Thinking books · Communication & persuasion · Chip & Dan Heath, 2007
Made to Stick — the big ideas
Why some ideas survive being retold and others do not.
Free — no account needed to read
The big ideas
Six properties: simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, story. Concreteness is the one most often missing from expert communication.
The curse of knowledge: once you know something you cannot remember not knowing it, which is why experts explain badly and do not notice.
Simple does not mean dumbed down; it means finding the single core and being ruthless about what else goes.
These make an idea memorable, not true — a wrong idea sticks equally well, which is worth knowing in both directions.
Practise it — no need to have read it
Take an idea you have explained more than once without it landing. Rewrite it with one concrete image and no abstractions.
A hint: Not "improve quality" — what quality looked like on a specific Tuesday.
Where it shows up in real life
- Presentations
- Explaining your work
- Anything you need repeated accurately
Described in our own words with the source named — never quoted, and not a substitute for reading the book.
Thinking methods from this book
- Make an idea stick — Six properties that make an idea survive being retold.
The thinking it builds
- Argumentation — Build and evaluate arguments