Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

• Introduction: What Sticks?
• PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY
• 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.
• PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS
• We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. A bag of popcorn is as unhealthy as a whole day’s worth of fatty foods! We can use surprise—an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus—to grab people’s attention. But surprise doesn’t last. 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.
• PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS
• We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information.
• Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions—they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images—ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors—because our brains are wired to remember concrete data.
• In the sole U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable statistics demonstrating the sluggishness of the economy. Instead, he asked a simple question that allowed voters to test for themselves:“Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago.”
• PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS
• How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. In the case of movie popcorn, we make them feel disgusted by its unhealthiness. The statistic“37 grams” doesn’t elicit any emotions.
• Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region.
• PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES
• How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. Firefighters naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations.
• Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, 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.
• It’s hard to be a tapper. The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge(the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. When they’re tapping, they can’t imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. 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.
• The surprising lesson of this story: Highly creative ads are more predictable than uncreative ones. It’s like Tolstoy’s quote:“All happy families resemble each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” All creative ads resemble one another, but each loser is uncreative in its own way.

• Chapter 1: Simple
• “The trite expression we always use is No plan survives contact with the enemy,” says Colonel Tom Kolditz, the head of the behavioral sciences division at West Point.“You may start off trying to fight your plan, but the enemy gets a vote. Unpredictable things happen—the weather changes, a key asset is destroyed, the enemy responds in a way you don’t expect. Many armies fail because they put all their emphasis into creating a plan that becomes useless ten minutes into the battle.”
• Colonel Kolditz says,“Over time we’ve come to understand more and more about what makes people successful in complex operations.” He believes that 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.” So, in the 1980s the Army adapted its planning process, inventing a concept called Commander’s Intent(CI).
• CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plan’s goal, the desired end-state of an operation. At high levels of the Army, the CI may be relatively abstract:“Break the will of the enemy in the Southeast region.” At the tactical level, for colonels and captains, it is much more concrete:“My intent is to have Third Battalion on Hill 4305, to have the hill cleared of enemy, with only ineffective remnants remaining, so we can protect the flank of Third Brigade as they pass through the lines.”
• The CI never specifies so much detail that it risks being rendered obsolete by unpredictable events.“You can lose the ability to execute the original plan, but you never lose the responsibility of executing the intent,” says Kolditz. In other words, if there’s one soldier left in the Third Battalion on Hill 4305, he’d better be doing something to protect the flank of the Third Brigade.
• Commander’s Intent manages to align the behavior of soldiers at all levels without requiring play-by-play instructions from their leaders. When people know the desired destination, they’re free to improvise, as needed, in arriving there. Colonel Kolditz gives an example:“Suppose I’m commanding an artillery battalion and I say, ‘We’re going to pass this infantry unit through our lines forward.’ That means something different to different groups. The mechanics know that they’ll need lots of repair support along the roads, because if a tank breaks down on a bridge the whole operation will come to a screeching halt.
• The artillery knows they’ll need to fire smoke or have engineers generate smoke in the breech area where the infantry unit moves forward, so it won’t get shot up as it passes through. As a commander, I could spend a lot of time enumerating every specific task, but as soon as people know what the intent is they begin generating their own solutions.”
• The Combat Maneuver Training Center, the unit in charge of military simulations, recommends that officers arrive at the Commander’s Intent by asking themselves two questions: If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission, we must _________. The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is _________. No plan survives contact with the enemy. No doubt this principle has resonance for people who have no military experience whatsoever. No sales plan survives contact with the customer. No lesson plan survives contact with teenagers.
• It’s hard to make ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, chaotic environment. If we’re to succeed, the first step is this: Be simple. Not simple in terms of“dumbing down” or“sound bites.” You don’t have to speak in monosyllables to be simple. 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.”
• There are two steps in making your ideas sticky—Step 1 is to find the core, and Step 2 is to translate the core using the SUCCESs checklist. That’s it.
• Herb Kelleher [the longest-serving CEO of Southwest] once told someone, 1“I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds. This is it: We are THE low-fare airline. Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company’s future as well as I can.“Here’s an example,” he said.“Tracy from marketing comes into your office. She says her surveys indicate that the passengers might enjoy a light entrée on the Houston to Las Vegas flight. All we offer is peanuts, and she thinks a nice chicken Caesar salad would be popular. What do you say?” The person stammered for a moment, so Kelleher responded:“You say, ‘Tracy, will adding that chicken Caesar salad make us THE low-fare airline from Houston to Las Vegas? Because if it doesn’t help us become the unchallenged low-fare airline, we’re not serving any damn chicken salad.’
