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Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die Audio CD – Unabridged, January 9, 2007
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“Anyone interested in influencing others—to buy, to vote, to learn, to diet, to give to charity or to start a revolution—can learn from this book.”—The Washington Post
Mark Twain once observed, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus news stories circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas—entrepreneurs, teachers, politicians, and journalists—struggle to make them “stick.”
In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the human scale principle, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating curiosity gaps. Along the way, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds—from the infamous “kidney theft ring” hoax to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony—draw their power from the same six traits.
Made to Stick will transform the way you communicate. It’s a fast-paced tour of success stories (and failures): the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of the Mother Teresa Effect; the elementary-school teacher whose simulation actually prevented racial prejudice.
Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, Made to Stick shows us the vital principles of winning ideas—and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.
- Print length0 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House Audio
- Publication dateJanuary 9, 2007
- Dimensions5.1 x 1.1 x 6 inches
- ISBN-100739341340
- ISBN-13978-0739341346
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“Utterly compelling.”—Los Angeles Times
“Surprising and provocative.”—The New York Sun
“Savvy.”—People
“Fun to read and solidly researched.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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- Publisher : Random House Audio; Unabridged edition (January 9, 2007)
- Language : English
- Audio CD : 0 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0739341340
- ISBN-13 : 978-0739341346
- Item Weight : 7.5 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.1 x 1.1 x 6 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,314,755 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,784 in Popular Social Psychology & Interactions
- #7,088 in Communication Skills
- #34,768 in Motivational Self-Help (Books)
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About the authors

Chip Heath is a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, teaching courses on business strategy and organizations. He is the co-author (along with his brother, Dan) of three books. Their latest book, Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions in Life and Work was published in spring of 2013 and debuted at #1 on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list and #2 on the New York Times. Their 2010 book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, hit #1 on both bestseller lists. Their first book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, spent two years on the Business Week bestseller list and was an Amazon Top 10 Business Book for both editors and readers. Their books have been translated into over 30 languages including Thai, Arabic, and Lithuanian. Chip has consulted with clients ranging from Google and Gap to The Nature Conservancy and the American Heart Association.

Dan Heath is the co-author, along with his brother Chip, of four New York Times bestsellers: Made to Stick, Switch, Decisive, and The Power of Moments. The Heaths' books have sold over 3 million copies worldwide and been translated into 33 languages.
Heath's fifth book, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen, will be released on March 3, 2020. Heath is a Senior Fellow at Duke University's CASE center, which supports entrepreneurs who are fighting for social good. A graduate of the University of Texas and Harvard Business School, he lives now in Durham, NC.
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Others may experience over time they develop habits that slowly erode their mind's sensitivity. The inevitable pain and disappointment of moments such as delivering your ideas at a business meeting or a conference have caused you to set up walls around your mind. Much of this is understandable. But, there's no way around the truth: your mind is out of tune with confidence it was created to maintain. As we live in community, communication is the way for us to feel the unity. The book is even greater because the authors, Chip and Dan Heath, apply their SUCCESs theory onto practical situation to help readers understand more clearly. Without the SUCCESs rule, some kinds of communications might ease our conscience temporarily but would do nothing to expose the deeper secrets we carry and deliver. And, it might be the secrets that keep our minds in turmoil. Worse, this kind of communication could actually fuel destructive behavior rather than curb it. The rules the authors explain in this book might seem the things you would feel that you already know. But, these are the things you could easily ignore. The book is a great reference to keep you on succeeding the efficient deliverability of your ideas.
Chapter summary
Chapter1: Simple
When you needed to deliver your message in a brief and compact way, how would you prepare to deliver it to your audiences or readers? Simplicity is the key and first step to make a message sticky to others. Making it simple does not mean that you need to bring out your most important idea. It is critical to find the core. According to the authors, "finding the core isn't synonymous with communicating the core." But, that simplicity must come with its value. Like the metaphor of a company for the employees to be encouraged, your message needs to be simple and important to make your message remain not just in your mind but others as well.
