About 'Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Stick and Others Die'

TL;DR

This book shares about how to to maximize the stickiness of your ideas. The concepts shared may seem like common sense, but only in hindsight. It is a good reference on how to communicate effectively.

What I Learnt

Six principles to create ideas to maximize their stickiness:

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

Curse of Knowledge: Once we know something, it is hard to imagine what it was like to not know it. This hinders our ability to share our knowledge with others.

Simplicity

• Prioritize your “core” idea, and weed out everything else. Only the most important idea matters. Do not bury the lead.
• Share your most important information first.
• “If you say three things, you don’t say anything.”
• Tie your idea to a concept that most people already know.
• Use compact, stripped-down examples. Do not assume prior knowledge unless you have shared it.
• Accuracy vs. accessibility: If a message cannot be used to make predictions or decision, it is without value, no matter how accurate or comprehensive it is.

Unexpectedness

• Surprise gets attention - People will want to find out why they were surprised, so they can improve their guessing machines for the future. However, you will have to provide a fix.
• A process:
  1. Identify the central message you need to communicate. This is your core.
  2. What is counterintuitive about your core? (i.e. What are the unexpected implications? Why is it not happening naturally?)
  3. Break your audience’s guessing machines, then fix them.
• Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages.
• Shift your thinking from “What information I need to convey?” to “What questions do I want my audience to ask?“.
• Knowledge gaps create interest.
  • Highlight some knowledge first (e.g. “Here is what you know, and here is what is missing”).
  • Set context so people know what is coming next.
• Sequence information - drop a clue, then another, and another.

Concreteness

• Even the most abstract must eventually show up in the tangible. It is easier to understand tangibles than to understand an abstract.
• Abstraction will make it harder to coordinate with others since everyone may interpret the abstraction in very different ways.
• Concreteness can help people construct higher, more abstract insights. Abstraction demands some concrete foundation.
• Novices perceive concrete details as concrete details. Experts perceive concrete details as symbols of patterns and insights they have learnt through experience.
• It is important to find a “universal” language - one that everyone speaks fluently. Inevitably, that language will be concrete.
• Concrete things present challenges - a way of focusing your thoughts and bringing your existing knowledge to bear. Attitudes will change from reactive and critical to active and creative.
• What should be concrete is guided by the needs of your audience.

Credibility

• Use:
  1. External validation and statistics
  2. Vivid details
  3. Authorities
  4. Sinatra Test: If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere
• Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. Statistics should be used to illustrate a relationship. It is more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.
• Allow your audience to “try before they buy” your idea.

Emotions

• Get your audience to take off their analytical hats.
• Create empathy for specific individuals. Associate your ideas with things that people care about.
• Appeal to self-interest (e.g. “what is in it for me?”), but also identities (e.g. “what is in it for my group?“) - the people they are right now, and also the people they want to be.
• Focus on the tangibility, rather than the magnitude of the benefits that people care.

Stories

• Stories provide simulation (i.e. knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (i.e. motivation to act).
• Simulating past events is much more helpful than simulating future outcomes.
• You do not always have to create your own stories, learn to spot them using schemas.
  1. Challenge: Underdog, rags-to-riches, truimph of sheer willpower over adversity.
     • Makes us want to work harder, take on new challenges, and overcome obstacles.
  2. Connection: Developing a relationship that bridges a gap - racial, class, ethnic, religious, demographic, etc.
     • Makes us want to help others, be more tolerant of others, work with others, and love others.
  3. Creativity: Newton’s Apple, etc.
     • Makes us want to do something different, to be creative, and to experiment with new approaches.
• Springboard stories are stories that let people see how an existing problem might change. This combats skepticism and create buy-in.
• Stories engage the audience and involve people with the idea.
• Telling stories with visible goals and barriers shift the audience into a problem-solving mode, instead of being argumentative.