Made to Stick Quotes

“WHAT WE SHOULD learn from urban legends and the Mrs. Johnson trial is that vivid details boost credibility. But what should also be added is that we need to make use of truthful, core details. We need to identify details that are as compelling and human as the “Darth Vader toothbrush” but more meaningful—details that symbolize and support our core idea.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

“When Boeing prepared to launch the design of the 727 passenger plane in the 1960s, its managers set a goal that was deliberately concrete: The 727 must seat 131 passengers,8 fly nonstop from Miami to New York City, and land on Runway 4-22 at La Guardia. (The 4-22 runway was chosen for its length—less than a mile, which was much too short for any of the existing passenger jets.) With a goal this concrete, Boeing effectively coordinated the actions of thousands of experts in various aspects of engineering or manufacturing. Imagine how much harder it would have been to build a 727 whose goal was to be “the best passenger plane in the world.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

“Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure. “You’ve heard of the famous Aha! experience, right?” he says. “Well, the Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it is preceded by the Huh? experience.” By creating a mystery, the writer-astronomer made dust interesting. He sustained attention, not just for the span of a punch line but for the span of a twenty-page article dense with information on scientific theories and experimentation.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

“To be surprising, an event's can't be predictable. Surprise is the opposite of predictability. But, to be satisfying, surprise must be "post-dictable.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“Surprise isn't enough. We also need insight.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“Surprise jolts us to attention. Surprise is triggered when our schemas fail, and it prepares us to understand why the failure occurred.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“In 1925, John Caples was assigned to write a headline for an advertisement promoting the correspondence music course offered by the U.S. School of Music. Caples had no advertising experience, but he was a natural. He sat at his typewriter and pecked out the most famous headline in print-advertising history: “They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano. . .But When I Started to Play!”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

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

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

“sound of the orchestra but the intimacy of chamber music.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“What should a Pegasus person do in this situation?”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“serving food is a job, but improving morale is a mission.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“As I see it, I am not just in charge of food service; I am in charge of morale.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

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

“tangibility, rather than the magnitude, of the benefits that makes people care.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“making messages “emotional” is to make people care.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Ronald Reagan famously posed”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“human-scale principle allows us to bring our intuition to bear in assessing whether the content of a message is credible.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“Statistics aren’t inherently helpful; it’s the scale and context that make them so.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“increase an employee’s productivity by one to two minutes a day, you’ve paid back the cost of wireless.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“Concreteness is an indispensable component of sticky ideas.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“The simple act of committing to an answer makes the students more engaged and more curious about the outcome.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“contexts. To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from “What information do I need to convey?” to “What questions do I want my audience to ask?”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“Loewenstein argues that gaps cause pain.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“the Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it is preceded by the Huh? experience.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“finding the core,” and expressing it in the form of a compact idea,”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

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

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

“collection of generic properties of a concept or category.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die