Chapter2: Unexpected
"We can't demand attention. We must attract it" says the authors in the book. In order to grab people's attention, your message may be attractive with unexpectedness. Breaking a pattern could be one way. For example, the old emergency siren was too monotonic to stimulate our sensory systems and therefore failing to attract our attention. As the siren gets systematically and audibly improved, people hear much brighter and more stimulating sound and therefore being aware of some situation. In order to catch people's attention, you need to break the ordinary patterns. According to the book, "Our brain is designed to keenly aware of changes." The more you learn knowledge, the greater the knowledge gap you would get. Because we sometimes tend to perceive that we know everything, it's hard to glue the gap. However, curiosity comes from the knowledge gaps, so these knowledge gaps can be interesting.
Chapter3: Concrete
Humans can hallucinate and imagine what we've experienced in visual, audible, or any other sensory pathways. When we use all our sensory systems to visualize ideas or messages, then the ideas get much more concrete. As an example the authors provide in this chapter, "a bathtub full of ice" in the Kidney Theft legend is an example of abstract moral truths that makes it concrete.
Chapter4: Credible
When you are a scientist, you believe more in the things that are scientifically proven or that are referred to many other studies or to the words or the theories that the well-known scientist has established. That much, credibility makes or deceives people believe your ideas. Both authorities and antiauthorities work. We present results, charts, statistics, pictures and other data to make people believe. "But concrete details don't just lend credibility to the authorities who provide them; they lend credibility to the idea itself."
Chapter5: Emotional
What's in it for you? It is a good example of the power of association. Sometimes, we need to grab people's emotion. It does not mean tear jerking, dramatic, or romantic. It means that your idea must pull out people's care and attachment to it. However, we don't always have to create this emotional attachment. "In fact, many ideas use a sort of piggybacking strategy, associating themselves with emotions that already exist (Made to Stick)." People can make decisions based on two models: the consequence model and the identity model. The consequence model can be rational self-interest, while the identity model is that people identify such situations like what type of situation is this?
Chapter6: Stories
Have you seen and heard the story of the college student from the Subway campaign? He's the guy who lost hundreds of pounds eating Subway sandwiches. The story inspires people and even connects to people's real life. Like the book, Made to Stick, also presents a lot of stories to deliver and to help readers understand in each chapter, stories allow people to understand how your idea can affect or change their mind.
Close the book and think for a moment before you start reading. How are things with your mind? Chances are, you've never stopped to consider your mind. Why should you? There are interviews to prepare for, meetings to blow others' mind with your amazing ideas, and moments you need to bring up emotional attachment with your family or your friends. If you are all caught up with these things and ask yourself this, "how are things?" "How have I dealt with those situations?" Before you go reading, you first need to dispel a commonly held myth about communication. You need to understand your old habits would die hard. And, like any habit that goes unchecked, over time they come to keep disturbing you to make your ideas sticky. Try to use the clinic part in each chapter. It will enhance your understandings, and you will improve your skills to make your ideas survive. If you really want to understand much deeper, as you read the book, look up some informative articles about the anatomy and physiology of the brain. It will help you. According to the book, your ideas must simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and stories. Try to apply these rules into your next presentation. I was not a good organized speaker. When I adjusted my mind with these rules to prepare my presentation recently, an amazing thing happened. I am the leader of the young adult ministry of a small local church. At almost every meeting, I needed to make the members understand what and why we need to awaken ourselves and other people; they barely paid attention to what I was saying. Even they seemed understanding, but once they returned to their home or to their life, they forgot what I emphasized. However, with the rules I learned from the book, the members started showing their interests in what I say and paying good attention to it. It works!
Part of our confusion in delivering ideas stems from a misapplication of the rules we think we already know for persuasions. The notion that all confusions can be reduced down to a single underlying problem may strike you as a case of oversimplification. However, with the book, Made to Stick, you will track and be ready for your next presentation. When I was looking for a neuroscience book, Made to Stick was one of the recommended books related to neuroscience. The book is easy to follow, and it is really made to stick! If you are looking for a scientifically texted neuroscience book, this is not the book for you. However, this book will stir up your curiosity about neuroscience as a fundamental connector to higher neural knowledge. Simply, highly I recommend.