• It’s not supposed to be fun to work for penny-pinchers. It’s hard to imagine Wal-Mart employees giggling their way through the workday. Yet somehow Southwest has pulled it off. Let’s think about the ideas driving Southwest Airlines as concentric circles. The central circle, the core, is“THE low-fare airline.” But the very next circle might be“Have fun at work.” Southwest’s employees know that it’s okay to have fun so long as it doesn’t jeopardize the company’s status as THE low-fare airline. A new employee can easily put these ideas together to realize how to act in unscripted situations. For instance, is it all right to joke about a flight attendant’s birthday over the P.A.? Sure. Is it equally okay to throw confetti in her honor? Probably not—the confetti would create extra work for cleanup crews, and extra clean-up time means higher fares.
• “THE low-fare airline” and the other stories in this chapter aren’t simple because they’re full of easy words. They’re simple because they reflect the Commander’s Intent. It’s about elegance and prioritization, not dumbing down.
• Don Wycliff, a winner of prizes for editorial writing, says,“I’ve always been a believer that if I’ve got two hours in which to write a story, the best investment I can make is to spend the first hour and forty-five minutes of it getting a good lead, because after that everything will come easily.”
• 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.”
• “Burying the lead” occurs when the journalist lets the most important element of the story slip too far down in the story structure.
• Finding the core and writing the lead both involve forced prioritization. Suppose you’re a wartime reporter and you can telegraph only one thing before the line gets cut, what would it be? There’s only one lead, and there’s only one core. You must choose.
• 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. In fact, psychologists have found that people can be driven to irrational decisions by too much complexity and uncertainty.
• Here’s the twist: The group of students who, like you, didn’t know their final exam results behaved completely differently. The majority of them(61 percent) paid five dollars to wait for two days. Think about that! If you pass, you want to go to Hawaii. If you fail, you want to go to Hawaii. If you don’t know whether you passed or failed, you … wait and see? This is not the way the“sure-thing principle” is supposed to behave. It’s as if our businessman had decided to wait until after the election to buy his property, despite being willing to make the purchase regardless of the outcome.
• Tversky and Shafir’s study shows us that uncertainty—even irrelevant uncertainty—can paralyze us.
• Remarkably, when a different group of students were given the three choices, 40 percent decided to study—double the number who did before. 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.
• Core messages help people avoid bad choices by reminding them of what’s important. In Herb Kelleher’s parable, for instance, someone had to choose between chicken salad and no chicken salad—and the message“THE low-fare airline” led her to abandon the chicken salad.
• PUNCH LINE: 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.
• Adams can’t possibly be personally involved in the vast majority of these hundreds of small decisions. But his employees don’t suffer from decision paralysis, because Adams’s Commander’s Intent is clear:“Names, names, and names.” Adams can’t be everywhere. But by finding the core and communicating it clearly, he has made himself everywhere. That’s the power of a sticky idea.
• 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. At that point, making something simple can seem like“dumbing down.” As an expert, we don’t want to be accused of propagating sound bites or pandering to the lowest common denominator. Simplifying, we fear, can devolve into oversimplifying.
• Cervantes defined proverbs9 as“short sentences drawn from long experience.” Take the English-language proverb:“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” What’s the core? The core is a warning against giving up a sure thing for something speculative. The proverb is short and simple, yet it packs a big nugget of wisdom that is useful in many situations.
• As it turns out, this is not just an English-language proverb. In Sweden, the saying is“Rather one bird in the hand than ten in the woods.” In Spain:“A bird in the hand is better than a hundred flying birds.” In Poland:“A sparrow in your hand is better than a pigeon on the roof.” In Russia:“Better a titmouse in the hand than a crane in the sky.”
• 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. Keep in mind that nobody funded a“bird in hand” advertising campaign. It spreads on its own. Many other proverbs share this longevity.
• The Golden Rule is a great symbol of what we’re chasing in this chapter: ideas that are compact enough to be sticky and meaningful enough to make a difference.
• If you’re a photographer, the proverb has no value as a literal statement, unless you plan to shoot name tags. But when you know that your organization thrives on names—i.e., the specific actions taken by specific members of the local community—that knowledge informs the kinds of photo ops you look for. Do you shoot the boring committee deliberations or the gorgeous sunset over the park? Answer: the boring committee deliberations.
• 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.
• 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.”
• So, to make a profound idea compact you’ve got to pack a lot of meaning into a little bit of messaging. And how do you do that? You use flags. You tap the existing memory terrain of your audience. You use what’s already there.
• 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. If someone tells you that she saw a great new sports car, a picture immediately springs to mind, filled with generic properties. You know what“sports cars” are like. You picture something small and two-door, with a convertible top perhaps. If the car in your picture moves, it moves fast. Its color is almost certainly red. Similarly, your schema of“grapefruit” also contains a cluster of generic properties: yellow-pink color, tart flavor, softball-sized, and so on.
