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by
Chip Heath
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August 26, 2021 - February 18, 2022
Rather, the goal of making messages “emotional” is to make people care. Feelings inspire people to act.
many ideas use a sort of piggybacking strategy, associating themselves with emotions that already exist.
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. We all naturally practice the tactic of association.
“Honoring the Game” is a kind of sports patriotism. It implies that you owe your sport basic respect.
The lesson for the rest of us is that if we want to make people care, we’ve got to tap into the things they 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.
What matters to people? People matter to themselves. It will come as no surprise that one reliable way of making people care is by invoking self-interest.
He says, “First and foremost, try to get self-interest into every headline you write. Make your headline suggest to readers that here is something they want. This rule is so fundamental that it would seem obvious. Yet the rule is violated every day by scores of writers.”
Caples says companies often emphasize features when they should be emphasizing benefits.
This finding suggests that it may be the tangibility, rather than the magnitude, of the benefits that makes people care. You don’t have to promise riches and sex appeal and magnetic personalities. It may be enough to promise reasonable benefits that people can easily imagine themselves enjoying.
sometimes self-interest helps people care, and sometimes it backfires.
And perhaps the most important part of the story is this: “Group interest” is often a better predictor of political opinions than self-interest. Kinder says that in forming opinions people seem to ask not “What’s in it for me?” but, rather, “What’s in it for my group?”
The first model involves calculating consequences. We weigh our alternatives, assessing the value of each one, and we choose the alternative that yields us the most value.
The second model is quite different. It assumes that people make decisions based on identity. They ask themselves three questions: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? And what do people like me do in this kind of situation?
Self-interest is important. There’s no question that we can make people care by appealing to it. But it makes for a limited palette. Always structuring our ideas around self-interest is like always painting with one color. It’s stifling for us and uninspiring for others.
You do math exercises so that you can improve your ability to think logically, so that you can be a better lawyer, doctor, architect, prison warden or parent. MATH IS MENTAL WEIGHT TRAINING. It is a means to an end (for most people), not an end in itself.
The idea was that Bubba would respond to an identity appeal better than he would to a rational self-interest appeal.
So far we’ve looked at three strategies for making people care: using associations (or avoiding associations, as the case may be), appealing to self-interest, and appealing to identity.
Asking “Why?” helps to remind us of the core values, the core principles, that underlie our ideas.
How can we make people care about our ideas? We get them to take off their Analytical Hats. We create empathy for specific individuals. We show how our ideas are associated with things that people already care about. We appeal to their self-interest, but we also appeal to their identities—not only to the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be
The story’s power, then, is twofold: 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.
Stories are strongly associated with entertainment—movies and books and TV shows and magazines. When children say “Tell me a story,” they’re begging for entertainment, not instruction.
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. But what good is simulation?
Why does mental simulation work? It works because we can’t imagine events or sequences without evoking the same modules of the brain that are evoked in real physical activity. Brain scans show that when people imagine a flashing light, they activate the visual area of the brain; when they imagine someone tapping on their skin, they activate tactile areas of the brain. The activity of mental simulation is not limited to the insides of our heads.
Mental simulation helps with problem-solving. Even in mundane planning situations, mentally simulating an event helps us think of things that we might otherwise have neglected.
The takeaway is simple: Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something, but it’s the next best thing. And, to circle back to the world of sticky ideas, what we’re suggesting is that the right kind of story is, effectively, a simulation. Stories are like flight simulators for the brain.
A story is powerful because it provides the context missing from abstract prose. It’s back to the Velcro theory of memory, the idea that the more hooks we put into our ideas, the better they’ll stick.
This is the role that stories play—putting knowledge into a framework that is more lifelike, more true to our day-to-day existence. More like a flight simulator. Being the audience for a story isn’t so passive, after all. Inside, we’re getting ready to act.
Note how well the Jared story does on the SUCCESs checklist: • It’s simple: Eat subs and lose weight. (It may be oversimplified, frankly, since the meatball sub with extra mayo won’t help you lose weight.) • It’s unexpected: A guy lost a ton of weight by eating fast food! This story violates our schema of fast food, a schema that’s more consistent with the picture of a fat Jared than a skinny Jared. • It’s concrete: Think of the oversized pants, the massive loss of girth, the diet composed of particular sandwiches. It’s much more like an Aesop fable than an abstraction. • It’s credible: It has
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Jared reminds us that we don’t always have to create sticky ideas. Spotting them is often easier and more useful.
When we finished sorting through a big pile of inspirational stories—a much narrower domain—we came to the conclusion that there are three basic plots: the Challenge plot, the Connection plot, and the Creativity plot.
Challenge plots are inspiring in a defined way. They inspire us by appealing to our perseverance and courage. They make us want to work harder, take on new challenges, overcome obstacles.
This is what a Connection plot is all about. It’s a story about people who develop a relationship that bridges a gap—racial, class, ethnic, religious, demographic, or otherwise. The Connection plot doesn’t have to deal with life-and-death stakes, as does the Good Samaritan.
Connection plots are also fabulous for romance stories—think of Romeo and Juliet (or the top-grossing movie of all time, Titanic). All Connection plots inspire us in social ways.
The Creativity plot involves someone making a mental breakthrough, solving a long-standing puzzle, or attacking a problem in an innovative way. It’s the MacGyver plot.
In the history of the Grinder Team, this story has become known as the Drag Test. The Drag Test is a Creativity plot that reinforced the team’s new culture. The Drag Test implied, “We still need to get the right data to make decisions. We just need to do it a lot quicker.”
Creativity plots make us want to do something different, to be creative, to experiment with new approaches.
The goal here is to learn how to spot the stories that have potential.
Denning defines a springboard story as a story that lets people see how an existing problem might change. Springboard stories tell people about possibilities. One major advantage of springboard stories is that they combat skepticism and create buy-in.
But with a story, Denning argues, you engage the audience—you are involving people with the idea, asking them to participate with you.
In addition to creating buy-in, springboard stories mobilize people to act. Stories focus people on potential solutions. Telling stories with visible goals and barriers shifts the audience into a problem-solving mode.
But springboard stories go beyond having us problem-solve for the main character. A springboard story helps us problem-solve for ourselves.
Stories can almost single-handedly defeat the Curse of Knowledge. In fact, they naturally embody most of the SUCCESs framework. Stories are almost always Concrete. Most of them have Emotional and Unexpected elements. The hardest part of using stories effectively is making sure that they’re Simple—that they reflect your core message. It’s not enough to tell a great story; the story has to reflect your agenda.
We bring up these examples because, in making ideas stick, the audience gets a vote. The audience may change the meaning of your idea, as happened with Durocher. The audience may actually improve your idea, as was the case with Sherlock Holmes. Or the audience may retain some of your ideas and jettison others, as with Carville.
But let’s not forget that it’s just as effective to spot sticky ideas as it is to create them.
If you’re a great spotter, you’ll always trump a great creator. Why? Because the world will always produce more great ideas than any single individual, even the most creative one.
The stars of stickiness are the students who made their case by telling stories, or by tapping into emotion, or by stressing a single point rather than ten.
One of the worst things about knowing a lot, or having access to a lot of information, is that we’re tempted to share it all.
The first is decision paralysis—the anxiety and irrationality that can emerge from excessive choice or ambiguous situations.
To beat decision paralysis, communicators have to do the hard work of finding the core.
The archvillain of sticky ideas, as you know by now, is the Curse of Knowledge.