I can vote this book four stars because, despite its defects, I have already verified its effectiveness in my own teaching and research--even before I read the book! And in fact the book actually does a good job, for the most part, of getting its message across using the very rules of the SUCCES model it is articulating: "Sticky" ideas tend to have the attributes of:
Simplicity
Unexpectedness
Concreteness
Credibility
Emotion
Stories
Key for readers is to understand the importance of how these rules help overcome "The curse of knowledge", illustrated beautifully by the cited research example in which "tappers" were amazed that "listeners" could not discern the tunes the former were composing using taps, because they of course already had the tune clearly in their head and could not grasp their listener's lack of frame of reference. The key thing we must do when trying to communicate a topic we thoroughly understand to a neophyte audience is pare messages down to basic cores and give them the attributes of the SUCCES model to make them "sticky"--or so the Heath brother say.
Again, the authors in each chapter did a nice job of applying the very rules they articulate while in the act of articulating those rules.
IChapter 1 ("Simple")
They provide the excellent examples of "Commander's Intent" employed by the military to simplify operational instructions for battlefield units confronted with the fact that "No plan survives contact with the enemy;" paring down the '92 Clinton campaign message to "It's the economy stupid;" following the generally applicable rule in journalism of not "burying the lead"; the "a bird in the hand" metaphor and its multinational variations; Hollywood high-concept pitches such as Alien being "Jaws in Space", the use of "generative analogies" such as "staff as cast members" at Disneyland.
Chapter 2 ("Unexpected").
People pay attention when something is counterintuitive. I was pleased that I had been instinctively using this principle in my teaching. The "gap theory" of curiosity posits that "gaps" in our understanding of the world (mysteries) create a need for resolution in the mind of the audience. Sticky ideas play to this crucial aspect of human nature.
Chapter 3 ("Concrete")
Specific, concrete ideas ("''60 Chevy") are stickier than more general and abstract ones ("American automotive engineering"), so concrete examples and references help ideas stick. Making an idea sticky means exploiting the "Velcro theory" of memory: Memory is like Velcro, with loops that enable a concept to attach to it, and different constituents of our memory have more loops to which an idea might be attached. Concrete ideas have more loops.
(I was less pleased with the Heath Brothers' use of the example of Jane Elliot, who famously used the blue-eye/brown-eye distinction among her students to illustrate the power of arbitrary bias. To me it was a concrete example of overeager progressivism degenerating into an unethical psychic assault on children.)
(Chapter 4: "Credible")
Obviously, support from real authorities can make an idea stickier if people believe it has expert corroboration (e.g. "97 percent of researchers whose specialty is climate science agree with the conclusions presented by the IPCC"). However, an idea can have "internal credibility" if it contains little concrete details that make it seem real (like the various renditions of the urban legend of the boyfriend murdered and scraping his lifeless foot on the roof of the car to be discovered by discovered by his horrified date; people always place it in their home county!). Another way to make an idea credible is to put it in a comprehensible scale. Statistics require comparative referents that make sense to people (you're more likely to be killed by a deer than a shark--which also has counterintuitiveness). There is the Sinatra Test of credibility: one impressive factual achievement means the product can "make it anywhere". Another example is the "testable credential", such as Ronald Reagan asking if you are better off four years ago than you are today.
(Chapter 5: "Emotional")
No surprises here, and again it pleased me to note I was using this technique if not explicitly. And one of the best emotional appeals is self-interest: ("Acting on climate change now could save our ass.") An interesting discussion to come out of this is that Maslow's hierarchy of needs might not be a correct model in the sense of recognizing a set order in which those needs are met. Different appeals can be successful by appealing to different components of the hierarchy (e.g. you might be able to appeal to someone better at actualization level even if some "lower" level need might seem like the likely target.) Examples of emotional appeals to get kids to appreciate the importance of math with near slam-dunk application of the SUCCESS model: "Never. You will never use this again. But Math is mental weight training."
(Chapter 6: "Stories")
Yet again having used this in my own research and teaching it's a sense of vindication to see it recommended. Obviously, memorable anecdotes stick better than dry recitation of dreary numbers and arguments.