• The choice may seem to be a difficult one:(1) accuracy first, at the expense of accessibility; or(2) accessibility first, at the expense of accuracy. But in many circumstances this is a false choice for one compelling reason: If a message can’t be used to make predictions or decisions, it is without value, no matter how accurate or comprehensive it is.
• An accurate but useless idea is still useless.
• To a CEO,“maximizing shareholder value” may be an immensely useful rule of behavior. To a flight attendant, it’s not. To a physicist, probability clouds are fascinating phenomena. To a child, they are incomprehensible.
• 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.
• This metaphor of employees as cast members in a theatrical production is communicated consistently throughout the organization:  Cast members don’t interview for a job, they audition for a role.  When they are walking around the park, they are onstage.  People visiting Disney are guests, not customers.  Jobs are performances; uniforms are costumes. The theater metaphor is immensely useful for Disney employees.
• Chapter 2: Unexpected
• The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern.
• 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.
• The linkages between emotion and behavior can be more subtle, though. For instance, a secondary effect of being angry, which was recently discovered by researchers, is that we become more certain of our judgments. When we’re angry, we know we’re right, as anyone who has been in a relationship can attest.
• When our guessing machines fail, surprise grabs our attention so that we can repair them for the future.
• Researchers who study conspiracy theories, for instance, have noted that many of them arise when people are grappling with unexpected events, such as when the young and attractive die suddenly. There are conspiracy theories about the sudden deaths of JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, and Kurt Cobain. There tends to be less conspiratorial interest in the sudden deaths of ninety-year-olds. Surprise makes us want to find an answer—to resolve the question of why we were surprised—and big surprises call for big answers. If we want to motivate people to pay attention, we should seize the power of big surprises.
• But although HENSION and BARDLE are surprising, they aren’t sticky; they’re just frustrating. What we see now is that surprise isn’t enough. We also need insight.
• good process for making your ideas stickier is:(1) Identify the central message you need to communicate—find the core;(2) Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message—i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn’t it already happening naturally?(3) Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience’s guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.
• Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. When messages sound like common sense, they float gently in one ear and out the other. And why shouldn’t they? If I already intuitively“get” what you’re trying to tell me, why should I obsess about remembering it?
• “It was a breathtaking moment,” Ephron recalls.“In that instant I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn’t enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant. And why it mattered.”
• What made this idea work? First, the teacher knew that the students had a defective schema of journalism, and he knew how it was defective. Second, he made them publicly commit to their defective models with the“write the lead” assignment. Then he pulled the rug out from under them with a well-structured surprise. By revealing the right lead—“ There will be no school next Thursday”—he took their mental models, gave them a swift kick, and made them work better.
• The numbers in billions are unlikely to stick—huge numbers are difficult to grasp and hard to remember. One effective part of the message, in combating this“big-number problem,” is the analogy comparing our sub-Saharan Africa aid to the cost of a single B-2 bomber. We really like this comparison, because it puts the reader in a decision-making mode:“Would I trade one B-2 bomber for the chance to double aid to sub-Saharan Africa?”
• How can we account for what is perhaps the most spectacular planetary feature in our solar system, the rings of Saturn? There’s nothing else like them. What are the rings of Saturn made of anyway? And then he deepened the mystery further by asking,“How could three internationally acclaimed groups of scientists come to wholly different conclusions on the answer?” One, at Cambridge University, proclaimed they were gas; another group, at MIT, was convinced they were made up of dust particles; while the third, at Cal Tech, insisted they were comprised of ice crystals. How could this be, after all, each group was looking at the same thing, right? So, what was the answer?
• Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure.“You’ve heard of the famous Aha! experience, right?” he says.“Well, the Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it is preceded by the Huh? experience.”
• In McKee’s view, a great script is designed so that every scene is a Turning Point.“Each Turning Point hooks curiosity. The audience wonders, What will happen next? and How will it turn out? The answer to this will not arrive until the Climax of the last act, and so the audience, held by curiosity, stays put.”
• What will happen next? How will it turn out? We want to answer these questions, and that desire keeps us interested. It keeps us watching bad movies—but it might also keep us reading long scientific articles. McKee and Cialdini have come up with similar solutions to very different problems.
• Curiosity, he says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.
• Movies cause us to ask, What will happen? Mystery novels cause us to ask, Who did it? Sports contests cause us to ask, Who will win? Crossword puzzles cause us to ask, What is a six-letter word for“psychiatrist”? Pokémon cards cause kids to wonder, Which characters am I missing?
