Made to Stick

It’s the nature versus nurture debate applied to ideas: Are ideas born interesting or made interesting?

make your ideas stick. By “stick,” we mean that your ideas are understood and remembered, and have a lasting impact—they change your audience’s opinions or behavior.

perhaps the oldest class of naturally sticky ideas is the proverb—a nugget of wisdom that often endures over centuries and across cultures.

To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize.

We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.

For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity.

We can engage people’s curiosity over a long period of time by systematically “opening gaps” in their knowledge—and then filling those gaps.

How do we make our ideas clear? We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry.

Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images—ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors—because our brains are wired to remember concrete data.

Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials.

people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions.

All creative ads resemble one another, but each loser is uncreative in its own way.

If you want to spread your ideas to other people, you should work within the confines of the rules that have allowed other ideas to succeed over time. You want to invent new ideas, not new rules.

plans are useful, in the sense that they are proof that planning has taken place. The planning process forces people to think through the right issues. But as for the plans themselves, Kolditz says, “They just don’t work on the battlefield.”

“You can lose the ability to execute the original plan, but you never lose the responsibility of executing the intent,”

When people know the desired destination, they’re free to improvise, as needed, in arriving there.

After the lead, information is presented in decreasing order of importance. Journalists call this the “inverted pyramid” structure—the most important info (the widest part of the pyramid) is at the top.

No matter what the reader’s attention span—whether she reads only the lead or the entire story—the inverted pyramid maximizes the information she gleans.

If news stories were written like mysteries, with a dramatic payoff at the end, then readers who broke off in mid-story would miss the point.

A common mistake reporters make is that they get so steeped in the details that they fail to see the message’s core—what readers will find important or interesting.

“The longer you work on a story, the more you can find yourself losing direction. No detail is too small. You just don’t know what your story is anymore.”

Finding the core and writing the lead both involve forced prioritization.

Forced prioritization is really painful. Smart people recognize the value of all the material. They see nuance, multiple perspectives—and because they fully appreciate the complexities of a situation, they’re often tempted to linger there. This tendency to gravitate toward complexity is perpetually at war with the need to prioritize.

Why is prioritizing so difficult? In the abstract, it doesn’t sound so tough. You prioritize important goals over less important goals. You prioritize goals that are “critical” ahead of goals that are “beneficial.” But what if we can’t tell what’s “critical” and what’s “beneficial”? Sometimes it’s not obvious. We often have to make decisions between one “unknown” and another. This kind of complexity can be paralyzing.

Prioritization rescues people from the quicksand of decision angst, and that’s why finding the core is so valuable.

finding the core isn’t synonymous with communicating the core. Top management can know what the priorities are but be completely ineffective in sharing and achieving those priorities.

compactness itself can come to seem an unworthy goal. Lots of us have expertise in particular areas. Becoming an expert in something means that we become more and more fascinated by nuance and complexity. That’s when the Curse of Knowledge kicks in, and we start to forget what it’s like not to know what we know.