Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Ever heard of the kidney heist? Or the Halloween candy booby-trapped with razor blades? Want to make orientation as memorable as these urban legends? This book provides simple and effective ways to do just that. For orientation professionals, the challenge of presenting a volume of important information in a very small amount of time and making it stick is often daunting. Too frequently, stories of students who walk into other departments and say things like “No one ever told me that!” are circulated around campus, giving pause to individuals that know that the material in question was covered in orientation. The book is a call to action and a beacon of hope for anyone interested in making their messages more salient and memorable. Made to Stick is based on the idea that some ideas are more memorable or “sticky,” than others. “Stickiness” is a concept borrowed from Malcolm Gladwell’s book on social phenomena, The Tipping Point. According to the authors, “stickiness” occurs when ideas are “understood and remembered, and they have a lasting impact – they change your audience’s opinions or behavior.” Both Dan and Chip Heath have spent the last decade exploring this topic from multiple angles. Chip Heath, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, spent years doing extensive research on urban legends and topics like, why Nostradamus’ prophecies are still read, why Chicken Soup for the Soul stories are inspirational, and why ineffective folk remedies persist. Dan Heath, a former Harvard researcher, studied the most effective teaching techniques of the nation’s top instructors as a part of his research for Thinkwell, the multimedia textbook company he founded. Through their collective experience, the Heath brothers have come up with six factors that seem to affect the stickiness of an idea: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories. These factors can easily be recalled using the acronym SUCCESs (a pneumonic device designed by the authors to make their message stick). Each chapter contains a myriad of examples, exercises, and illustrations to help the reader understand and remember the messages presented. The result is a “sticky” message that the reader will be eager to share. Chapter One of the Heath brothers’ creation addresses the need for messages to be simple and get at the core of the idea being communicated. This is easier said