Made to Stick

The Heath brothers start from an unfairness. Urban legends, conspiracy theories and health scares spread by themselves, while people with something worth saying, teachers, managers, journalists, cannot get an idea to survive a week. Their claim is that this is not about the truth of the idea but about its form, and that the ideas which stick share six traits, which can be deliberately built in. Those traits are simplicity, meaning the core of an idea rather than a shortened version of everything; unexpectedness, which opens a gap in someone's understanding that they then want closed; concreteness, since abstractions are not remembered; credibility, often supplied by a detail the listener can test themselves; emotion, which in practice means one person rather than a statistic; and a story, which is what makes a message repeatable by the person who heard it. They illustrate the framework with successes and failures side by side, and treat the ability to make an idea stick as a craft that can be learned rather than a talent.

Written from the publisher description, Open Library.

What this vault takes from it

Reliability

Not audited here. 1 note in this vault draws on it.

People

• Chip Heath