Made to Stick by Chip Heath

Made to Stick

6 min read

9/26/21

  • Principle 1: Simplicity

  • 'If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the 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. jury room they won't remember any.'

  • Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound

  • The Golden Rule

  • Principle 2: Unexpectedness

  • We can use surprise —an emotion whose function is to in- crease 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

  • We can engage people's curiosity over a long period of time by systematically 'opening gaps' in their knowledge—and then filling those gaps

  • Principle 3: Concreteness

  • We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information

  • 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. We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves

  • Principle 5: Emotions

  • Make them feel something

  • Principle 6: Stories

  • Mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment

  • When people know the desired destination, they're free to improvise, as needed, in arriving there

  • Be simple. Find the core of the idea

  • 'A designer knows he has achieved perfection not where there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.' - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  • Lead with the most important information

  • Simple = Core + Compact

  • The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be

  • The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: Break a pattern

  • To be satisfying, surprising must be 'post-dictable'

  • If you want your ideas to be stickier, you've got to break someone's guessing machine and then fix it

  • A good process for making your ideas stickier is:

  • Identify the central message you need to communicate—find the core

  • 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?

  • 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

  • It's your job, as a communicator, to expose the parts of your message that are uncommon sense

  • Huge numbers are difficult to grasp and hard to remember

  • Percentages are easier

  • Focus on tangible stats that people can understand

  • The best way to get people's attention is to break their existing schemas directly

  • What questions do I want my audience to ask?

  • Set the context and give people enough backstory that they start to care about the gaps in their knowledge

  • The way to get people to care is to provide context

  • 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.' Alternatively, you can set context so people care what comes next

  • There is value in sequencing information—not dumping a stack of information on someone at once but dropping a clue, then another clue, then another. This method of communication resembles flirting more than lecturing

  • It's easier to understand tangible actions than to understand an abstract strategy statement

  • Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it

  • Concrete language helps people understand new concepts. Abstraction is the luxury of the expert

  • High performance is abstract

  • V8 engine is concrete. Something you can examine with your senses

  • Using concreteness as a foundation for abstraction is not just good for mathematical instruction; it is a basic principle of understanding. Novices crave concreteness

  • 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

  • Concrete ideas are easier to remember

  • 'If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.' - Mother Teresa

  • For people to take action, they have to care

  • Charities have long since figured out the Mother Teresa effect— they know that donors respond better to individuals than to abstract causes

  • 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

  • People matter to themselves. One reliable way of making people care is by invoking self-interest

  • 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.

  • Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs:

  • 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

  • James March, a professor at Stanford University, proposes that we use two basic models to make decisions. The first model involves calculating consequences. We weigh our alternatives, assessing the value of each one, and we choose the alternative that yields us the most value. The second model is quite different. It assumes that people make decisions based on identity. They ask themselves three questions: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? And what do people like me do in this kind of situation?

  • The tactic of the 'Three Whys' can be useful in bypassing the Curse of Knowledge

  • 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

  • Shared from Twos ✌️

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