May 21, 2019

📚 Book Notes: Made to Stick - Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Here are my notes from Made to Stick - Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die:

Bits

1. Have you ever noticed that our friends’ friends have much more interesting lives than our friends themselves?
2. Are ideas born interesting or made interesting?
   A successful / sticky idea tells a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story.
3. A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
4. People are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region.
5. If You Say Three Things, You Don’t Say Anything.
6. A secondary effect of being angry is that we become more certain of our judgments.
7. To be satisfying, surprise must be “post-dictable.” The twist makes sense after you think about it, but it’s not something you would have seen coming.
8. Curiosity happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge. Mysteries are powerful because they create a need for closure.
9. We forget that other people don’t know what we know.
10. If you’re a great spotter, you’ll always trump a great creator. Why? Because the world will always produce more great ideas than any single individual, even the most creative one.

Bytes

1. The first problem of communication is getting people’s attention.
   The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern.
   Our brain is designed to be keenly aware of changes. Smart product designers are well aware of this tendency. They make sure that, when products require users to pay attention, something changes. Warning lights blink on and off because we would tune out a light that was constantly on. Old emergency sirens wailed in a two-note pattern, but modern sirens wail in a more complex pattern that’s even more attention-grabbing. Car alarms make diabolical use of our change sensitivity.
2. Surprise gets our attention. Some naturally sticky ideas propose surprising “facts”: The Great Wall of China is the only man-made structure visible from space! You use only 10 percent of your brain! You should drink eight glasses of water a day! Urban legends frequently contain surprising plot twists.
   Interest keeps our attention. There are classes of sticky ideas that maintain our interest over time. Conspiracy theories keep people ravenously collecting new information. Gossip keeps us coming back to our friends for developments.
3. Surprise can prompt us to hunt for underlying causes, to imagine other possibilities, to figure out how to avoid surprises in the future.
   Surprise makes us want to find an answer—to resolve the question of why we were surprised—and big surprises call for big answers. If we want to motivate people to pay attention, we should seize the power of big surprises.
4. What makes people believe ideas? We believe because our parents or our friends believe. We believe because we’ve had experiences that led us to our beliefs. We believe because of our religious faith. We believe because we trust authorities.
5. The most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments (the world’s best seed!) that they forget to tell us why we should buy (the world’s best lawn!).
   People don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children’s pictures.

If you liked the above content, I'd definitely recommend reading the whole book. 💯

Until We Meet Again...
🖖 swap