Here are my notes on Chip & Dan Heath’s excellently written, riveting book Made to Stick.


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  • You can make ANYTHING punchy and interesting. E.g. popcorn fat.
  • Urban Legends don’t need repeating. If you have to repeat the message, the message isn’t sticky enough.
  • Stickiness can be used for good or evil. Bad ideas become viral because they stick.
  • To unsticky: fight sticky with stickier.
  • SUCCESs (when phrasing a message or story)
    • Simple (× The Laws of Simplicity)
      • Simple is stickier. The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be.
      • Single message: “You can’t have five North Stars” Go to the core of the idea. Prune until you reach the core. (× Creative Being — remove to perfection)
      • A clear core mission simplifies every decision. (× Clear Thinking, Essentialism) “We are THE low-fare airline.”
        • Concentric circles/missions. The next circle being “Have fun at work.”
      • Inverted pyramid. Put the lead first. (Journalists) Start your story with the most important information — then continue by decreasing order of importance.
        • Also helps prune quickly if running out of space — just remove the end (the least important).
        • Spend 80% of your efforts on the lead.
      • Commander’s Intent (× Culture Map (holistic cultures)): goal for the action (becomes more concrete as you go down the hierarchy). “To do X in order to do Y.” When X is made impossible, you know to become creative to do Y.
      • More good choice is less good choice. Irrelevant uncertainty: two good alternatives and you’re more likely to pick the bad one.
    • Unexpected
      • Use surprise — an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus — to grab people’s attention.
        • All emotions have a purpose. The purpose of surprise is to jolt us to attention. (Surprise: eyebrows going up, widening are eyes to see better — as opposed to anger: narrowing our eyes so we can focus on a known problem.)
      • To get attention: Go off the script. Break a pattern. (× hospitality) — the stuff that humanity is made of. (× The Erotic Mind (break character); Improvise (Authenticity: Do not plan, do not have a script); Improvise (“If you do something weird, I’ll do something weirder”); Tiny Experiments (breaking the game, asking users how to monetize)) (× Enclave mini-van car safety ad; + “Didn’t see that one coming? No one ever does” — × let people come to the conclusion themselves, experience the insight for themselves) (× Gal.) (× Liberators International; FIT (Ekman); The Statement (Crystal Pite); Bad Nature; asking out directly instead of playing games in relationships, etc.)
      • Product design: Change something if you want the user to pay attention. (× The Design of Everyday Things) Blinking warning lights (we would tune them off if they were constantly on (or off)), two-tone sirens (and now even more complex patterns) — forestall getting used to.
      • Find what is counter-intuitive about your message — leverage it (for surprise). Find unexpected implications. Common sense is the enemy of stickiness. (“the best customer service in industry” — make it more vivid or extreme, tell stories)
      • Use concrete thought experiments to unexpected effect. “If everyone in the US gave up one soft drink a month, we could double our current aid to Africa.” (× The Wikipedia Move™)
      • Surprise needs to be relevant. (Just as Simple needs to be substantial.) Surprise doesn’t last — you need to generate interest and curiosity.
        • Post-dictable: surprising, but that, in hindsight, you could have seen coming.
      • Open loops. Open gaps in people’s knowledge. First “Huh?”, then “Aha!”. Leverage curiosity — the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Start your class with a mystery, solve it at the end. Open loops to hold people’s interest. “What questions do I want my audience to ask?” Set the context and give people enough backstory that they start to care about the gaps in their knowledge.
        • All sticky media relies on open loops. (× Hooked)
          • Movies: What will happen? (also: Teasers)
          • Mystery novels: Who did it?
          • Sports contests: Who will win?
          • Crosswords: What is a six-letter word for “psychiatrist”?
          • End of chapters (or introductions). Clickbait. Flirting (× The Erotic Mind (ambivalence))
        • Start your message with an open loop. “This year we set out to answer a question: Why …”
    • Concrete
      • Use vivid, clear, concrete images.
        • Communicate using stuff people can relate to. Talk the language of the people. “A medium-sized ‘butter’ popcorn … contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings — combined!”
      • Use sticky analogies.
      • Use analogies to aid understanding. “A pomelo is basically a supersized grapefruit with a very thick and soft rind.” “Automobiles are horseless carriages.” Use what people already know or are familiar with.
        • “Basically…”
          • In film: “high-concept pitches” (Speed is “Die Hard on a bus”, 13 Going on 30 is “Big for girls” Alien is “Jaws on a spaceship”)
          • (× Music Menu Meeting: e.g. “Basically Animal Collective’s Strawberry Jam album but with strings” — starting from common reference points; describing as a mix of influences (cf band descriptions); describing your band by its influences when searching for band members)
          • Starting from something existing & then editing (carving) — rather than starting from scratch (cf mixing through a bus)
        • Generative analogies: Analogies become springboards for creative thinking. (Music making; the brain as a computer (mental models)) (× Steve Pavlina’s thought experiments)
        • From accessible models to accurate models — adapt your mental models to be more complex but more accurate as you progress (× Design of Everyday Things (conceptual models); Design of Everyday Things (simplified models)).
