Book: Made to Stick

"Made to Stick" by Chip and Dan Heath

Overall Theme: The book explores why some ideas are naturally "sticky" – easily understood, remembered, and able to create a lasting impact – while others fade away. It aims to provide a framework for making ideas stickier, whether in business, education, or everyday communication.

Core Principles of Sticky Ideas (SUCCESs): The authors propose six key principles that make ideas stick:

1. Simple: Find the core of the idea.
2. Unexpected: Grab people's attention with surprise.
3. Concrete: Make the idea clear and memorable through sensory details.
4. Credible: Give the idea believability.
5. Emotional: Help people see the importance of the idea.
6. Stories: Empower and inspire people to act.

Key Ideas and Examples:

• Unexpectedness:The Surprise Brow: "PHRAUG and TAYBL cause the surprise brow because they look unfamiliar but sound familiar. The “Oh!” reaction comes when we realize that PHRAUG is just a funny way to spell FROG." This highlights how breaking patterns and creating a "gap" in understanding can grab attention.
• The Gap Theory of Curiosity: "Curiosity, he says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge." The authors emphasize that highlighting what people don't know, and then offering clues, is a powerful way to generate interest and engagement. Creating mysteries. "What are Saturn's rings made of?"
• The Importance of Initial Interest: "The trite expression we always use is No plan survives contact with the enemy,” says Colonel Tom Kolditz, the head of the behavioral sciences division at West Point. “You may start off trying to fight your plan, but the enemy gets a vote. Unpredictable things happen—the weather changes, a key asset is destroyed, the enemy responds in a way you don’t expect. Many armies fail because they put all their emphasis into creating a plan that becomes useless ten minutes into the battle.”
• Movie Turning Points: Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.
• Concreteness:The Power of Sensory Details: "Naturally sticky ideas are stuffed full of concrete words and images— think of the Kentucky Fried Rat or the Kidney Heist’s ice-filled bathtub." Concreteness relies on details and mental images to build memories. The Kidney Heist legend would have been far less sticky if the man had woken up and found that someone had absconded with his self-esteem.
• The Velcro Theory of Memory: The authors suggest that concreteness makes ideas "stick" because it gives our brains more "hooks" to latch onto. "You can actually test this idea for yourself. The following set of sentences will ask you to remember various ideas. Spend five or ten seconds lingering on each one—don’t rush through them. As you move from one sentence to another, you’ll notice that it feels different to remember different kinds of things."
• Landscapes as Eco-Celebrities: Instead of talking in terms of land area, it talked about a “landscape.” A landscape is a contiguous plot of land with unique, environmentally precious features. The TNC set a goal of preserving fifty landscapes—of which twenty-five were an immediate priority—over a ten-year period. Five landscapes per year sounds more realistic than 2 million acres per year, and it’s much more concrete.
• Visualizing "White Things": The "white things in your refrigerator" exercise shows how concreteness focuses the brain. "Why does this happen? Because concreteness is a way of mobilizing and focusing your brain."
• Pomelo Schema: "When we tell you that a pomelo is like a grapefruit, you call up a mental image of a grapefruit. Then we tell you what to change about it: It’s “supersized.” Your visualized grapefruit grows accordingly."
• Credibility:Authorities vs. Anti-Authorities: "A commercial claiming that a new shampoo makes your hair bouncier has less credibility than hearing your best friend rave about how a new shampoo made her own hair bouncier." Trustworthiness and honesty, rather than status, can make a source credible.
• The Power of Details: Provide enough detail to convince the audience of the truth.
• The Sinatra Test: "If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere." This highlights the power of a single example to establish credibility in a domain.
• Testable Credentials: "Wendy’s made a falsifiable claim. Any customer with a ruler and a scale could have verified the claim’s truth value." Giving people a way to verify the claims. See for yourself - our burgers have more beef.
• Edible Fabrics: A story can unite all three internal credibility sources.
• Emotional:The importance of self-interest: "First and foremost, try to get self-interest into every headline you write. Make your headline suggest to readers that here is something they want. This rule is so fundamental that it would seem obvious. Yet the rule is violated every day by scores of writers.”
• Transcendence: "Think about that: I am in charge of morale. In terms of Maslow’s hierarchy, Lee is going for Transcendence."
• The Identity Model: "The thought process would be more like this: “I’m a firefighter. You’re offering me a popcorn popper to get me to view a film on safety. But firefighters aren’t the kind of people who need little gifts to motivate us to learn about safety. We risk our lives, going into burning buildings to save people. Shame on you for implying that I need a popcorn popper!”
• Stories:Stories as Simulation: "When we hear a story, our minds move from room to room. When we hear a story, we simulate it. But what good is simulation?" Stories act as mental flight simulators.
• Stories as Inspiration: Jared, the 425 pound fast food dieter. Look for three key plots: Challenge (to overcome obstacles), Connection (to get along or reconnect), Creativity (to inspire a new way of thinking).
• Springboard Stories: “The conventional view of communication is to ignore the little voice inside the head and hope it stays quiet and that the message will somehow get through,” Denning says. But he has a different recommendation: “Don’t ignore the little voice…. Instead, work in harmony with it. Engage it by giving it something to do. Tell a story in a way that elicits a second story from the little voice.”

Recurring Themes:

• The Curse of Knowledge: This concept is mentioned in the epilogue. It refers to the difficulty that experts have in understanding the perspective of novices because they have forgotten what it's like to lack the knowledge they possess. This can be a major barrier to effective communication.
• Schemas: Prior knowledge and experiences create "schemas" that act as mental frameworks for understanding new information. Sticky ideas often leverage existing schemas to make new concepts easier to grasp (e.g., comparing a pomelo to a grapefruit). Also schema violation.
• Mental Simulation: When we hear a story, our minds actively simulate it.
• Decision Making: "The study about the Christmas vacation in Hawaii study is in Amos Tversky and Eldar Shafir, “The Disjunction Effect in Choice Under Uncertainty,” Psychological Science 3 (1992): 305–9."

Practical Applications:

• The book is designed to be practical. The authors include "Clinics" that offer advice on applying the SUCCESs principles to specific communication challenges, such as fundraising, explaining foreign aid, or teaching algebra.
• Making ideas stick: The Easy Reference Guide Notes

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