• Our tendency is to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts. The trick to convincing people that they need our message, according to Loewenstein, is to first highlight some specific knowledge that they’re missing. We can pose a question or puzzle that confronts people with a gap in their knowledge. We can point out that someone else knows something they don’t. We can present them with situations that have unknown resolutions, such as elections, sports events, or mysteries. We can challenge them to predict an outcome(which creates two knowledge gaps—What will happen? and Was I right?).
• MESSAGE 1:(Both messages in this Clinic are made up.) This year we targeted support from theatergoers under thirty-five. Our goal is to increase donations from younger patrons, who have traditionally composed a much greater percentage of our audience than of our donor base. To reach them, we implemented a phone-based fund-raising program. Six months into the program, the response rate has been almost 20 percent, which we consider a success.
• MESSAGE 2: This year we set out to answer a question: Why do people under thirty-five, who make up 40 percent of our audience, provide only 10 percent of our donations? Our theory was that they didn’t realize how much we rely on charitable donations to do our work, so we decided to try calling them with a short overview of our business and our upcoming shows. Going into the six-month test, we thought a 10 percent response rate would be a success. Before I tell you what happened, let me remind you of how we set up the program.
• To hold people’s interest, we can use the gap theory of curiosity to our advantage. A little bit of mystery goes a long way.
• 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?”
• How do you get people interested in a topic? You point out a gap in their knowledge. But what if they lack so much knowledge about, say, the Georgia Bulldogs, that they’ve got more of an abyss than a gap? In that case, you have to fill in enough knowledge to make the abyss into a gap.
• Arledge set the scene, showed the local fans, panned across the campus. He talked up the emotions, the rivalries, the histories. By the time the game started, some viewers had begun to care who won. Others were riveted.
• The way to get people to care is to provide context. Today that seems obvious, because these techniques have become ubiquitous. But this avalanche of context started because a twenty-nine-year-old wrote a memo about how to make college football more interesting.
• Knowledge gaps create interest. But to prove that the knowledge gaps exist, it may be necessary to highlight some knowledge first.“Here’s what you know. Now here’s what you’re missing.” Alternatively, you can set context so people care what comes next. It’s no accident that mystery novelists and crossword-puzzle writers give us clues. When we feel that we’re close to the solution of a puzzle, curiosity takes over and propels us to the finish.
• Chapter 3: Concrete
• What makes something“concrete”? If you can examine something with your senses, it’s concrete. A V8 engine is concrete.“High-performance” is abstract. Most of the time, concreteness boils down to specific people doing specific things. In the“Unexpected” chapter, we talked about Nordstrom’s world-class customer service.“World-class customer service” is abstract. A Nordie ironing a customer’s shirt is concrete.
• The manufacturing people were thinking, Why don’t you just come down to the factory floor and show me where the part should go? And the engineering people were thinking, What do I need to do to make the drawings better?
• The moral of this story is not to“dumb things down.” The manufacturing people faced complex problems and they needed smart answers. Rather, the moral of the story is to find a“universal language,” one that everyone speaks fluently. Inevitably, that universal language will be concrete.
• Researchers get excited about pushing the boundaries of a technology, making products that are complex and sophisticated, while customers generally seek out products that are easy and reliable. The desires of researchers and customers don’t always dovetail.
• Why does this happen? Because concreteness is a way of mobilizing and focusing your brain. For another example of this phenomenon, consider these two statements:(1) Think of five silly things that people have done in the world in the past ten years.(2) Think about five silly things your child has done in the past ten years.
• When he met with the prime ministers of developing countries, he would take out his packet of salt and sugar and say,“Do you know that this costs less than a cup of tea and it can save hundreds of thousands of children’s lives in your country?”
• Chapter 4: Credible
• What makes people believe ideas? How’s that for an ambitious question? Let’s start with the obvious answers. We believe because our parents or our friends believe. We believe because we’ve had experiences that led us to our beliefs. We believe because of our religious faith. We believe because we trust authorities.
• If we’re trying to persuade a skeptical audience to believe a new message, the reality is that we’re fighting an uphill battle against a lifetime of personal learning and social relationships. It would seem that there’s nothing much we can do to affect what people believe. But if we’re skeptical about our ability to affect belief, we merely have to look at naturally sticky ideas, because some of them persuade us to believe some pretty incredible things.
• WHAT WE SHOULD learn from urban legends and the Mrs. Johnson trial is that vivid details boost credibility. But what should also be added is that we need to make use of truthful, core details. We need to identify details that are as compelling and human as the“Darth Vader toothbrush” but more meaningful—details that symbolize and support our core idea.
• Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It’s more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.
• The relevant statistic was that a medium-sized bag of popcorn had 37 grams of saturated fat. So what? Is that good or bad? Art Silverman, of the CSPI, cleverly placed the popcorn’s saturated-fat content in a relevant context for comparison. He said that one bag of popcorn was equivalent to a whole day’s worth of unhealthy eating. Silverman knew that most people would be appalled by this finding.
