Episode 41 - Review and Summary of Made to Stick by Dan and Chip Heath

We’ve all had that one idea or multiple ideas that we thought were going to change the world, and when we shared them with others, they thought we were out of our minds, and despite how awesome they were in hindsight, if we were just able to make them stick, we could have been successful.

I remember during the early 2000s when dot-com days still had some traction. I had the idea to start up a free TV website called Tuby that would play TV and movies, not unlike how Hulu, Netflix, and cable on demand is now, and I would sell ads locally to small businesses.

The concept of each computer having a local address attached to the internet connection called IP, was new to everyone, and it would revolutionize the quality of the ads, which was at the time dominated with Spammy banner ads and popups that would open 15 screens when you closed them.

This would drive quality viewerships to ads just like how it is today on Youtube.

But of course, I sucked at presenting my idea and couldn’t make it stick and it just went into my many piles of unsticky business feasibility studies.

If only I had known the principles of why things stuck, presented by Bestselling authors Chip and Dan Heath in this book. I could have pitched it correctly, and who knows, it could have eventually become the platform we know today and use to consume video contents.

The authors talk about the concept of the "Knowledge curse" as the main reason why ideas don't stick,

Please allow me to read you an excerpt about this: "And that brings us to the villain of our book: The Curse of Knowledge. Lots of research in economics and psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can't give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience render him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in abstractions that you can't follow. And we're all like the lawyer in our own domain of expertise.

Here's the great cruelty of the Curse of Knowledge: The better we get at generating great ideas--new insights and novel solutions--in our field of expertise, the more unnatural it becomes for us to communicate those ideas clearly. That's why knowledge is a curse. But notice we said "unnatural," not "impossible." Experts just need to devote a little time to apply the basic principles of stickiness.”

So how do we overcome the Curse of Knowledge and make our ideas, or messages easier to recall?

Chip and Dan present key strategies to defeat this and how we should present our ideas, with a mneomic, SUCCES (single S in the end) = Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and Stories.

In school, our teachers and professors filled us with formulas, tables, and theories, only for us to forget them.

Even today, in my line of work, as a Leader in an organization charged with marketing and brand, I have to constantly communicate our ideas to the rest of the exec team, clients and others. This tells us that our ideas are only as good as the effectiveness of how we are able to communicate them and have others understand our concepts in order to buy in.

Yesterday’s podcast, we talked about one of the 5 dysfunctions of a team, is the lack of buy-into our plans and strategies. This book helps us understand how to get our ideas to stick.

Sticky is that idea that breaks through the noise and gets remembered, but more importantly, helps to shift attitudes and behavior towards us, our ideas and our organizations.

Let's dive into the 6 strategies to help make our ideas stick.