MADE TO STICK by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

• Good ideas often have a hard time succeeding in the world.
• 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.
• There is no “formula” for a sticky idea—we don’t want to overstate the case. But sticky ideas do draw from a common set of traits, which make them more likely to succeed.
• PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY
• To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize. Saying something short is not the mission—sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound.
• PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS
• We can use surprise—an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus—to grab people’s attention. But surprise doesn’t last. For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity.
• PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS
• We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information.
• Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images—ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors—because our brains are wired to remember concrete data. In proverbs, abstract
• Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.
• PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY
• Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials.
• PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS
• We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions.
• PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES
• Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.
• To summarize, here’s our checklist for creating a successful idea: a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. A clever observer will note that this sentence can be compacted into the acronym SUCCESs. This is sheer coincidence, of course.
• 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.
• You can’t unlearn what you already know.
• If you want to spread your ideas to other people, you should work within the confines of the rules that have allowed other ideas to succeed over time. You want to invent new ideas, not new rules.
• The planning process forces people to think through the right issues.
• 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.
• When people know the desired destination, they’re free to improvise, as needed, in arriving there.
• No plan survives contact with the enemy.
• What we mean by “simple” is finding the core of the idea. “Finding the core” means stripping an idea down to its most critical essence. To get to the core, we’ve got to weed out superfluous and tangential elements. But that’s the easy part. The hard part is weeding out ideas that may be really important but just aren’t the most important idea.
• There are two steps in making your ideas sticky—Step 1 is to find the core, and Step 2 is to translate the core using the SUCCESs checklist.
• A well-thought-out simple idea can be amazingly powerful in shaping behavior.
• Core messages help people avoid bad choices by reminding them of what’s important.
• Avoid burying the lead. Don’t start with something interesting but irrelevant in hopes of entertaining the audience. Instead, work to make the core message itself more interesting.
• Simple messages are core and compact.
• The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be.
• Proverbs are helpful in guiding individual decisions in environments with shared standards. Those shared standards are often ethical or moral norms. Proverbs offer rules of thumb for the behavior of individuals.
• Great simple ideas have an elegance and a utility that make them function a lot like proverbs.
• Compact ideas help people learn and remember a core message.
• Our messages have to be compact, because we can learn and remember only so much information at once.
• most people in the world do complicated things.
• Psychologists define schema as a collection of generic properties of a concept or category. Schemas consist of lots of prerecorded information stored in our memories.
• Good teachers intuitively use lots of schemas.
• Schemas help us create complex messages from simple materials.
• An accurate but useless idea is still useless.
• 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.
• A great way to avoid useless accuracy, and to dodge the Curse of Knowledge, is to use analogies.
• Analogies make it possible to understand a compact message because they invoke concepts that you already know.
• Generative metaphors and proverbs both derive their power from a clever substitution: They substitute something easy to think about for something difficult.
• Proverbs are the Holy Grail of simplicity. Coming up with a short, compact phrase is easy. Anybody can do it. On the other hand, coming up with a profound compact phrase is incredibly difficult.
• What we’ve tried to show in this chapter is that the effort is worth it—that “finding the core,” and expressing it in the form of a compact idea, can be enduringly powerful.
• The first problem of communication is getting people’s attention.
• The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern.
• Our brain is designed to be keenly aware of changes.
• Surprise gets our attention.
• Interest keeps our attention.
• If we can make our ideas more unexpected, they will be stickier.
• Schemas help us predict what will happen and, consequently, how we should make decisions.
• Unexpected ideas are more likely to stick because surprise makes us pay attention and think. That extra attention and thinking sears unexpected events into our memories. Surprise gets our attention.
• Surprise is the opposite of predictability.
• Here is the bottom line for our everyday purposes: If you want your ideas to be stickier, you’ve got to break someone’s guessing machine and then fix it.
• So, a good process for making your ideas stickier is:
• (1) Identify the central message you need to communicate—find the core;
• (2) Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message—i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn’t it already happening naturally?
• (3) Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience’s guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.
• Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. When messages sound like common sense, they float gently in one ear and out the other.
• A journalists gets the facts and reports them. To get the facts, you track down the five Ws—who, what, where, when, and why.
• The best way to get people’s attention is to break their existing schemas directly.
• Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure.
• Science doesn’t have a monopoly on mysteries. Mysteries exist wherever there are questions without obvious answers.
• A schema violation is a onetime transaction. Boom, something has changed.
• Curiosity, he says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.
• The trick to convincing people that they need our message, according to Loewenstein, is to first highlight some specific knowledge that they’re missing.
• To hold people’s interest, we can use the gap theory of curiosity to our advantage. A little bit of mystery goes a long way.
• Making people commit to a prediction can help prevent overconfidence.
• Overconfident people are more likely to recognize a knowledge gap when they realize that others disagree with them.
• Curiosity comes from gaps in our knowledge.
