Summary: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

• The book is about how to make ideas more memorable, persuasive, and impactful by using six principles: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories.
• The book explains each principle with examples from various domains and provides practical tips and tools for applying the principles to create sticky ideas.
• The book is not only relevant for people who want to communicate their ideas more effectively, but also for anyone who wants to understand how ideas work and why some ideas stick while others die.

“When an expert asks, ‘Will people understand my idea?’ her answer will be Yes, because she herself understands.” – Chip & Dan Heath

Made to Stick explains why some ideas become popular, while others wither and die.

The book “Made to Stick” lays out the most important characteristics of “stickiness”; that is, what makes ideas “stick” in the mind, and how to make them work for you.

Once we know something, it’s hard to imagine what it was like to not know it. Psychologists call this the curse of knowledge. This ‘curse’ impedes our ability to share ideas effectively because it makes us believe other people share our interests and other people care about our ideas as much as we do.

To deliver messages people find interesting and memorable (despite not having our knowledge and experience), you need to modify your ideas to include the following traits:

Simple: What one thing do I want my audience to remember?

In the 1992 US Presidential election, Bill Clinton was notorious for going off point. Clinton loved policy, and he wanted to address every issue that the country was facing at the time. But Clinton’s inability to prioritize policy issues made voters wary.

James Carville, Clinton’s advisor, got Clinton to stay on point by writing three phrases on a whiteboard for all the campaign workers to see. One of the phrases was: “It’s the economy, stupid.” The United States economy was in the middle of a recession and needed to be the central talking point of every interview. The message was simple and memorable.

What’s the main message you want your audience to walk away with? If you want your audience to remember anything you say, deliver fewer ideas. Two or three ideas are OK, but one idea is best.

Unexpected: How can I make my message surprising and insightful?

When a manager at Nordstrom’s (a retail store in the United States) wants to explain the importance of customer service, she tells the story of the Nordstrom’s employee who gift-wrapped items bought at Macy’s or the story of the Nordstrom’s employee who started a customer’s car in the middle of a snow storm.

“Tell them something that is uncommon sense.”- Chip & Dan Heath

Concrete: How can I make my message easy to understand?

When managers at Trader Joe’s (a grocery store in the United States) explains their target customer, they don’t say ‘upscale budget-conscious customer,’ they say, ‘unemployed college professor.’

Use concrete language everyone understands. Leave out the jargon. Stop trying to sound smart.

“The beauty of concrete language—language that is specific and sensory—is that everyone understands your message in a similar way.” – Chip & Dan Heath

Credible: How can I make my message believable?

When the directors of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange (LLDE) company tried to convince a workshop of people that their core value was ‘diversity,’ the audience seemed skeptical. One of the audience members said, “everyone claims that they value diversity, but you’re a dance company. You’re probably filled with a bunch of twenty-five-year-old dancers, all of them tall and thin. Some of them are probably people of color, but is that diversity?”

Peter DiMuro, the artistic director of the LLDE, responded with an extreme example, “as a matter of fact,” he said, “the longest-term member of our company is a seventy-three-year-old man named Thomas Dwyer…” This detail—seventy-three-year-old Thomas Dwyer—silenced the skepticism in the room.” – Chip & Dan Heath

Make your message credible by telling extreme anecdotes with vivid detail.

Emotion: How can I make my audience care?

In 2004, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that people were more likely to donate money when they heard a message about a starving seven-year-old girl in Africa than a message about 3 million starving children in Africa.

When you tell a personal story about yourself, someone you know, or someone you read about, your audience can put themselves in their shoes and feels that person’s struggle and success.

“If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” – Mother Teresa

Story: How can I keep my audience engaged?

“Telling stories with visible goals and barriers shifts the audience into a problem-solving mode…. (we) empathize with the main characters and start cheering them on when they confront their problems: “Look out behind you!” “Tell him off now!” “Don’t open that door!” – Chip & Dan Heath

The most engaging stories are mysteries that keep your audience wondering:

• “What’s going to happen next?”
• “How is this going to end?”

Review

Retention

Mega-bestsellers Chip and Dan Heath break down the components of ideas that stick, and offer suggestions for creating them.