      • Make your core mission concrete. Your core mission should be able to clearly guide behaviour in unscripted situations. (“Maximize shareholder value” doesn’t help the flight attendant decide whether to serve chicken salad.) (× Measure What Matters (mission statements)) (≠ inert strategies, that do not drive action).
        • At Disney, employees are “cast members”. (× generative analogies; To The Actor, temporary roles; Your Symphony of Selves; Improvise) — going “onstage”, wearing “costumes” (not uniforms), doing “performances” (not jobs), “auditioning for a role” (not interviewing for a job). A metaphor that can clearly guide behaviour in unscripted situations.
        • The converse: Non-generative analogies, e.g. Subway’s “sandwich artists”.
      • Concrete, vivid goals (for the team). Something exciting. “A pocketable radio.” “Man on the moon and back by the end of this decade” (Rather than “creating the most advanced radio”, “being the most respected manufacturer”, “beating our competitor”). Concrete goals unite teams.
      • Convert the abstract to the concrete.
      • Make it a lived experience. Brown eyes / blue eyes segregation in primary school. Reverse online dating.
      • If teaching and you don’t know what people know, be concrete. (× The Culture Map — being explicit in cross-cultural teams).
      • Use statistics not by themselves, but to illustrate relationships.
      • Concrete thinking tools: “If you believe you can increase an employee’s productivity by one or two minutes a day, you’ve paid back the cost of wireless.”
      • In proverbs, abstract truths are encoded in concrete language — because it sticks. (“A bid in hand is worth two in the bush.”)
    • Credible
      • Let the people test the ideas for themselves. Let the people get to the conclusion themselves (rather than pushing statistics & numbers). Make them realize.
      • Let living proofs preach. “Every homeless man who enters the program is matched with a mentor who, two years before, was in the same situation.”
      • Make people commit to a prediction to prevent overconfidence.
      • Two kinds of authorities: experts and influencers (and anti-authorities — who’ve experienced it all).
        • Influencers: we want to be like them, so we do what they do.
      • The Sinatra Test: when one experience makes you credible for life. (e.g. having worked somewhere.)
      • The God is in the Details. People who know a lot of details are more likely to be experts. Mention details to boost your credibility.
    • Emotional
      • Piggy-back on things people feel emotional about.
      • Leverage self-interest in your communication — how your customers’ life will improve. Emphasize benefits instead of features (“what’s in it for me”). (× Nudge)
        • “Spell out the benifit of the benefit” — not drill bits, not holes, but a way to hang their children’s pictures.
      • Two models for making decisions (James March, Stanford): consequences, or identity. Identity: “What would someone like me do?” (also × “Texans don’t litter”, cf Nudge)
      • We care more about an individual than about the mass.
      • Primed to feel vs primed to calculate (e.g. relationally).
    • Story
      • Stories inspire to act.
    • Something else with an S
  • Communication Framework:
    • Pay attention (Unexpected)
    • Understand and remember it (Concrete)
    • Agree/Believe (Credible)
    • Care (Emotional)
    • Be able to act on it (Story)
  • Use SUCCESs for teaching.
  • Use SUCCESs in speeches.
  • Write SUCCESsful meeting minutes, conference summaries.
  • Ultra-local newspaper (“names, names, names”) — updates from the community, where one knows every mentioned person.
  • When a concept has been diluted, give it a new name. (“Honoring the Game” instead of sportsmanship, etc.) — × Art of Gathering (invent a name to remove associations))
  • Chapels. Ask locals to help locally, and the whole land is covered. Sweeping in front of one’s doorstep — we wouldn’t need street sweepers.
  • Plan your days precisely. By simulating the next day, you become aware of things you might have overlooked.
  • Meta: Elements of Book-Writing (Tiny Experiments)
    • Start with a strong story.
    • Use sticky mnemonics (SUCCESs, etc. — cf also “Very Few Wizards Ask Properly” (The Mom Test), etc.)
    • Provide a clear method/framework/model, then go through each element chapter by chapter.
    • Use cliff-hangers at the end of chapters or in the introduction of the chapter. (Open loops — build anticipation.) (× Clickbait)
    • Have asides throughout the book (cf practical case studies (“Clinics”) in Made to Stick and Power of Moments; blurbs in I Will Teach You To Be Rich). Parallel plots. To hammer the point home.
    • Hammer the point home with many examples and coming at it from different approaches and fields. Also stories.
    • Funny names for ideas (The Sinatra Test) ­— but with reason.
    • Short-ish chapters. (You could write a book out of standalone blog posts.)
    • Repeatedly recall examples/concepts from the book.
    • Ending/Epilogue: Reviewing the book somehow nostalgically or big-picture, meta talks. Even opening up onto…