Release year: 2007

Questions

What is the book about as a whole?

The book is about what makes an idea memorable or sticky, in the words of the authors. They argue this is often the crucial ingredient that gets people to act.

What is being said in detail, and how?

In the introduction, the book begins by laying out the Six Principles of Sticky ideas (SUCCESs):

Simplicity of the core message
Unexpectedness (gets people to pay attention)
Concreteness (makes people understand and remember the message)
Credibility (makes people agree/believe the message)
Emotional (makes people care)
Story (shows people how to act on it)

They explain the enemy of sticky ideas is The Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it’s like not to know it. To illustrate this principle, they use the tapper-listener exercise:

The tapper flips a coin: heads = the star-sprangled banner, tails = happy birthday song
Using their hands, the tapper “taps” the first two measures of the song to get the listener to guess it. For the listener, the odds are 50-50, contrary to what the tapper might believe.

An interesting insight from the author is that if we want to spread our ideas to other people, we should work within the confines of the rules that have allowed other ideas to succeed overtime. We want to invent new ideas, not new rules for spreading ideas.

They encourage us to imagine the relationship between a brain and ideas like velcro: the more hooks an idea has, the more likely it is to stick in our audience members’ brain.

Near the end of the book, the focus is given to stories as vehicles that perfectly encapsulate the principles that make an idea sticky. “They laughed when you shared a story instead of a statistic. But when the idea stuck…”

Finally, the authors reassure us that we don’t have to worry about making all of our ideas sticky. Instead, we have more chances of success if we are simply on the lookout for sticky ideas that already exist in the world but have not yet caught on. Indeed, the world will always produce more great ideas than even the most creative individual.

Is the book true, in whole or part?

It makes a lot of sense to me!

What of it?

The SUCCESs framework, itself a sticky idea, is a useful rule of thumb to measure the stickiness of ideas we come across in the real world. It allowed me to better appreciate what makes some ideas go viral, and why I often have issues making my ideas take off.

Review

I appreciated this read. As I am currently looking for my next professional role, I often have to present myself in a way that will stick with the people interviewing me. Thus, this book fell on my lap at exactly the perfect time.

I found the SUCCESs framework especially appealing for how simple, concise and concrete it was. This is something I will keep in mind whenever I will tell my story to others. In particular, I wish I had known about these concepts back when I wrote Overcoming Learning Anxiety.

Félix rating:
👍

⭐ Star Quotes

Introduction: What Sticks?

Chapter 1 : Simple

(p. 26) You can lose the ability to execute the original plan, but you never lose the responsibility of executing the intent.
(p. 28) “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
(p. 41) Avoid burying the lead. Don’t start with something interesting but irrelevant in the hopes of entertaining the audience. Instead, work to make the core message itself more interesting.
(p. 56) If a message can’t be used to make predictions or decisions, it is without value, no matter how accurate or comprehensive it is.
(p. 57) An accurate but useless idea is still useless.

Chapter 2 : Unexpected

(p. 72) What sounds like common sense often isn’t. It’s your job, as a communicator, to expose the parts of your message that are uncommon sense.
(p. 85, 87) The trick to convincing people that they need our message is to first highlight some specific knowledge that they’re missing. […] Make them care about knowing something, then tell them what they want to know.
(p. 88) To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from “What information do I need to convey?” to “What questions do I want my audience to ask?”

Chapter 3 : Concrete

Chapter 4 : Credible

(p. 147) Use statistics as input, not output. Use them to make us your mind on an issue. Don’t make up your mind and then go looking for the numbers to support yourself.
(p. 158) The job of coaches is to fill people’s Emotional Tank.

Chapter 5 : Emotional

(p. 168) Beliefs count for a lot, but belief isn’t enough. For people to take action, they have to care.
(p. 169) The goal of making messages “emotional” is to make people care. Feelings inspire people to act.
(p. 173) The most basic way to make people care is to form an association between something they don’t yet care about and something they do care about.
(p. 179) Emphasize benefits, not features. What is the benefit of the benefit?

Chapter 6 : Stories

(p. 206) ⭐ A credible idea makes people believe. An emotional idea makes people care. The right stories make people act.
(p. 224) We don’t always have to create sticky ideas. Spotting them is often easier and more useful.

Epilogue : What Sticks

(p. 243) One of the worst things about knowing a lot, or having access to a lot of information, is that we’re tempted to share it all.
(p. 245) The same factors that work to your advantage in finding an answer will backfire when telling it to others. An answer requires expertise, which comes with the Curse of Knowledge.
(p. 253) Employees need to be able to “talk strategy”. And if they can talk strategy back to you, you’ll benefit from insights that would otherwise be untapped and invisible.
(p. 255) A strategy is, at its core, a guide to behavior. A good strategy drives actions that differentiate the company and product financial success.

(Read 104) Made to Stick