Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Really enjoyed this book. Concepts are great and the examples illustrated the concepts very well. If you want to learn the keys to communicating concepts or ideas model the steps from Made to Stick. It stays in my library.

Over the past year I discovered a hurtle with my personality.

When I am talking to people one on one, I am outgoing, loquacious, animated, and blend in analogies and anecdotes with great abandoned. When interacting with friends, this method enthralls them (at least that is how I choose to view it), but I have a very different way of presenting ideas to others in a business setting.

Because of my technical background, I choose my words carefully when speaking about business. I make great efforts to be both precise and accurate and labor over how to most completely present all of the relevant ideas... and I do mean completely. I feel it necessary to go into great detail about all of the aspects of the topic under consideration because I believe all of the points to be critical - I want to make sure my audience is as informed about the topic as I am.

This led me to a problem. I discovered (to my amazement) that people didn't want to become experts on these topics, especially not in our first meeting. They wanted to quickly understand the breadth of the concept and then decide whether they wanted to know more or not. How could this be with such exciting ideas?

So, as I started to pitch my most recent project to potential investors, I ran into problems. How do I fit my ideas into a 60-second elevator pitch, a 3-minute overview and a 20 minute project presentation. With the complete development plan assembled, the business model defined, and the team ready to go, I had to learn how to efficiently present the dream to find funding and my free wheeling conversational style used with friends and detailed oriented professional style weren't cutting it. I had the Curse of Knowledge and needed to alter it.

Made to Stick outlines a game plan for how to do this. They provide methods that help to refine a message to make it sticky to audiences so that it is more easily understood and absorbed at a deeper level - separated from abstraction. I found myself putting the book down mid-chapter to make revisions to presentations and documents and making notes about new steps that I needed to take. Presentation times dropped, people were able to repeat the key concepts I wanted to drive home, and there was dancing in the streets. I highly recommend this book to anyone trying to communicate more effectively.


Marcel Crudele
Atlanta, GA

How do you communicate so that the message is remembered? The authors have many good ideas. The question is broad so anyone can take something away from the book. You don't have to be a marketer or Powerpoint presenter to get value of the ideas. (You can get the whole content of the book by reading some of the longer reviews on amazon!)

This could have been a very nice book if they wrote 80 pages (like the 1 minute series). Now it is just repetitive and bloated. The ideas are good, but it is very tedious to wade through the pages.

1. Simplicity
2. Unexpectedness
3. Concreteness
4. Credibility
5. Emotions
6. Stories

Get the idea? Good stuff.
Tao Cycle Therapy: Natural Happiness via Self Directed Cure for Chronic Anxiety & Depression [Updated 2008 3nd Edition]

In a world where we are bombarded by messages every second, having the know-how to create a message that stands out above the rest is a serious asset. `Made to Stick' is a book by Chip and Dan Heath, brothers who researched psychosocial studies on the memory, emotion and motivation.

The Heath brothers found that six basic qualities enable an idea to stick in our minds; these are: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories.

Once you have mastered this communication skill, the world is your oyster. A job seeker can create a resumé and cover letter to stand out above the rest. An entrepreneur will have their ideas heard loud and clear.

Danny Iny
Author of the free eBook "Forget Everything You Know About Looking For a Job... And Actually Find One!"
HuntingToHired, www.HuntingToHired.com