Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

But the jurors did make different judgments based on irrelevant vivid details. So why did the details make a difference? They boosted the credibility of the argument. If I can mentally see the Darth Vader toothbrush, it’s easier for me to picture the boy diligently brushing his teeth in the bathroom, which in turn reinforces the notion that Mrs. Jo

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.

a 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

To new employees, the idea of wrapping a gift bought at a competitor’s store is so absurd, so far outside the bounds of their existing notion of “service,” that the story stops them in their tracks. Their guessing machines have been broken. Their old “good service” guessing machine would never have produced the idea of altruistic gift-wrapping.

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 t

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?”

If a message can’t be used to make predictions or decisions, it is without value, no matter how accurate or comprehensive it is.

The story about the baby appears in a chapter called “The Power of Stories,” in Klein’s book Sources of Power.

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.” McKee notes that the How will it turn