By focusing on communicating concrete concepts instead of abstractions, you speak in language that people can understand. Once you understand the idea, you tend to talk about it using abstractions that are just mumbo jumbo to people who don't understand the idea yet. Making your ideas concrete is often critical for overcoming what the authors refer to repeatedly as 'the curse of knowledge' - the difficulty, once you know something, of remembering what it was like not knowing it. If, on the other hand, you shake your audience out of their daily stupor (the book discusses several ways to do that) in a way that leads into your message, now you've given their awakened mind something to latch onto, and you have a chance to give them a new way of thinking. If you're just going for shock value to wake people up, but not building a strong connection between the surprise and your message, you'll come across as gimmicky and annoying. It's another to understand how to use unexpectedness (is that a word?) effectively.

If you read the book, you'll understand that 'simple' means that you strip away the fluff and get to the core of the idea - the really important part - and focus clearly on that. If you read the list above and start dumbing down your message, thinking that'll make it stick, you're in for a surprise - you'll just make your idea sound dumb. My first mistake before reading the book was to think that 'simple' meant 'dumbed down'. The 6 main concepts that I mentioned above are that sticky ideas are: If you've got an idea (or a product, a cause, etc.) that you'd like people to remember, act on, and spread, this book teaches some powerful ways to improve the odds of that happening. The book is Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath. Only after I'd read another book by the same authors and heard other people talk about things in this book that I didn't get from skimming the table of contents did I realize I wasn't getting the whole picture. And when you did, you may have thought you had a pretty good idea of what you'd find in the book, and decided not to read it.īig mistake. You may even have read reviews that list the main concepts that it covers. You've probably already heard of the first one I've decided to tackle. I'll probably spend the new few days here doing that.

I read several good books a few months ago, but haven't yet gotten around to sharing insights I got from them and writing reviews. Executive Summary: Read it! Don't think you can catch the vision by reading book reviews that list the 6 main concepts.

Made to stick book review