• What if Silverman had been a sleazebag? He could have picked a food item that was notoriously unhealthy but relatively low in saturated fat, such as lollipops.“One bag of popcorn has the fat equivalent of 712,000 lollipops!”(Or an infinite number of lollipops, since they’re fat-free.) This statistic is sleazy because it draws its power from sleight of hand involving different senses of unhealthy food. A sleazy movie-theater executive, to retaliate, might have changed the domain of comparison from saturated fat to some positive attribute of corn:“A bag of popcorn has as much Vitamin J as 71 pounds of broccoli!”(We made this up.)
• So what about the rest of us, who aren’t spinmeisters? What do we do? We will still be tempted to put the best possible spin on our statistics. All of us do it.“I scored sixteen points for the church basketball team tonight!”(Not mentioned: twenty-two missed shots and the loss of the game.)“I’m five feet six.”(Not mentioned: The three-inch heels.)“Revenue was up 10 percent this year, so I think I deserve a bonus.”(Not mentioned: Profits tanked.)
• When it comes to statistics, our best advice is to use them as input, not output. Use them to make up your mind on an issue. Don’t make up your mind and then go looking for the numbers to support yourself—that’s asking for temptation and trouble. But if we use statistics to help us make up our minds, we’ll be in a great position to share the pivotal numbers with others, as did Geoff Ainscow and the Beyond War supporters.
• In Frank Sinatra’s classic“New York, New York,” he sings about starting a new life in New York City, and the chorus declares,“If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” An example passes the Sinatra Test when one example alone is enough to establish credibility in a given domain. For instance, if you’ve got the security contract for Fort Knox, you’re in the running for any security contract(even if you have no other clients). If you catered a White House function, you can compete for any catering contract. It’s the Sinatra Test: If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
• Both of Jain’s stories passed the Sinatra Test. Jain could have used statistics instead of stories—“ 98.84 percent of our deliveries arrive on time.” Or he could have drawn on an external source of credibility, such as a testimonial from the CEO of a multinational company:“We’ve used Safexpress for all our deliveries in India and we’ve found them to be an excellent service provider.”
• But there is something extraordinary about being the company that carries completed board exams and the latest Harry Potter book. Their power comes from their concreteness rather than from numbers or authority. These stories make you think,“If Safexpress can make it there, they can make it anywhere.”
• Peller:“Where’s the beef?” Announcer:“The Wendy’s Single has more beef than the Whopper or the Big Mac. At Wendy’s you get more beef and less bun.” Peller:“Hey! Where’s the beef?” She peers over the counter.“I don’t think there’s anybody back there.”
• It highlighted a genuine advantage of its product and presented it in an enjoyable way.
• This challenge—asking customers to test a claim for themselves—is a“testable credential.” Testable credentials can provide an enormous credibility boost, since they essentially allow your audience members to“try before they buy.”
• So why do people predict badly? Because of the availability bias. The availability bias is a natural tendency that causes us, when estimating the probability of a particular event, to judge the event’s probability by its availability in our memory. We intuitively think that events are more likely when they are easier to remember. But often the things we remember are not an accurate summary of the world.
• We may remember things better because they evoke more emotion, not because they are more frequent. We may remember things better because the media spend more time covering them(perhaps because they provide more vivid images), not because they are more common.
• One year, despite the secrecy surrounding the orientation, a group of female fans staked out the location. On the first night of the orientation, they were hanging out in the hotel bar and restaurant, dressed to be noticed. The players were pleased by the attention. There was a lot of flirting, and the players made plans to meet up with some of the women later in the orientation. The next morning, the rookies dutifully showed up for their session. They were surprised to see the female fans in front of the room. The women introduced themselves again, one by one.“Hi, I’m Sheila and I’m HIV positive.”“Hi, I’m Donna and I’m HIV positive.” Suddenly the talk about AIDS clicked for the rookies. They saw how life could get out of control, how a single night could cause a lifetime of regret. Contrast the NBA’s approach with the NFL’s approach. At the NFL’s orientation18 one year, league personnel had every rookie put a condom on a banana. No doubt eye-rolling was epidemic. Later, two women—former football groupies—talked about how they would try to seduce players, hoping to get pregnant. The women’s session was powerful—it was a well-designed message. But what’s more likely to stick with someone: hearing about someone who fooled someone else, or being fooled yourself?
• In this chapter we’ve seen that the most obvious sources of credibility—external validation and statistics—aren’t always the best. A few vivid details might be more persuasive than a barrage of statistics. An antiauthority might work better than an authority. A single story that passes the Sinatra Test might overcome a mountain of skepticism. It’s inspirational to know that a medical genius like Marshall had to climb over the same hurdles with his idea as we’ll have to climb with ours—and to see that he eventually prevailed, to the benefit of us all.
