Made to Stick

Given the importance of making ideas stick, it’s surprising how little attention is paid to the subject. When we get advice on communicating, it often concerns our delivery: “Stand up straight, make eye contact, use appropriate hand gestures. Practice, practice, practice (but don’t sound canned).” Sometimes we get advice about structure: “Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em. Tell ’em, then tell ’em what you told ’em.” Or “Start by getting their attention—tell a joke or a story.”

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.

How do you keep students engaged during the forty-eighth history class of the year? We can engage people’s curiosity over a long period of time by systematically “opening gaps” in their knowledge—and then filling those gaps.

We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information.

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

Research shows that 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.

hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.

Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. A clever observer will note that this sentence can be compacted into the acronym SUCCESs.

This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.

When a CEO discusses “unlocking shareholder value,” there is a tune playing in her head that the employees can’t hear.

What we mean by “simple” is finding the core of the idea.

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

It’s about elegance and prioritization, not dumbing down.

According to one account, perhaps apocryphal, the inverted pyramid arose4 during the Civil War. All the reporters wanted to use military telegraphs to transmit their stories back home, but they could be cut off at any moment; they might be bumped by military personnel, or the communication line might be lost completely—a common occurrence during battles. The reporters never knew how much time they would get to send a story, so they had to send the most important information first.

The longtime newspaper writer Ed Cray, a professor of communications at the University of Southern California, has spent almost thirty years teaching journalism. He says, “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.”

This problem of losing direction, of missing the central story, is so common that journalists have given it its own name: Burying the lead. “Burying the lead” occurs when the journalist lets the most important element of the story slip too far down in the story structure.

Clinton’s advisers had to tell him, “There has to be message triage. If you say three things, you don’t say anything.”

Tversky and Shafir’s study shows us that uncertainty—even irrelevant uncertainty—can paralyze us.

Another study, conducted by Shafir and a colleague, Donald Redelmeier, demonstrates that paralysis can also be caused by choice.

Giving students two good alternatives to studying, rather than one, paradoxically makes them less likely to choose either. This behavior isn’t “rational,” but it is human.

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

Avoid burying the lead. Don’t start with something interesting but irrelevant in hopes of entertaining the audience. Instead, work to make the core message itself more interesting.

Top management can know what the priorities are but be completely ineffective in sharing and achieving those priorities.

Simple messages are core and compact.

The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will

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.

Simplifying, we fear, can devolve into oversimplifying.

Cervantes defined proverbs9 as “short sentences drawn from long experience.”

The first documented case in English is from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in 1678. But the proverb may be much older still. In one of Aesop’s fables, a hawk seizes a nightingale, who pleads for its life, arguing that it is too tiny a morsel to satisfy the hawk. The hawk replies, “I would be foolish to release the bird I have in my hand to pursue another bird that is not even in sight.” This story dates from 570 B.C.

The “bird in hand” proverb, then, is an astoundingly sticky idea. It has survived for more than 2,500 years. It has spread across continents, cultures, and languages.

Proverbs are helpful in guiding individual decisions in environments with shared standards. Those shared standards are often ethical or moral norms.

Proverbs offer rules of thumb for the behavior of individuals.

The Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is so profound that it can influence a lifetime of behavior.

Cervantes’s definition of “proverbs” echoes our definition of Simple ideas: short sentences (compact) drawn from long experience (core).

Why do remote controls have more buttons than we ever use? The answer starts with the noble intentions of engineers. Most technology and product-design projects must combat “feature creep,” the tendency for things to become incrementally more complex until they no longer perform their original functions very well. A VCR is a case in point.

Feature creep is an innocent process. An engineer looking at a prototype of a remote control might think to herself, “Hey, there’s some extra real estate here on the face of the control. And there’s some extra processing capacity on the chip. Rather than let it go to waste, what if we give people the ability to toggle between the Julian and Gregorian calendars?”

The Palm Pilot team, aware of this danger, took a hard line against feature creep. When the team began its work, in the early 1990s, personal digital assistants (PDAs) had an unblemished record of failure. Apple’s famous debacle with its Newton PDA had made other competitors gun-shy.

