Made to Stick Quotes

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

“This book can’t offer a foolproof recipe. We’ll admit it up front: We won’t be able to show you how to get twelve-year-olds to gossip about mitosis around the campfire. And in all likelihood your process-improvement memo will not circulate decades from now as a proverb in another culture. But we can promise you this: Regardless of your level of “natural creativity,” we will show you how a little focused effort can make almost any idea stickier, and a sticky idea is an idea that is more likely to make a difference. All you need to do is understand the six principles of powerful ideas.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“But isn’t the use of a template or a checklist confining? Surely we’re not arguing that a “color by numbers” approach will yield more creative work than a blank-canvas approach? Actually, yes, that’s exactly what we’re saying.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

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

“So, while our focus will veer away from The Tipping Point’s turf, we want to pay tribute to Gladwell for the word “stickiness.” It stuck.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“Or think about an elementary-school teacher. She knows her goal: to teach the material mandated by the state curriculum committee. She knows her audience: third graders with a range of knowledge and skills. She knows how to speak effectively—she’s a virtuoso of posture and diction and eye contact. So the goal is clear, the audience is clear, and the format is clear. But the design of the message itself is far from clear. The biology students need to understand mitosis—okay, now what? There are an infinite number of ways to teach mitosis. Which way will stick? And how do you know in advance?”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“In 1985, an ABC News poll showed that 60 percent of parents worried that their children might be victimized. To this day, many parents warn their children not to eat any snacks that aren’t prepackaged. This is a sad story: a family holiday sullied by bad people who, inexplicably, wish to harm children. But in 1985 the story took a strange twist. Researchers discovered something shocking about the candy-tampering epidemic: It was a myth. The researchers, sociologists Joel Best and Gerald Horiuchi, studied every reported Halloween incident since 1958. They found no instances where strangers caused children life-threatening harm on Halloween by tampering with their candy. Two children did die on Halloween, but their deaths weren’t caused by strangers. A five-year-old boy found his uncle’s heroin stash and overdosed. His relatives initially tried to cover their tracks by sprinkling heroin on his candy. In another case, a father, hoping to collect on an insurance settlement, caused the death of his own son by contaminating his candy with cyanide. In other words, the best social science evidence reveals that taking candy from strangers is perfectly okay. It’s your family you should worry about.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

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

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

“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

“companies often emphasize features when they should be emphasizing benefits.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“It’s like Tolstoy’s quote: “All happy families resemble each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” All”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

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

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

“It’s easy to lose awareness that we’re talking like an expert. We start to suffer from the Curse of Knowledge, like the tappers in the “tappers and listeners” game. 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 Survive and Others Die

“Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“Which of these animals is more likely to kill you? A SHARK                                    A DEER           ANSWER: The deer is more likely to kill you. In fact, it’s 300 times more likely to kill you (via a collision with your car).”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“Language is often abstract, but life is not abstract. Teachers”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“Contrast Disney with Subway. Like Disney, Subway has created a metaphor for its frontline employees. They are “sandwich artists.” This metaphor is the evil twin of Disney’s “cast members.” It is utterly useless as a guide to how the employee should act. Disney expects its cast members to behave like actors, but Subway does not expect its counter help to behave like artists. The”
― 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. But in surprising people, in breaking their guessing machines, how do we avoid gimmicky surprise, like the wolves? The easiest way to avoid gimmicky surprise and ensure that your unexpected ideas produce insight is to make sure you target an aspect of your audience’s guessing machines that relates to your core message. We”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern. Humans”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“Employees as cast members” is a generative metaphor that has worked for Disney for more than fifty years.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

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

“it can be the honesty and trustworthiness of our sources, not their status, that allows them to act as authorities. Sometimes”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“The linkages between emotion and behavior can be more subtle, though. For instance, a secondary effect of being angry, which was recently discovered by researchers, is that we become more certain of our judgments. When we’re angry, we know we’re right, as anyone who has been in a relationship can attest.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“this message is that skin damage is cumulative and irreversible. So we’ve rewritten the message to stress that point and eliminate nonessential information. We’ve done this to illustrate the process of forced prioritization; we’ve had to eliminate some interesting stuff (such as the references to melanin) in order to let the core shine through. We’ve tried to emphasize the core in a couple of ways. First, we’ve unburied the lead—putting”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

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

“He’d just finished one drink when an attractive woman approached and asked if she could buy him another. He was surprised but flattered. Sure, he said. The woman walked to the bar and brought back two more drinks—one for her and one for him. He thanked her and took a sip. And that was the last thing he remembered.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“When we use statistics, the less we rely on the actual numbers the better. The numbers inform us about the underlying relationship, but there are better ways to illustrate the underlying relationship than the numbers themselves.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

“When it comes to statistics, our best advice is to use them as input, not output. Use them to make up your mind on an issue. Don’t make up your mind and then go looking for the numbers to support yourself—that’s asking for temptation and trouble. But if we use statistics to help us make up our minds, we’ll be in a great position to share the pivotal numbers with others,”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck