Improving Our “Signals” and “Beings”

This is a book review of Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

Why is it that urban legends, conspiracy theories, and public health scares can reach the other side of the world; while most businesses, teachers, and public speakers cannot get their ideas to reach the very person they are talking to? The answer lies in Made to Stick.

Everyday we get pounded with information from people. Most of it slips straight off us like food sliding off Teflon. “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.” said Herbert Simon, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics. “Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick teaches you more than how to grab people’s attention. It will provide you with an exact formula for getting your ideas in people’s minds and keeping them there. The two authors use their first of six principles, “Simplicity”, in their stickiness formula by making their six principles form an acronym SUCCESs:

1. Simplicity
2. Unexpectedness
3. Concreteness
4. Credibility
5. Emotions
6. Stories

Reading a book about sticky ideas makes you hope the authors’ make their own principles sticky – and Chip and Dan Heath make all their principles stick using exactly what they teach. Each principle contains many real-life, and not so real, examples of ideas that have stuck in people’s minds. The stories used are really entertaining, most notably is the urban legend of Kidney thieves where an attractive lady seduces and drugs men who later awaken to find their kidneys have been stolen.

While Chip Heath is a Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and Dan Heath has conducted research for Harvard Business School, they don’t throw technical information at you – that would break their principles. Their book embodies many entertaining stories that are very practical. They also give you several exercises, and allow you to compare your answers with their answers, to practice the principles.

Teachers, public speakers, marketers, and experts in their field of choice, need to read Made to Stick. The book’s ideas focus around the Curse of Knowledge, a principle that explains why experts fail to make their ideas stick in students’ minds. Business managers fall into the trap of thinking they have successfully presented their proposal, or convinced people to buy into their idea, when they have finished a PowerPoint presentation. “What they’ve done is share data”, says the authors. Expressing your thoughts is one thing; it is entirely another thing for people to be convinced and remember your words.

I purchased the book to help me better communicate the communication skills I teach in books and articles, but I found how important it is to use as much of the SUCCESs formula in your everyday conversations as possible. Over the past few weeks, I’ve come to realize how most charismatic and persuasive persons naturally use the book’s principles.

If you want you, and your ideas, to be remembered in conversations and presentations, then the New York Times Best Seller Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die is exactly the book you need. You can grab your copy now from Amazon by clicking here.

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I'm creator of a highly praised program called "Communication Secrets of Making People Like You". You can read about it here and order it here.