Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Chip Heath

We wrote this book to help you make your ideas stick. By “stick,” we mean that your ideas are understood and remembered, and have a lasting impact—they change your audience’s opinions or behavior.

And he found that, while each teacher had a unique style, collectively their instructional methodologies were almost identical.

In short, we were looking to understand what sticks. We adopted the “what sticks” terminology from one of our favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell. In 2000, Gladwell wrote a brilliant book called The Tipping Point, which examined the forces that cause social phenomena to “tip,” or make the leap from small groups to big groups, the way contagious diseases spread rapidly once they infect a certain critical mass of people.

Both stories highlighted an unexpected danger in a common activity: eating Halloween candy and eating movie popcorn. Both stories called for simple action: examining your child’s candy and avoiding movie popcorn. Both made use of vivid, concrete images that cling easily to memory: an apple with a buried razor blade and a table full of greasy foods. And both stories tapped into emotion: fear in the case of Halloween candy and disgust in the case of movie popcorn.

There is no “formula” for a sticky idea—we don’t want to overstate the case. But sticky ideas do draw from a common set of traits, which make them more likely to succeed.

In the world of ideas, we can genetically engineer our players. We can create ideas with an eye to maximizing their stickiness.

We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.

How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive.

For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity.

How do we make our ideas clear? We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information.

Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images—ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors—because our brains are wired to remember concrete data.

Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves—a “try before you buy” philosophy for the world of ideas.

How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something.

We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness.

How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories.

Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.

To summarize, here’s our checklist for creating a successful idea: a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story.

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.

There are, in fact, only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge reliably. The first is not to learn anything. The second is to take your ideas and transform them. This book will teach you how to transform your ideas to beat the Curse of Knowledge. The six principles presented earlier are your best weapons. They can be used as a kind of checklist.

The surprising lesson of this story: Highly creative ads are more predictable than uncreative ones.

What this Israeli research team did for advertisements is what this book does for your ideas. We will give you suggestions for tailoring your ideas in a way that makes them more creative and more effective with your audience. We’ve created our checklist of six principles for precisely this purpose.

Commander’s Intent manages to align the behavior of soldiers at all levels without requiring play-by-play instructions from their leaders. When people know the desired destination, they’re free to improvise, as needed, in arriving there.

It’s hard to make ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, chaotic environment. If we’re to succeed, the first step is this: Be simple. Not simple in terms of “dumbing down” or “sound bites.” You don’t have to speak in monosyllables to be simple. What we mean by “simple” is finding the core of the idea.

Finding the core is analogous to writing the Commander’s Intent—it’s about discarding a lot of great insights in order to let the most important insight shine.

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

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. That’s it.

A well-thought-out simple idea can be amazingly powerful in shaping behavior.

“THE low-fare airline” and the other stories in this chapter aren’t simple because they’re full of easy words. They’re simple because they reflect the Commander’s Intent. It’s about elegance and prioritization, not dumbing down.

Burying the lead. “Burying the lead” occurs when the journalist lets the most important element of the story slip too far down in the story structure.

Finding the core and writing the lead both involve forced prioritization.

“It’s the economy, stupid” was the lead of the Clinton story—and it was a good one, because in 1992 the U.S. economy was mired in a recession. But if “It’s the economy, stupid” is the lead, then the need for a balanced budget can’t also be the lead. Carville had to stop Clinton from burying the lead.

In fact, psychologists have found that people can be driven to irrational decisions by too much complexity and uncertainty.

Think about that! If you pass, you want to go to Hawaii. If you fail, you want to go to Hawaii. If you don’t know whether you passed or failed, you. . .wait and see? This is not the way the “sure-thing principle” is supposed to behave.

Tversky and Shafir’s study shows us that uncertainty—even irrelevant uncertainty—can paralyze us.

Another study, conducted by Shafir and a colleague, Donald Redelmeier, demonstrates that paralysis can also be caused by choice.

Prioritization rescues people from the quicksand of decision angst, and that’s why finding the core is so valuable.

Core messages help people avoid bad choices by reminding them of what’s important.

Avoid burying the lead. Don’t start with something interesting but irrelevant in hopes of entertaining the audience. Instead, work to make the core message itself more interesting.

In other words, finding the core isn’t synonymous with communicating the core. Top management can know what the priorities are but be completely ineffective in sharing and achieving those priorities.

Adams found the core of his newspaper operations: local focus. Then he turned his attention to sharing his core message—making it stick with his staff.

What’s going on here? Adams has found the core idea that he wants to communicate—that local focus is the key to his newspaper’s success. That’s Step 1. Step 2 is to communicate the core to others. And he does that brilliantly.

Adams’s Commander’s Intent is clear: “Names, names, and names.” Adams can’t be everywhere. But by finding the core and communicating it clearly, he has made himself everywhere. That’s the power of a sticky idea.

Simple messages are core and compact.

The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be.

Compact messages may be sticky, but that says nothing about their worth.

Simplifying, we fear, can devolve into oversimplifying. So if we’re going to define “simple” as core and compact, we need to assure ourselves that compactness is worth striving for.

The “bird in hand” proverb, then, is an astoundingly sticky idea. It has survived for more than 2,500 years.

Proverbs are helpful in guiding individual decisions in environments with shared standards. Those shared standards are often ethical or moral norms. Proverbs offer rules of thumb for the behavior of individuals.

The Golden Rule is a great symbol of what we’re chasing in this chapter: ideas that are compact enough to be sticky and meaningful enough to make a difference.

Great simple ideas have an elegance and a utility that make them function a lot like proverbs. Cervantes’s definition of “proverbs” echoes our definition of Simple ideas: short sentences (compact) drawn from long experience (core).