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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.
The Human-Scale Principle
The availability bias is a natural tendency that causes us, when estimating the probability of a particular event, to judge the event’s probability by its availability in our memory. We intuitively think that events are more likely when they’re easier to remember. But often the things we remember are not an accurate summary of the world.
EMOTIONAL
These results are shocking. The mere act of calculation reduced people’s charity. Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel.
Research conducted at Stanford and Yale shows that this process—exploiting terms and concepts for their emotional associations—is a common characteristic of communication. People tend to overuse any idea or concept that delivers an emotional kick. The research labeled this overuse “semantic stretch.”
Using associations, then, is an arms race of sorts. The other guy builds a missile, so you have to build two. If he’s “unique,” you’ve got to be “super-unique.”
Because mail-order advertising is so transparent, it’s essentially a laboratory for assessing motivational appeals. What makes people care? Ask a direct-mail copywriter. And John Caples is often cited as the greatest copywriter of all time. 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.
If you’ve got self-interest on your side, don’t bury it. Don’t talk around it. Even subtle tweaks can make a difference. It’s important, Caples says, to keep the self in self-interest: “Don’t say, ‘People will enjoy a sense of security when they use Goodyear Tires.’ Say, ‘You enjoy a sense of security when you use Goodyear Tires.’”
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.
This realization—that empathy emerges from the particular rather than the pattern—brings us back full circle to the Mother Teresa quote at the beginning of the chapter: “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”
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
STORIES
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.
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.
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. 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.
THE CHALLENGE PLOT The story of David and Goliath is the classic Challenge plot. A protagonist overcomes a formidable challenge and succeeds.
The key element of a Challenge plot is that the obstacles seem daunting to the protagonist.
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.
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. They make us want to help others, be more tolerant of others, work with others, love others.
Where Challenge plots involve overcoming challenges, Connection plots are about our relationships with other people. If you’re telling a story at the company Christmas party, it’s probably best to use the Connection plot. If you’re telling a story at the kickoff party for a new project, go with the Challenge plot.
THE CREATIVITY PLOT The third major type of inspirational story is the Creativity plot. The prototype might be the story of the apple that falls on Newton’s head, inspiring his theory of gravity. 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.
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. You don’t want a general lining up his troops before battle to tell a Connection plot story. Stories have the amazing dual power to simulate and to inspire. And most of the time we don’t
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WHAT STICKS
Ultimately, the test of our success as idea creators isn’t whether people mimic our exact words, it’s whether we achieve our goals.
In the Introduction, we debunked the common assumption that you need natural creative genius to cook up a great idea. You don’t. But, beyond that, it’s crucial to realize that creation, period, is unnecessary. Think of the ideas in this book that were spotted rather than created:
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.
Why can’t these smart, talented speakers make their ideas stick? A few of the villains discussed in this book are implicated. The first villain is the natural tendency to bury the lead—to get lost in a sea of information. 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 second villain is the tendency to focus on the presentation rather than on the message. Public speakers naturally want to appear composed, charismatic, and motivational.
There are two other key villains in the book that the Stanford students don’t have to wrestle with. 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. Lawyers must stress one or two points in their closing arguments, not ten. A teacher’s lesson plans may contain fifty concepts to share with her students, but in order to be effective that teacher must devote most of her efforts to making the most critical two or three stick.
The Curse of Knowledge is a worthy adversary, because in some sense it’s inevitable. Getting a message across has two stages: the Answer stage and the Telling Others stage. In the Answer stage, you use your expertise to arrive at the idea that you want to share. Doctors study for a decade to be capable of giving the Answer. Business managers may deliberate for months to arrive at the Answer.
Here’s the rub: The same factors that worked to your advantage in the Answer stage will backfire on you during the Telling Others stage. To get the Answer, you need expertise, but you can’t dissociate expertise from the Curse of Knowledge. You know things that others don’t know, and you can’t remember what it was like not to know those things. So when you get around to sharing the Answer, you’ll tend to communicate as if your audience were you.
There is a curious disconnect between the amount of time we invest in training people how to arrive at the Answer and the amount of time we invest in training them how to Tell Others.
Making an Idea Stick: The Communication Framework For an idea to stick, for it to be useful and lasting, it’s got to make the audience: 1. Pay attention 2. Understand and remember it 3. Agree/Believe 4. Care 5. Be able to act on it This book could have been organized around these five steps, but there’s a reason they were reserved for the conclusion. The Curse of Knowledge can easily render this framework useless.
The SUCCESs checklist is a substitute for the framework above, and its advantage is that it’s more tangible and less subject to the Curse of Knowledge. In fact, if you think back across the chapters you’ve read, you’ll notice that the framework matches up nicely: 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
MAKING IDEAS STICK: THE EASY REFERENCE GUIDE What Sticks? Kidney heist. Halloween candy. Movie popcorn. Sticky = understandable, memorable, and effective in changing thought or behavior. SIX PRINCIPLES: SUCCESs. SIMPLE UNEXPECTED CONCRETE CREDIBLE EMOTIONAL STORIES. THE VILLAIN: CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE. It’s hard to be a tapper. Creativity starts with templates: Beat the Curse with the SUCCESs checklist. 1. Simple FIND THE CORE. Commander’s Intent. Determine the single most important thing: “THE low-fare airline.” Inverted pyramid: Don’t bury the lead. The pain of decision paralysis. Beat decision
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