Minor Critique:
All this is great food for thought for those of us trying to articulate something we think is "true" to the world, but I do have a couple of reservations, and I do not guarantee that their articulation conforms to the SUCCES model:
First, taken to an extreme, the SUCCES model makes communicators slaves to the psychology, emotionalism, simplemindedness, and laziness of the audience. Neil Postman's *Amusing Ourselves to Death* discusses the degeneration of American culture from the days of a highly literate populous in the early republic to the modern discordant hash of electronic sound bites. For example, while the Heath brothers lauded the Clinton campaign's successful employment of "It's the economy, stupid," as a keen adaptation to James Carville's admonition that "If you say three things, you say nothing," I more lament that power in our democracy is so easily won and lost on such paltry turns of phrase.
Second, some really important things just might be inherently un-sticky, and maybe sometimes the best way to make something stick is to communicate it to a strictly qualified and interested audience, or warn an unqualified an uninterested in advance: "Look. This is tedious and boring. But it's still very important. Pay attention." The current deficit reduction debate is an example in which sticky but grotesquely distorting clichés like, "on the backs of the elderly and sick", or "no more taxes on the American people," or "tax breaks for the rich," and so on are thrown around willy-nilly, and more often than not, stick.
At some point we as an audience consuming ideas need to see what's sticking to us and why--and ask whether we need to get ourselves disentangled and be open first to the truth, not stickiness.
Top reviews from other countries
I am sure many , especially those who are in the marketing function, would love to create such sticky stories. And who does not like to create an idea which sticks. For all of us, Chip and Dan have brought us this book wherein they have distilled down their study of more than a decade into six principles of sticky ideas
1. Simplicity – Become a master of exclusion and strip an idea down to the core. Get to one sentence that is so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it
2. Unexpectedness – violate people’s expectation-generate interest and curiosity
3. Concreteness – explain the idea in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information
4. Credibility - sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials
5. Emotions – Make the receiver feel something
6. Stories – have a story which someone can transmit (like the stories of Nordstorm – tire chains, wrapping etc)
The other gems from this book:
• Many a times, we have the curse of knowledge – which is accurate to the point of uselessness. Just give enough info to be useful, then a little more and then a little more. Use schemas effectively for this
• If you want your ideas to be stickier, you’ve break someone’s guessing machine and then fix it. But make sure you target an aspect of your audience’s guessing machine that relates to your core message (the case of “there is no school on Thursday” was very interesting, how to figure out the main point)
• Open a gap, build the curiosity and then give the facts to close the gaps. Need to convince the people that need the message
• Brown eyes, blue eyes as a case of Velcro memory
• Concreteness makes targets transparent – The case of Boeing 727 or Kaplan’s pitch to the investors
• Credibility – Researchers in Australia found that that Ulcers are caused by bacteria, but how do they convince the world. Took them 10 years to convince the world, and had to poison themselves for the same
• Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. It should be used to illustrate a relationship. What is more important is for people to remember the relationship than the number.(e.g : A deer is 300 times more likely to kill you than a shark)
• Build credibility through the Sinatra test – take a challenge of handling the most difficult situation and propagate that Success (Indian courier service – Safeexpress)
• Emotional – Individual appeals are more effective than mass appeals. When people think analytically, they are less likely to think emotionally.
• Simulation video by IDEO of a patient in a hospital driving employees to empathise with the customers
• Stories as mental rehearsal can prevent people from relapsing into bad habits.
• Story of Jared - sandwich helping to reduce weight – eat more to lose more
As one can see, there are a myriad of cases which Dan and Chip have examined and come out with a framework which is common in all.
But the moot question is whether the framework sticks in the mind of the readers of the book? To test that out, I am writing this summary after about 4 months of reading the book and am afraid, I could not recollect the framework much, though a few cases I could recollect on prompt.
So, about the book, I would recommend as it one good compilation of many cases where people have managed to get their ideas stick. It is possible that one might find some situations similar to their own predicament. The other good thing about this book is the clinic at the end of each chapter wherein a situation is outlined and the reader can draft their own response. Gives a good idea of how to make thoughts stickier.
I am going with 4 stars just for the sheer amount of research that has gone into the book.