• Knowledge gaps create interest. But to prove that the knowledge gaps exist, it may be necessary to highlight some knowledge first. “Here’s what you know. Now here’s what you’re missing.”
• Unexpectedness, in the service of core principles, can have surprising longevity.
• Language is often abstract, but life is not abstract.
• Concreteness is an indispensable component of sticky ideas.
• Concrete language helps people, especially novices, understand new concepts. Abstraction is the luxury of the expert.
• If you’ve got to teach an idea to a room full of people, and you aren’t certain what they know, concreteness is the only safe language.
• 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.
• Concrete ideas are easier to remember.
• Naturally sticky ideas are stuffed full of concrete words and images.
• The difference between an expert and a novice is the ability to think abstractly.
• Novices perceive concrete details as concrete details. Experts perceive concrete details as symbols of patterns and insights that they have learned through years of experience. And, because they are capable of seeing a higher level of insight, they naturally want to talk on a higher level.
• It’s easy to lose awareness that we’re talking like an expert. We start to suffer from the Curse of Knowledge,
• The moral of the story is to find a “universal language,” one that everyone speaks fluently. Inevitably, that universal language will be concrete.
• Concreteness makes targets transparent. Even experts need transparency.
• Concreteness creates a shared “turf” on which people can collaborate. Everybody in the room feels comfortable that they’re tackling the same challenge.
• To be simple—to find our core message—is quite difficult. (It’s certainly worth the effort, but let’s not kid ourselves that it’s easy.)
• We forget that other people don’t know what we know.
• A citizen of the modern world, constantly inundated with messages, learns to develop skepticism about the sources of those messages.
• Sometimes antiauthorities are even better than authorities.
• A person’s knowledge of details is often a good proxy for her expertise.
• But concrete details don’t just lend credibility to the authorities who provide them; they lend credibility to the idea itself.
• This is the most important thing to remember about using statistics effectively. Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It’s more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.
• Another way to bring statistics to life is to contextualize them in terms that are more human, more everyday.
• Statistics aren’t inherently helpful; it’s the scale and context that make them so.
• 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,
• 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.
• People often trust their intuition, but our intuition is flawed by identifiable biases. Still, most people feel pretty good about their intuition, and it’s hard to convince them otherwise.
• 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 are easier to remember. But often the things we remember are not an accurate summary of the world.
• People remember things better because they evoke more emotion, not because they are more frequent.
• Using testable credentials allows people to try out an idea for themselves.
• A few vivid details might be more persuasive than a barrage of statistics. An antiauthority might work better than an authority.
• the goal of making messages “emotional” is to make people care. Feelings inspire people to act.
• 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 make people care by appealing to the things that matter to them.
• In 1954, a psychologist named Abraham Maslow surveyed the research in psychology about what motivates people. He boiled down volumes of existing research to a list of needs and desires that people try to fulfill:
• Transcendence: help others realize their potential
• Self-actualization: realize our own potential, self-fulfillment, peak experiences
• Aesthetic: symmetry, order, beauty, balance
• Learning: know, understand, mentally connect
• Esteem: achieve, be competent, gain approval, independence, status
• Belonging: love, family, friends, affection
• Security: protection, safety, stability
• Physical: hunger, thirst, bodily comfort
• “Group interest” is often a better predictor of political opinions than self-interest.
• “Math is mental weight training” reminds us that, even in the most mundane situations, there’s an opportunity to move out of Maslow’s basement and into the higher levels of motivation.
• Asking “Why?” helps to remind us of the core values, the core principles, that underlie our ideas.
• 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.
• Why do people talk shop? Part of the reason is simply Humanity 101—we want to talk to other people about the things that we have in common.
• 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.
• Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something, but it’s the next best thing.
• Stories are like flight simulators for the brain.
• The more that training simulates the actions we must take in the world, the more effective it will be.
• We must fight the temptation to skip directly to the “tips” and leave out the story.
• 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.
• Creativity plots make us want to do something different, to be creative, to experiment with new approaches.
• Challenge plots inspire people to take on challenges and work harder.
• One major advantage of springboard stories is that they combat skepticism and create buy-in.
• Stories have the amazing dual power to simulate and to inspire.
• All of us tend to have a lot of “idea pride.” We want our message to endure in the form we designed.
• Ultimately, the test of our success as idea creators isn’t whether people mimic our exact words, it’s whether we achieve our goals.
• 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.
• 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
• The Curse of Knowledge can easily render this framework useless.
• Make the message simpler and use concrete language.
• Make sure your message is simple and concrete enough to be useful—turn it into a proverb
• Sticky = understandable, memorable, and effective in changing thought or behavior.
• SIX PRINCIPLES: SUCCESs
• SIMPLE
• UNEXPECTED
• CONCRETE
• CREDIBLE
• EMOTIONAL
• STORIES.
• Commander’s Intent. Determine the single most important thing.