[Read] Made to stick

 Inspired by the video: Mini Essays: The Ultimate Learning Tool. I decided to write a mini essay about this book - Made to Stick. The purpose of writing an mini essay is that we can improve our own understanding of a book through the writing and reconstructing the new knowledge in our brain. Since this is the very first try, the article wouldn’t be perfect and could never be perfect. This article is just a place for myself to practice writing skills and to polish wording.

Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath

The book starts with introducing 6 essential components of writing a good article, which are Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotion and Story. The acronym is SUCCES (pretty easy to be remembered). These components were mention in my Writing Science post 4 years ago! Joshua (the author of writing secience) mentions these important concepts in his book.

The authors, Chip and Dan brothers, give us plenty of examples when they explain each component. As a non-English speaker, it is really easy to follow the flow of the stories in this book. I think there are two main reasons that this book is easily to be read. First, the authors know how to grab readers attention by applying all their SUCCES components in this book. Second, they do not use hard and fancy words in the sentence. So, I would be happy to recommend this book to anyone who want to improve their writing. The SUCCES skill is a general principal that can be applied to any kinds of articles. The followings are the notes I took while reading the book (For more details, please read the book):

👉Simple: Whenever you want to convey a message, you will want to stick to the core. A core is like the commander's intent, which is simple and short (compactness is the word described in the book). Simple helps to avoid the curse of knowledge* (only compact info but no value). Schemas are useful to build complexity from simplicity. If you said three things, you don't say anything. Don't bury the lead. Make important things show first.

*Curse of knowledge: when you learn something, it hard to go back to the beginner's mind and pretend that you don't understand. So, make it hard to explain things when you know something well.

👉Unexpected: to make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from "what information do I need to covey" to "what questions do I want my audience to ask". Unexpected comes from knowledge gap. First, we need to battle people's overconfidence. (not surprisingly, we always believe that we know more than we actually know) A way to deal with this to make people commit to their preconceived ideas. Overconfidence people are more likely to recognize a knowledge gap when they realize that others disagree with them.

👉Concrete: instead of abstract, concrete idea makes people memorize easily; it's earlier to apply concrete than unexpected. Concreteness is a way of mobilizing and focusing your brain.

👉Credible: 3 internal credibility, 1. Details 2.statistics: should almost always be used to illustrate a relationship but not purely show the numbers. Remember relationship is more important than numbers. 3. The Sinatra test: if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. And testable credentials: you need to test yourself.

👉Emotional: in total three ways: 1. using association, 2. appealing to self-interest and 3. appealing to Identity (not only to the people they are right now, but also to the people they would like to be).

👉Story: the purpose of telling a story is getting people to act. Mental practice (think about the process) alone produced about two thirds of the benefits of actual physical practice. Story is like a mental practice. 3 basic plots of stories: the challenge plot, the connection plot (things over race that can be understood by all), and the creativity plot (make us want to do something different). Stories are naturally embody most of the SUCCESs framework. Keep in mind that when you present something, don't just try to tap on your own imagination, but care about if audiences can hear the tone.

For an idea to stick, you need to make people:

1. Pay attention: unexpected

2. Understand and remember it: concrete

3. Agree/believe: credible

4. Care: emotional

5. Be able to act on it: story

Three barriers that make strategic communication more difficult:

1. The curse of knowledge: the leader should make the order concrete for others to understand. A story can be a perfect concrete example to guide behavior.

2. Decision paralysis: more options make people harder to make decisions. It's easy to tell between good and bad things, but it's hard to tell between two good things. Therefore, we need an index of priorities (core value).

3. Lack of common language: it's important to form a common strategic language that allows everyone to contribute (express their opinions).