• Chapter 5: Emotional
• The researchers theorized that thinking about statistics shifts people into a more analytical frame of mind. When people think analytically, they’re less likely to think emotionally. And the researchers believed it was people’s emotional response to Rokia’s plight that led them to act.
• Then both groups were given the Rokia letter. And, confirming the researchers’ theory, the analytically primed people gave less. When people were primed to feel before they read about Rokia, they gave $ 2.34, about the same as before. But when they were primed to calculate before they read about Rokia, they gave $ 1.26. These results are shocking. The mere act of calculation reduced people’s charity. Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel.
• Everyone believes there is tremendous human suffering in Africa; there’s no doubt about the facts. But belief does not necessarily make people care enough to act. Everyone believes that eating lots of fatty food leads to health problems; there’s no doubt about the facts. But the belief does not make people care enough to act.
• Feelings inspire people to act.
• What’s the Truth campaign about? It’s about tapping into antiauthority resentment, the classic teenage emotion. Once, teens smoked to rebel against The Man. Thanks to the ingenious framing of the Truth campaign—which paints a picture of a duplicitous Big Tobacco—teens now rebel against The Man by not smoking. The Truth campaign isn’t about rational decision-making; it’s about rebellion. And it made a lot of teens care enough to do something. In this case, that something was nothing.
• People tend to overuse any idea or concept that delivers an emotional kick. The research labeled this overuse“semantic stretch.”
• 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. We all naturally practice the tactic of association. What“relativity” and“unique” teach us is that in using associations we can overuse colors. Over time, associations get overused and become diluted in value; people end up saying things like“This is really, truly unique.”
• The superlatives of one generation—groovy, awesome, cool, phat—fade over time because they’ve been associated with too many things. When you hear your father call something“cool,” coolness loses its punch. When your finance professor starts using the word“dude,” you must eliminate the word from your vocabulary. Using associations, then, is an arms race of sorts. The other guy builds a missile, so you have to build two. If he’s“unique,” you’ve got to be“super-unique.”
• What matters to people? People matter to themselves. It will come as no surprise that one reliable way of making people care is by invoking self-interest.
• And John Caples is often cited as the greatest copywriter of all time. He says,“First and foremost, try to get self-interest into every headline you write. Make your headline suggest to readers that here is something they want. This rule is so fundamental that it would seem obvious. Yet the rule is violated every day by scores of writers.”
• Imagine that Save the Children incorporated this idea into its pitches for sponsorship. Right now the pitch is“You can sponsor Rokia, a little girl in Mali, for $ 30 per month”—a pitch that is already successful. But what if the pitch was expanded?“Imagine yourself as the sponsor of Rokia, a little girl in Mali. You’ve got a picture of her on your desk at work, next to your kids’ pictures. During the past year you’ve traded letters with her three times, and you know from the letters that she loves to read and frequently gets annoyed by her little brother. She is excited that next year she’ll get to play on the soccer team.” That’s powerful.(And it’s not crass.)
• In 1954, a psychologist named Abraham Maslow surveyed the research in psychology about what motivates people. He boiled down volumes of existing research to a list of needs and desires that people try to fulfill:  Transcendence: help others realize their potential  Self-actualization: realize our own potential, self-fulfillment, peak experiences  Aesthetic: symmetry, order, beauty, balance  Learning: know, understand, mentally connect  Esteem: achieve, be competent, gain approval, independence, status  Belonging: love, family, friends, affection  Security: protection, safety, stability  Physical: hunger, thirst, bodily comfort
• Here’s the twist, though: When people are asked which is the best positioning for other people(not them), they rank No. 1 most fulfilling, followed by No. 2. That is, we are motivated by self-esteem, but others are motivated by down payments. This single insight explains almost everything about the way incentives are structured in most large organizations.
• In other words, a lot of us think everyone else is living in Maslow’s basement—we may have a penthouse apartment, but everyone else is living below. The result of spending too much time in Maslow’s basement is that we may overlook lots of opportunities to motivate people. It’s not that the“bottom floors”—or the more tangible, physical needs, to avoid the hierarchy metaphor—aren’t motivational. Of course they are. We all like to get bonuses and to have job security and to feel like we fit in. But to focus on these needs exclusively
• Lee is well aware that being a soldier is relentlessly difficult. The soldiers often work eighteen-hour days, seven days a week. The threat of danger in Iraq is constant. Lee wants Pegasus to provide a respite from the turmoil. He’s clear about his leadership mission:“As I see it, I am not just in charge of food service; I am in charge of morale.” Think about that: I am in charge of morale. In terms of Maslow’s hierarchy, Lee is going for Transcendence.