One of the competitors on the PDA market in 1994 looked like a malnourished computer. It was a bulky device with a keyboard and multiple ports for peripherals. Jeff Hawkins, the Palm Pilot team leader, was determined that his product would avoid this fate. He wanted the Palm Pilot to be simple. It would handle four things: calendars, contacts, memos, and task lists. The Palm Pilot would do only four things, but it would do them well.

Vassallo said that the Palm Pilot became a successful product “almost because it was defined more in terms of what it was not than in terms of what it was.” Tom Kelley, from IDEO, a prominent Silicon Valley design firm, made a similar point: “The real barrier to the initial PDAs10 … was the idea that the machine had to do nearly everything.”

The secret, of course, is that we’re not “lifting” JFK. All the remembering work related to JFK has already been done. We’ve already built those muscles—the concept of JFK, and all its associations, is already embedded in our memories. What we’re remembering is simply a pointer to this information—we’re posting a little flag on the terrain of our memory. With the raw letters, we’re posting three separate flags. In the end, it’s one bit of information (or one flag) versus three, and it’s no surprise that one is easier to remember.

We’ve made it easier for you to learn a new concept by tying it to a concept that you already know. In this case, the concept is “grapefruit.” “Grapefruit” is a schema that you already have. (“Schema” is a bit of technical jargon from psychology, but it’s so useful that we think it’s worth carrying through the book.)

Psychologists define schema12 as a collection of generic properties of a concept or category. Schemas consist of lots of prerecorded information stored in our memories.

Good teachers intuitively use lots of schemas. Economics teachers, for instance, start with compact, stripped-down examples that can be understood by students who have no preexisting economics schemas.

People are tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more.

A great way to avoid useless accuracy, and to dodge the Curse of Knowledge, is to use analogies. Analogies derive their power from schemas: A pomelo is like a grapefruit.

Analogies make it possible to understand a compact message because they invoke concepts that you already know.

A good analogy can wield a lot of power. In fact, in Hollywood $100 million movies can be green-lighted based largely on the strength of a one-sentence analogy.

Imagine investing millions in an idea that will change as it is filtered through the consciousness of a succession of individuals with giant egos: directors, stars, producers, marketers. That idea had better be good.

Many simple sticky ideas are actually generative metaphors in disguise.

Proverbs are the Holy Grail of simplicity. Coming up with a short, compact phrase is easy. Anybody can do it. On the other hand, coming up with a profound compact phrase is incredibly difficult.

The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern.

Humans adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patterns. Consistent sensory stimulation makes us tune out: Think of the hum of an air conditioner, or traffic noise, or the smell of a candle, or the sight of a bookshelf. We may become consciously aware of these things only when something changes: The air conditioner shuts off. Your spouse rearranges the books.

Our brain is designed to be keenly aware of changes. Smart product designers are well aware of this tendency. They make sure that, when products require users to pay attention, something changes. Warning lights blink on and off because we would tune out a light that was constantly on. Old emergency sirens wailed in a two-note pattern, but modern sirens wail in a more complex pattern that’s even more attention-grabbing. Car alarms make diabolical use of our change sensitivity.

To understand the answers to these two questions, we have to understand two essential emotions—surprise and interest—that are commonly provoked by naturally sticky ideas.

Surprise gets our attention. Some naturally sticky ideas propose surprising “facts”: The Great Wall of China is the only man-made structure visible from space! You use only 10 percent of your brain! You should drink eight glasses of water a day! Urban legends frequently contain surprising plot twists.

Interest keeps our attention. There are classes of sticky ideas that maintain our interest over time. Conspiracy theories keep people ravenously collecting new information. Gossip keeps us coming back to our friends for developments.

Naturally sticky ideas are frequently unexpected. If we can make our ideas more unexpected, they will be stickier. But can you generate “unexpectedness”? Isn’t “planned unexpectedness” an oxymoron?