Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck
£9.40
Why does fake news stick while the truth goes missing?
Why do disproved urban legends persist? How do you keep letting newspapers and clickbait sites lure you in with their headlines? And why do you remember complicated stories but not complicated facts?
Over ten years of study, Chip and Dan Heath have discovered how we latch on to information hooks. Packed full of case histories and incredible anecdotes, it shows:
– how an Australian scientist convinced the world he’d discovered the cause of stomach ulcers by drinking a glass filled with bacteria
– how a gifted sports reporter got people to watch a football match by showing them the outside of the stadium
– how pitches like ‘Jaws on a spaceship’ (Alien) and ‘Die Hard on a bus’ (Speed) convince movie execs to invest gigantic sums even when they know nothing else about the project
As entertaining as it is informative, this is a timely exploration of a fascinating human behaviour. At the same time, by demonstrating strategies like the ‘Velcro Theory of Memory’ and ‘curiosity gaps’, it offers superbly practical insights.
Made to Stick uses cutting-edge insight to help you ensure that what you say is understood, remembered and, most importantly, acted upon.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Arrow (7 Feb. 2008) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 336 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 009950569X |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0099505693 |
| Dimensions | 19.7 x 12.9 x 2.03 cm |
by Patryk
In general it’s an interesting book that probably shouldn’t be read for pleasure but as a part of a learning or self development path.
by Matt prior
Do you ever feel like your ideas go down like lead balloons?
Do you ever feel like there’s a painful awkwardness in the air after you deliver a presentation?
Well this book will change everything
No more lead balloons.
No more awkwardness
You will only be met now on by an audience who is hanging off your every word
Buy the book and you will see
by MISS A.
I started reading this book with expectations and some scepticism on how useful will be for my work disseminating learning and impact of funding. As the book unfolded i fell in love with it. I particularly like how the case studies are presented and the frameworks that were presented. I would highly recommend this book to any funders’ communications teams as it will help think through how to make ideas stick and increase creativity in communications
by C. Weldon
Each year one or two books change my view on the world and I start quoting them constantly. Last year it was Jo Owens’ How to Lead. This year it is Made to Stick. Just last week at Bring Your Child to Work Day a colleague asked me to talk to her daughter about communication and my job as a business analyst. How could I get across the idea that my job was about translating requirements from the business into specifications for their mother to code? Sounds pretty boring for a 9-year old, right?
But I had just read ‘made to stick’ and the chapter on the Curse of Knowledge. So we played a game. I tapped out a tune for her to guess and she didn’t get it. Then I got her to tap out a tune for me and I didn’t get it. “Did you hear the tune in your head?” I asked her. Yes, of course she did. “So did I when I did it, but all you heard was tapping.”
“And that’s what it is like when someone tells me they want your mum to solve a problem for them. They maybe have a clear picture in their mind of what they want, they hear the tune in their head, but I have to make sure your mum hears the tune too and not just the tapping.”
Thank you, Chip and Dan.
by KD
I’d recommend this book to any teacher – it’s probably 110% more useful than any of the text books you were told to read on your teacher training course!
It’s very readable. This is important because teachers (and that includes me) are too busy to find time to wade though dense theoretical texts. Secondly, and this probably shouldn’t be surprising given what the book’s about, it draws you in and the ideas contained within it are very easy to remember.
The job of a teacher is to explain sometimes really quite tricky ideas in short, sharp chunks, to people who are not always expecially engaged (i.e. teenagers), and then get them to use those ideas. This book explains very neatly how to do that more effectively. The authors’ SUCCESs mnemonic (simple, unexpected, concrete, credentialed, emotional, story) is well illustrated and explained in the book and is very easy to remember and apply. Highly recommended.
by Amit N
Before you buy this book, read about the concept it’s covering. This covers the success of ideas/concepts and reasons behind them with examples. It’s advocates that any idea can be put through a framework to make it more sticky or successful among people. This book may not be for all but people with content writing, user experience , product management etc Anybody who has to convey the ideas.
by Simon M Garrett (author)
I was very impressed with this book. It’s not often that a book makes a difference to your business but this has already done that, and I’m only half-way through.
Now, I don’t care if the rest of the book was written while Chip and Dan were drunk on 60% Romanian vodka, what I’ve read so far is brilliant! I was an academic and I am a businessman (Aispire consulting, look us up on Facebook), which is relevant because as an ex-academic I’m in a position to say that the research and writing quality, and the precision of their arguments, is second-to-none. I’m also able to talk about the value this book has had in helping me to explain, crisply and in tight focus, that my business is will help my clients make money. (I’m an also an author – see “Teddy and the Darkgate” here on Amazon – so I appreciate all the hard work these guys must have gone to to make a book that’s this detailed.)
Chip and Dan Heath, thank you both.
by JD
Since others have already summarized the key points the authors make in this book, I won’t go into that. But I did wanted to add my vote to the rating, and share my very positive experience with this book. I had come across the title as part of a panel at work on the topic of excellence in presentations. Using stories to bring across a point was named as one of the key ways to deliver a great presentation by several of the speakers. One of them recommended this book, and so I decided to give it a try. And a great read it is. In fact, a direct application of the SUCCESs framework the authors propose – Simple in that the core messages are stressed time and again, Unexpected in that the rules they talk about make perfect sense yet were not necessarily what I expected from the book, Concrete with countless examples, Credible by using examples from various fields of science and providing a wealth of scientific research to back up their points, Emotional with the stories being used and finally – as I have already mentioned – using Stories.
I will self-evaluate how sticky their framework is over time, and I will hopefully be able to tell a SUCCESs story about how I was able to transfer and apply their lessons to challenges in my everyday-life.