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

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

February 21, 2012

This review will be on the book: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Other Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Why do some ideas succeed while others fail? How do we make our ideas stickier? These are what I believe are the main themes of this book in addition to over-coming the "Curse of Knowledge". As mentioned in the introduction of this book, "Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it" (pg. 20).

In other words our knowledge has cursed us. A good example of this is the study that tested a tapper and listener game. A person was asked to tap out the rhythm of a song and have another recognize it but the listener nearly always failed to guess the right song. With tappers given knowledge of the song title, it makes it impossible for them to imagine what it's like to "lack" the knowledge. "When they're tapping they can't imagine what it's like for the listeners to hear isolated tops rather than a song" (pg. 20). This book shows us how to make our ideas stickier and to make them eventually stick by following in these six principles including 1)Simplicity 2)Unexpectedness 3)Concreteness 4)Credibility 5)Emotions 6)Stories.

The Simple principle. Determining the single most important thing by distilling to the most important idea at the core by relentessly priotitizing. The core message should be shared like Adams made his "local focus" message stick. Now that Adams has found his core idea he communicates his core idea to this staff.

The Unexpected principle.How do I get people's attention? How do I keep it? Humans like to think in patterns, the key is to break these patterns. A precfect of this principle is when a Southwest airlines flight attendant surprizes passengers with her creativity while anouncing the mandatory safety instructions in a very unexpected way that go the attention of the passengers.She was enexpected breaking the pattern set by all previous flight attendents.

The Concrete principle. Concret is the easiest of the six traits of stickiness to accept and implement. One example of concrete is when something can be described or detected by the human senses. "A V-8 engine is concrete; "high performance" is abstract" (pg. 104).

The Credible principle. This chapter focuses on how to create credibility when you don't have such authority figures. There are several ways to creat credibility to include: 1)Use an anti-authority 2)use concrete details 3)use statistics 4)use something called the Sinatra Test and 5)use testable credentials. To hightlight on of the serveral cays to creat credibility I will talke about one example for the "Sinatra Test". "In