# Made to Stick  ## Metadata - Author: [[Chip Heath, Dan Heath]] - Full Title: Made to Stick - Category: #books ## Highlights - CSPI called a press conference on September 27, 1992. Here’s the message it presented: “A medium-sized ‘butter’ popcorn at a typical neighborhood movie theater contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings—combined!” The folks at CSPI didn’t neglect the visuals—they laid out the full buffet of greasy food for the television cameras. An entire day’s worth of unhealthy eating, displayed on a table. All that saturated fat—stuffed into a single bag of popcorn. The story was an immediate sensation, featured on CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN. It made the front pages of USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post’s Style section. ([Location 98](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000N2HCKQ&location=98)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Kidney Heist, too, shares many of these traits. A highly unexpected outcome: a guy who stops for a drink and ends up one kidney short of a pair. A lot of concrete details: the ice-filled bathtub, the weird tube protruding from the lower back. Emotion: fear, disgust, suspicion. ([Location 214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000N2HCKQ&location=214)) - Tags: [[blue]] - PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any.” 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. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it. ([Location 230](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000N2HCKQ&location=230)) - Tags: [[blue]] - PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. A bag of popcorn is as unhealthy as a whole day’s worth of fatty foods! 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. How do you keep students engaged during the forty-eighth history class of the year? We can engage people’s curiosity over a long period of time by systematically “opening gaps” in their knowledge—and then filling those gaps. ([Location 236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000N2HCKQ&location=236)) - Tags: [[blue]] - PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS How do we make our ideas clear? We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions—they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. 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 truths are often encoded in concrete language: “A bird in hand is… ([Location 242](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000N2HCKQ&location=242)) - Tags: [[blue]] - PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY How do we make people believe our ideas? When the former surgeon general C. Everett Koop talks about a public-health issue, most people accept his ideas without skepticism. But in most day-to-day situations we don’t enjoy this authority. Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves—a “try before you buy” philosophy for the world of ideas. When we’re trying to build a case for something, most of us instinctively grasp for hard numbers. But in many cases this is exactly the wrong approach. In the sole U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable statistics demonstrating the… ([Location 247](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000N2HCKQ&location=247)) - Tags: [[blue]] - PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. In the case of movie popcorn, we make them feel disgusted by its unhealthiness. The statistic “37 grams” doesn’t elicit any emotions. Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness. For instance, it’s difficult to get teenagers to quit smoking by… ([Location 255](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000N2HCKQ&location=255)) - Tags: [[blue]] - PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. Firefighters naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations. Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical… ([Location 260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000N2HCKQ&location=260)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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… ([Location 267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000N2HCKQ&location=267)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It’s hard to be a tapper. The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. When they’re tapping, they can’t imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. 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. The tapper/listener experiment is reenacted every day across the world. The tappers and listeners are CEOs and frontline employees, teachers and students, politicians and voters, marketers and customers, writers and readers. All of these groups rely on ongoing communication, but, like the tappers and listeners, they suffer from enormous information imbalances. When a CEO discusses “unlocking shareholder value,” there is a tune playing in her head that the employees can’t hear. ([Location 291](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000N2HCKQ&location=291)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The surprising lesson of this story: Highly creative ads are more predictable than uncreative ones. It’s like Tolstoy’s quote: “All happy families resemble each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” All creative ads resemble one another, but each loser is uncreative in its own way. ([Location 332](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000N2HCKQ&location=332)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Commander’s Intent manages to align the behavior of soldiers at all levels without requiring play-by-play instructions from their leaders. When people know the desired destination, they’re free to improvise, as needed, in arriving there. ([Location 388](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000N2HCKQ&location=388)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Combat Maneuver Training Center, the unit in charge of military simulations, recommends that officers arrive at the Commander’s Intent by asking themselves two questions: If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission, we must _________________. The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is ________________. ([Location 395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000N2HCKQ&location=395)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It’s hard to make ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, chaotic environment. If we’re to succeed, the first step is this: Be simple. Not simple in terms of “dumbing down” or “sound bites.” You don’t have to speak in monosyllables to be simple. 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. ([Location 401](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000N2HCKQ&location=401)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” A designer of simple ideas should aspire to the same goal: knowing how much can be wrung out of an idea before it begins to lose its essence. ([Location 410](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000N2HCKQ&location=410)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000N2HCKQ&location=412)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The process of writing a lead—and avoiding the temptation to bury it—is a helpful metaphor for the process of finding the core. Finding the core and writing the lead both involve forced prioritization. Suppose you’re a wartime reporter and you can telegraph only one thing before the line gets cut, what would it be? There’s only one lead, and there’s only one core. You must choose. ([Location 475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000N2HCKQ&location=475)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Prioritization rescues people from the quicksand of decision angst, and that’s why finding the core is so valuable. The people who listen to us will be constantly making decisions in an environment of uncertainty. ([Location 540](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000N2HCKQ&location=540)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “All of us know that the main reason anybody reads a local newspaper is for local names and pictures. That’s the one thing we can do better than anybody else. And that’s the thing our readers can’t get anywhere else. Always remember, the mayor of Angier and the mayor of Lillington are just as important to those towns as the mayor of New York is to his people.” ([Location 622](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000N2HCKQ&location=622)) - Tags: [[blue]]