In this New York Times bestseller, Chip Heath – a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business – and Dan Heath – senior fellow at Duke University’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) – offer an engaging guide to devising ideas with maximum “stickiness.”

The Heath brothers take as their starting point Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell’s use of “stickiness” to describe innovations that are likely to find an audience. They embellish and expand his concept using many of his familiar methods – anecdotes, historical examples, non-linear conclusion-drawing and, in some cases, padding otherwise insubstantial ideas.

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. CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

Like Gladwell, the Heaths have a knack for the memorable acronym. They demonstrate how communication that is simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional and story-based (acronym: SUCCESs) makes ideas easy to understand, act on and remember. The Heaths, accordingly, provide mostly practical guidance that is easy to understand, specific, engaging and motivating – in other words, sticky.

SUCCESs

Comprehensible and memorable sticky ideas influence people’s thoughts and behaviors. The Heaths insist you can craft a sticky delivery for ideas that matter.

Sticky idea creation has an arch-nemesis: the Curse of Knowledge. People in charge of designing a sticky idea almost always know too much already.

There are, in fact, only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge. The first is not to learn anything. The second is to take your ideas and transform them. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

Academics and for-hire experts are the most likely to fall prey to this curse. Being subject experts, they’ve forgotten how little other people know and thus they default to associations that are lost on folks who don’t share their education, context or experience.

A Proverb

Keeping an idea simple doesn’t mean dumbing it down. Simplicity means stripping out details and subtleties until you reveal the idea’s essence. Present an idea succinctly, with elegance.

It is possible to create complexity through the artful use of simplicity. If simple ideas are staged and layered correctly, they can very quickly become complex. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

Your sticky idea is, ideally, a proverb: simple, brief and profound.

Guessing Machine

The human mind, the Heaths note – as do many authors – pays attention to novelty and change. To get its attention, break a pattern by doing something different and unexpected.

If you want your ideas to be stickier, you’ve got to break someone’s guessing machine and then fix it. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

Surprise occurs when your internal guessing machine turns out to be wrong. When you surprise people, they want to know why their expectations weren’t correct. Help people make sense of their surprise, and your idea will stick.

Concrete Language

Familiar, concrete, specific language helps people grasp an idea and retain it. If you use vague, general terms, people will interpret them subjectively or find them too heady. For instance, proverbs and fables use tangible descriptions set in recognizable contexts.

Language is often abstract, but life is not abstract…Abstraction is the luxury of the expert. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

Concrete language derives from the senses – what you can see, touch, smell, hear and taste. People retrieve sense-related information more easily than they retrieve abstract concepts, so the more sensory cues your sticky idea invokes, the more memorable it will become.

Using concrete terms puts everyone – no matter their level of expertise – on the same footing, thus facilitating communication and collaboration. To get sticky, keep your vocabulary in the realm of the senses.

Authority

If someone your audience trusts, likes, admires or finds authentic endorses your idea, his or her credibility enhances your concept’s stickiness.

Statistics also can create credibility, not because people remember the numbers – they don’t – but because numbers create a visceral impression of validity, thus bypassing rational processes.

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. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

Use data to develop and test an idea. Never massage data or spin it to support a preconceived notion. Data offers your audience a way to verify a sticky idea’s claims for themselves.

Emotional Content

Emotional connection moves people to action. You want to transfer an emotional charge from something people already care about to your sticky idea.

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. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

People respond to emotional appeals to their higher ideals or group interests. The Heaths explain that people make choices by calculating likely outcomes and picking the outcome that’s most valuable to them or by asking themselves how those who are “like them” – or like the people they want to be – behave in similar circumstances. When you invoke the identity-based mode, people might take action due to affinity instead of self-interest.

Stories

Telling a story can drive people to act. Stories provide concrete contexts for ideas and actions. People enter into stories as their brains create physical, visual, spatial and auditory simulations.

Stories are like flight simulators for the brain…Inside, we’re getting ready to act. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

Exploit three plotlines: the Challenge plot – an underdog overcomes tremendous odds, exemplifying courage and perseverance; the Connection plot – people bridge social divides for the common good, evoking compassion and service; and the Creativity plot – a story of breakthrough solutions and innovations that inspire people to new approaches.