• This vision manifests itself in hundreds of small actions taken by Lee’s staff on a daily basis. At Pegasus, the white walls of the typical mess hall are covered with sports banners. There are gold treatments on the windows, and green tablecloths with tassels. The harsh fluorescent lights have been replaced by ceiling fans with soft bulbs. The servers wear tall white chef’s hats.
• The remarkable thing about Pegasus’s reputation for great food is that Pegasus works with exactly the same raw materials that everyone else does. Pegasus serves the same twenty-one-day Army menu as other dining halls. Its food comes from the same suppliers. It’s the attitude that makes the difference. A chef sorts through the daily fruit shipment, culling the bad grapes, selecting the best parts of the watermelon and kiwi, to prepare the perfect fruit tray. At night, the dessert table features five kinds of pie and three kinds of cake. The Sunday prime rib is marinated for two full days. A cook from New Orleans orders spices that are mailed to Iraq to enhance the entrées. A dessert chef describes her strawberry cake as“sexual and sensual”—two adjectives never before applied to Army food.
• Lee realizes that serving food is a job, but improving morale is a mission. Improving morale involves creativity and experimentation and mastery. Serving food involves a ladle.
• One of the soldiers who commute to Pegasus for Sunday dinner said,“The time you are in here, you forget you’re in Iraq.” Lee is tapping into Maslow’s forgotten categories—the Aesthetic, Learning, and Transcendence needs. In redefining the mission of his mess hall, he has inspired his co-workers to create an oasis in the desert.
• Principles—equality, individualism, ideals about government, human rights, and the like—may matter to us even when they violate our immediate self-interest. We may dislike hearing the views of some fringe political group but support its right to speak because we treasure free speech.
• “Group interest” is often a better predictor of political opinions than self-interest. Kinder says that in forming opinions people seem to ask not“What’s in it for me?” but, rather,“What’s in it for my group?” Our group affiliation may be based on race, class, religion, gender, region, political party, industry, or countless other dimensions of difference.
• This model is the standard view of decision-making in economics classes: People are self-interested and rational. The rational agent asks, Which sofa will provide me with the greatest comfort and the best aesthetics for the price? Which political candidate will best serve my economic and social interests? The second model is quite different. It assumes that people make decisions based on identity. They ask themselves three questions: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? And what do people like me do in this kind of situation?
• Notice that in the second model people aren’t analyzing the consequences or outcomes for themselves. There are no calculations, only norms and principles. Which sofa would someone like me—a Southeastern accountant—be more likely to buy? Which political candidate should a Hollywood Buddhist get behind? It’s almost as if people consulted an ideal self-image: What would someone like me do?
• This second model of decision-making helps shed light on why the firefighters got angry about the popcorn popper. Bear in mind that the popcorn popper wasn’t a bribe. If the marketer had said,“Order this film for your firehouse and I’ll give you a popcorn popper for your family,” clearly most people would reject the offer on ethical grounds. On the contrary, the offer was innocuous: We will give you a popcorn popper to thank you for the trouble you’re taking to review the film. You can have the popper regardless of your decision on the film. There’s nothing unethical about accepting this offer. And we can go further than that: From a self-interested, value-maximizing point of view, it is simply stupid to turn down this offer. If you make Decision A, you end up with a popcorn popper. If you make Decision B, you end up with no popcorn popper. Everything else is the same. So unless popcorn destroys value in your world, you’d better make Decision A.
• But from the perspective of the identity model of decision-making, turning down the popper makes perfect sense. The thought process would be more like this:“I’m a firefighter. You’re offering me a popcorn popper to get me to view a film on safety. But firefighters aren’t the kind of people who need little gifts to motivate us to learn about safety. We risk our lives, going into burning buildings to save people. Shame on you for implying that I need a popcorn popper!”
• Floyd Lee, the manager of the Pegasus dining hall, has it right. He could have generated motivation through a strict self-interest appeal: perhaps by offering to let his employees off ten minutes early every night if they worked hard, or by giving them the first choice of the steaks. Instead, he helped create a kind of Pegasus identity: A Pegasus chef is in charge of morale, not food. You can imagine hundreds of decisions being made by staffers in the tent who think to themselves, What should a Pegasus person do in this situation?
• My grade 9 students have difficulty appreciating the usefulness of the Standard Form of the equation of a line, prompting them to ask,“When are we ever going to need this?” This question used to really bother me, and I would look, as a result, for justification for everything I taught. Now I say,“Never. You will never use this.” I then go on to remind them that people don’t lift weights so that they will be prepared should, one day, [someone] knock them over on the street and lay a barbell across their chests. You lift weights so that you can knock over a defensive lineman, or carry your groceries or lift your grandchildren without being sore the next day. You do math exercises so that you can improve your ability to think logically, so that you can be a better lawyer, doctor, architect, prison warden or parent. MATH IS MENTAL WEIGHT TRAINING. It is a means to an end(for most people), not an end in itself.
