In an excerpt from Made to Stick, broth­ers Dan and Chip Heath pro­vide an out­line of the six prin­ci­ples of cre­at­ing ‘sticky’ ideas:

  • Sim­plic­ity: “We must be mas­ters of exclu­sion. We must relent­lessly pri­or­i­tize. […] Proverbs are the ideal. We must cre­ate ideas that are both sim­ple and pro­found. The Golden Rule is the ulti­mate model of sim­plic­ity: a one-sentence state­ment so pro­found that an indi­vid­ual could spend a life­time learn­ing to fol­low it.”
  • Unex­pect­ed­ness: “We need to vio­late people’s expec­ta­tions. We need to be coun­ter­in­tu­itive. […] For our idea to endure, we must gen­er­ate inter­est and curios­ity. […] We can engage people’s curios­ity over a long period of time by sys­tem­at­i­cally “open­ing gaps” in their knowl­edge — and then fill­ing those gaps.”
  • Con­crete­ness: “We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sen­sory information.”
  • Cred­i­bil­ity: “Sticky ideas have to carry their own cre­den­tials. We need ways to help peo­ple test our ideas for them­selves — a ‘try before you buy’ phi­los­o­phy for the world of ideas.”
  • Emo­tions: “How do we get peo­ple to care about our ideas? We make them feel some­thing. […] We are wired to feel things for peo­ple, not for abstractions.”
  • Sto­ries: “How do we get peo­ple to act on our ideas? We tell sto­ries. […] Research shows that men­tally rehears­ing a sit­u­a­tion helps us per­form bet­ter when we encounter that sit­u­a­tion in the phys­i­cal envi­ron­ment. Sim­i­larly, hear­ing sto­ries acts as a kind of men­tal flight sim­u­la­tor, prepar­ing us to respond more quickly and effectively.”

via @contentini