Next up on the summer reading list was Chip & Dan Heath’s Made to Stick: Why some ideas survive and others die. The title, borrowing the term from Gladwell’s Tipping Point, lays out what it’s all about – why do we remember some messages and forget others? How can we make our ideas stickier, so that people wouldn’t just shrug them off in a second?
One repeating theme in the book is the emphasis on using stories – the idea is that our brains are hardwired to remember concrete stuff instead of abstract statistics. Proverbs are one powerful example of this. Few of us can remember a piece of statistic from last week, but we know and often repeat proverbs that originated thousands of years ago. Almost as “good” (or bad) are the many urban legends tenaciously circulating the world. Stickiness of both of these is uncontested. But how do we go about creating our own equivalent of undying – hopefully useful – proverbs of our ideas?
We don’t, of course. And we shouldn’t even aim for immortality for our ideas, but we can certainly aim and achieve something better than 0.5 seconds. Made to Stick presents a framework called SUCCES in identifying and building stories that stick – Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional Stories. Another key theme is the curse of knowledge; this means that once we know something, it becomes incredibly difficult to imagine life without knowing that. That, in turn, makes it quite difficult to teach whatever it is that we know to others as we’re dying to tell all the details we know, laying out too much information when what we’d really need to tell is just the simple core message.
That applies to me in writing this review also; I’d love to tell you about the 40-something interesting points that I wrote down when reading it, being blissfully unaware that you haven’t read the book yet and as such they may mean nothing to you. So I will for once to resist doing that. It’d be great if I could compact the message of the book in a sentence or two but, alas, I cannot. So let’s tackle just one very shortly: abstract vs concrete.
How often do you see something concrete in, say, a company strategy? Not very often – yet the management would most likely want the employees to remember and even act on the strategy. But eventually all actions are concrete, so consider this:
Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it. It also makes it harder to coordinate our activities with others, who may interpret the abstraction in very different ways. Concreteness helps us avoid these problems.
So the lesson? The lesson is to make your message concrete. Help people understand by giving them a concrete cases, people, something they can relate to instead of just empty words that’ll soon be forgotten. Here’s a quick example to see how concreteness helps. First, try to think of five silly things people in the world have done in the past 10 years. Second, try to think of filly silly things your kids have done recently. Most people find the latter task easier, even though it’s a very limited domain to draw those silly things from and, indeed, a subset of the first group.
So there’s lots of good insight in the book. Armed with all this insight into how to make your idea stick, you will most likely become better at it. There’s a small catch here (and this catch, btw, is entirely my thought and not in the book): as more and more people become better in making their ideas sticky, you will have to constantly stay ahead of them and be better than the rest to be remembered. Why? Well we as human beings have a finite capacity to remember stuff – if all the ads we saw were remarkable, none of them would be. If everything is surprising, nothing is. So by definition, not everyone can play this game well. And that’s the challenge; just be better than most others and you’ll be remembered. Made to Stick should help in that regards. Luckily everyone won’t read it.