• Syrek knew that the best way to change Bubba’s behavior was to convince him that people like him did not litter. Based on his research, the Texas Department of Transportation approved a campaign built around the slogan“Don’t Mess with Texas.”
• “Don’t Mess with Texas,” as a phrase, is a great slogan. But we shouldn’t confuse the slogan with the idea. The idea was that Syrek could make Bubba care about litter by showing him that real Texans didn’t litter. The idea was that Bubba would respond to an identity appeal better than he would to a rational self-interest appeal. Even if a second-rate copywriter had been hired, and the slogan had been“Don’t Disrespect Texas,” the campaign would still have decreased cans on Texas highways.
• How can we make people care about our ideas? We get them to take off their Analytical Hats. We create empathy for specific individuals. We show how our ideas are associated with things that people already care about. We appeal to their self-interest, but we also appeal to their identities—not only to the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be
• Chapter 6: Stories
• In the last few chapters, we’ve seen that a credible idea makes people believe. An emotional idea makes people care. And in this chapter we’ll see that the right stories make people act.
• When children say“Tell me a story,” they’re begging for entertainment, not instruction.
• When we hear a story, our minds move from room to room. When we hear a story, we simulate it.
• Mental simulation can even alter visceral physical responses: When people drink water but imagine that it’s lemon juice, they salivate more. Even more surprisingly, when people drink lemon juice but imagine that it’s water, they salivate less.
• review of thirty-five studies7 featuring 3,214 participants showed that mental practice alone—sitting quietly, without moving, and picturing yourself performing a task successfully from start to finish—improves performance significantly. The results were borne out over a large number of tasks: Mental simulation helped people weld better and throw darts better. Trombonists improved their playing, and competitive figure skaters improved their skating. Not surprisingly, mental practice is more effective when a task involves more mental activity(e.g., trombone playing) as opposed to physical activity(e.g., balancing), but the magnitude of gains from mental practice is large on average: Overall, mental practice alone produced about two thirds of the benefits of actual physical practice.
• The takeaway is simple: Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something, but it’s the next best thing. And, to circle back to the world of sticky ideas, what we’re suggesting is that the right kind of story is, effectively, a simulation. Stories are like flight simulators for the brain. Hearing the nurse’s heart-monitor story isn’t like being there, but it’s the next best thing.
• Note how well the Jared story does on the SUCCESs checklist:  It’s simple: Eat subs and lose weight.(It may be oversimplified, frankly, since the meatball sub with extra mayo won’t help you lose weight.)  It’s unexpected: A guy lost a ton of weight by eating fast food! This story violates our schema of fast food, a schema that’s more consistent with the picture of a fat Jared than a skinny Jared.  It’s concrete: Think of the oversized pants, the massive loss of girth, the diet composed of particular sandwiches. It’s much more like an Aesop fable than an abstraction.  It’s credible: It has the same kind of antiauthority truthfulness that we saw with the Pam Laffin antismoking campaign. The guy who wore 60-inch pants is giving us diet advice!  It’s emotional: We care more about an individual, Jared, than about a mass. And it taps into profound areas of Maslow’s hierarchy—it’s about a guy who reached his potential with the help of a sub shop.  It’s a story: Our protagonist overcomes big odds to triumph. It inspires the rest of us to do the same.
• The story of David and Goliath is the classic Challenge plot. A protagonist overcomes a formidable challenge and succeeds. David fells a giant with his homemade slingshot. There are variations of the Challenge plot that we all recognize: the underdog story, the rags-to-riches story, the triumph of sheer willpower over adversity.
• Up till ten minutes ago, these people weren’t willing to give me the time of day, and now I’m not doing enough to implement their idea. This is horrible! They’ve stolen my idea!” And then he had a happier thought.“How wonderful! They’ve stolen my idea. It’s become their idea!”
• The problem is that when you hit listeners between the eyes they respond by fighting back. The way you deliver a message to them is a cue to how they should react. If you make an argument, you’re implicitly asking them to evaluate your argument—judge it, debate it, criticize it—and then argue back, at least in their minds. But with a story, Denning argues, you engage the audience—you are involving people with the idea, asking them to participate with you.
• Once again, the Curse of Knowledge has bewitched these presenters. When they share their lessons—“ Keep the lines of communication open”—they’re hearing a song, filled with passion and emotion, inside their heads. They’re remembering the experiences that taught them those lessons—the struggles, the political battles, the missteps, the pain. They are tapping. But they forget that the audience can’t hear the same tune they hear.

‍