Internal Communications

Sticky strategic communication provides a common language for discussing problems and developing solutions.

The moral is implicit in the story, but the story is not implicit in the moral. And the story…is more likely to guide behavior. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

Make your strategic messaging concrete, story-driven and unexpected – that is, counterintuitive.

Stickier

Urban legends, celebrity scandals, product rumors and political lies are sticky. Debunking and fact-checking seldom unstick them.

We should fight sticky with stickier, meet Scotch tape with duct tape. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

The authors suggest pivoting the discussion from the original idea to an even stickier, but healthier, more constructive one. Easier said than done, perhaps, but still proactive.

Review

The Heaths are seasoned, successful hands at the intellectual advice game and understand how to stretch a magazine article into a book, with only a few padded sequences. They have a knack for understated wit and for letting their amusing examples of people’s idiocy or gullibility stand on their own without excess explanation. Whether they can teach you to make your ideas sticky is another question. The Heaths offer a blueprint that reads well and provokes thought, but doesn’t quite provide the cognitive leaps that stickiness requires. It does, however, prove a worthy starting place.

Chip Heath and Dan Heath co-authored Switch, The Myth of the Garage, The Power of Moments and Decisive. Dan Heath also wrote Upstream; and Chip Heath co-authored Making Numbers Count with Karla Starr.

About the author

Chip Heath is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University. He holds a BSc in industrial engineering and a PhD in psychology.

His brother Dan Heath is an academic, consultant and founder of the publishing company Thinkwell, which takes a new, didactic approach to writing textbooks.

CHIP HEATH is a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He lives in Los Gatos, California. DAN HEATH is a senior fellow at Duke University’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE). He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. The Heath brothers are the bestselling authors of Made to Stick and Switch. They write a regular column in Fast Company magazine, and have appeared on Today, NPR’s Morning Edition, MSNBC, CNBC, and have been featured in Time, People and US News and World Report.

Chip Heath is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, and his brother Dan Heath is a senior fellow at Duke University. They have co-authored two other bestsellers: Made to Stick and Decisive.

Genres

Business, Psychology, Leadership, Self Help, Communication, Design, Entrepreneurship, Management, Christian Scientist Monitor, Interpersonal Relations, Marketing, Social Psychology, Social Sciences

Table of Contents

Introduction: What sticks?
1. Simple
2. Unexpected
3. Concrete
4. Credible
5. Emotional
6. Stories
Epilogue: What sticks.

Review

The book is about how to make ideas more memorable, persuasive, and impactful. The authors identify six principles that make ideas “stick” in people’s minds and hearts. These principles are:

• Simplicity: Finding the core of the idea and expressing it in a compact and profound way.
• Unexpectedness: Grabbing attention by breaking patterns, creating curiosity, and revealing surprises.
• Concreteness: Making the idea clear and vivid by using sensory language, examples, and analogies.
• Credibility: Making the idea believable by using sources, statistics, details, and demonstrations.
• Emotions: Making the idea appealing by connecting with feelings, values, and identities.
• Stories: Making the idea inspiring by telling narratives that illustrate, simulate, and motivate.

The authors explain each principle with examples from various domains, such as business, education, journalism, politics, and social movements. They also provide practical tips and tools for applying the principles to create sticky ideas.

I enjoyed reading the book and found it very useful and insightful. The authors write in a clear, engaging, and humorous style that makes the book easy to follow and fun to read. They use a lot of stories and anecdotes to illustrate their points and keep the reader’s interest. They also show how the principles can be used for different purposes and audiences, such as persuading customers, teaching students, influencing voters, or changing behaviors.

The book is not only relevant for people who want to communicate their ideas more effectively, but also for anyone who wants to understand how ideas work and why some ideas stick while others die. The book helps the reader to think critically about the ideas they encounter and to evaluate their quality and impact. The book also challenges the reader to generate their own sticky ideas and to test them using the principles.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning more about how to make their ideas stick. The book is not only a valuable source of knowledge and insight, but also a source of inspiration and creativity. It is a book that can change one’s perspective, attitude, and behavior for the better.