and other aspirational figures make up the second class of “authorities.”

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? A commercial claiming that a new shampoo makes your hair bouncier has less credibility than hearing your best friend rave about how a new shampoo made her own hair bouncier. Well, duh. 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.

We don’t always have an external authority who can vouch for our message; most of the time our messages have to vouch for themselves. They must have “internal credibility.”

The use of vivid details is one way to create internal credibility—to weave sources of credibility into the idea itself. Another way is to use statistics.

This is the most important thing to remember about using statistics effectively. Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It’s more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.

It’s the Sinatra Test: If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

So far we’ve talked about creating credibility by drawing on external sources—authorities and antiauthorities. And we’ve talked about creating credibility by drawing on sources inside the message itself—by using details and statistics and examples that pass the Sinatra Test. But there’s one remaining source of credibility that we haven’t discussed. And it may be the most powerful source of all.

This challenge—asking customers to test a claim for themselves—is a “testable credential.” Testable credentials can provide an enormous credibility boost, since they essentially allow your audience members to “try before they buy.”