Made to Stick Quotes

“Journalists obsess about their leads. Don Wycliff, a winner of prizes for editorial writing, says, “I’ve always been a believer that if I’ve got two hours in which to write a story, the best investment I can make is to spend the first hour and forty-five minutes of it getting a good lead, because after that everything will come easily.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“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.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“Some analogies are so useful that they don’t merely shed light on a concept, they actually become platforms for novel thinking. For example, the metaphor of the brain as a computer has been central to the insights generated by cognitive psychologists during the past fifty years.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“An old advertising maxim says you've got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don't buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children's pictures.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“the pop-psychology literature is full of gurus urging you to visualize success. It turns out that a positive mental attitude isn’t quite enough to get the job done. Maybe financial gurus shouldn’t be telling us to imagine that we’re filthy rich; instead, they should be telling us to replay the steps that led to our being poor.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“Mother Teresa once said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” In”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“plans are useful, in the sense that they are proof that planning has taken place. The planning process forces people to think through the right issues. But as for the plans themselves, Kolditz says, “They just don’t work on the battlefield.” So, in the 1980s the Army adapted its planning process, inventing a concept called Commander’s Intent (CI). CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plan’s goal, the desired end-state of an operation. At”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“So, rather than guess about whether people will understand our ideas, we should ask, “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?”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

“Denning says that the idea of telling stories initially violated his intuition. He had always believed in the value of being direct, and he worried that stories were too ambiguous, too peripheral, too anecdotal. He thought, “Why not spell out the message17 directly? Why go to the trouble and difficulty of trying to elicit the listener’s thinking indirectly, when it would be so much simpler if I come straight out in an abstract directive? Why not hit the listeners between the eyes?” The problem is that when you hit listeners between the eyes they respond by fighting back. The way you deliver a message to them is a cue to how they should react. If you make an argument, you’re implicitly asking them to evaluate your argument—judge it, debate it, criticize it—and then argue back, at least in their minds. But with a story, Denning argues, you engage the audience—you are involving people with the idea, asking them to participate with you.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

“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.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

“We discussed the Curse of Knowledge in the introduction—the difficulty of remembering what it was like not to know something. Accuracy to the point of uselessness is a symptom of the Curse of Knowledge. To a CEO, “maximizing shareholder value” may be an immensely useful rule of behavior. To a flight attendant, it’s not. To a physicist, probability clouds are fascinating phenomena. To a child, they are incomprehensible. People are tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

“In reality, electrons move in “probability clouds.” So what do you tell a sixth grader? Do you talk about the motion of planets, which is easy to understand and nudges you closer to the truth? Or do you talk about “probability clouds,” which are impossible to understand but accurate? The choice may seem to be a difficult one: (1) accuracy first, at the expense of accessibility; or (2) accessibility first, at the expense of accuracy. But in many circumstances this is a false choice for one compelling reason: If a message can’t be used to make predictions or decisions, it is without value, no matter how accurate or comprehensive it is. Herb Kelleher could tell a flight attendant that her goal is to “maximize shareholder value.” In some sense, this statement is more accurate and complete than that the goal is to be “THE low-fare airline.” After all, the proverb “THE low-fare airline” is clearly incomplete—Southwest could offer lower fares by eliminating aircraft maintenance, or by asking passengers to share napkins. Clearly, there are additional values (customer comfort, safety ratings) that refine Southwest’s core value of economy. The problem with “maximize shareholder value,” despite its accuracy, is that it doesn’t help the flight attendant decide whether to serve chicken salad. An accurate but useless idea is still useless.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

“An accurate but useless idea is still useless.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“No plan survives contact with the enemy.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“If a message can’t be used to make predictions or decisions, it is without value, no matter how accurate or comprehensive it is.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

“Lots of us have expertise in particular areas. Becoming an expert in something means that we become more and more fascinated by nuance and complexity. That’s when the Curse of Knowledge kicks in, and we start to forget what it’s like not to know what we know.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

“You want to invent new ideas, not new rules.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

“Feature creep is an innocent process. An engineer looking at a prototype of a remote control might think to herself, “Hey, there’s some extra real estate here on the face of the control. And there’s some extra capacity on the chip. Rather than let it go to waste, what if we give people the ability to toggle between the Julian and Gregorian calendars?”
― Chip Heath & Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“When a CEO discusses “unlocking shareholder value,” there is a tune playing in her head that the employees can’t hear.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“Stories are like flight simulators for the brain.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“Ethically challenged people with lots of analytical smarts can, with enough contortions, make almost any case from a given set of statistics.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“If you want your ideas to be stickier, you’ve got to break someone’s guessing machine and then fix it.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“To summarize, here’s our checklist for creating a successful idea: a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“Sportsmanship" had been stretched too far. Like "relativity," it had migrated far afield from its original meaning. It used to refer to the kind of behavior that Lance Armstrong showed Jan Ullrich. But over time the term was stretched to include unimpressive, nonchivalrous behavior, like losing without whining too much or making it through an entire game without assaulting a referee.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“One important implication of the gap theory is that we need to open gaps before we close them. Our tendency is to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts. The”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“Good metaphors are “generative.”13 The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate “new perceptions, explanations, and inventions.” Many”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

“It changed their attitude from reactive and critical to active and creative.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“Compared with a typical mail-order ad, the “imagine cable television” appeal is a much more subtle appeal to self-interest. Note that the benefits offered were not fantastic in a Caples-esque way. The gist was that you could avoid the hassle of leaving home (!) by ordering cable. Indeed, just hearing about the benefits, in the abstract, wasn’t enough to lure additional subscribers. It was only when people put themselves in the starring role—I can see myself watching a good movie at home with my hubby, and I can get up and check on the kids in the next room whenever I like … and think of all that babysitting money I’d save!—that their interest grew. 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.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

“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. The moral of this story is not to “dumb things down.” The manufacturing people faced complex problems and they needed smart answers. Rather, the moral of the story is to find a “universal language,” one that everyone speaks fluently. Inevitably, that universal language will be concrete.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck