Made to stick

Why some ideas survive and others die?

When you want to purchase a pair of sport shoes, which brand would you go for? When you run out of milk but don't want to go out, where would you purchase them at the first place? When you reunion with your parents or grandparents for Spring Festival, which kind of gifts would you buy for them?

If these questions reminds you some slogens of brands or some advertisements you saw on TV or air unconsciously, then please take a few minutes to think about why you remember them instead of others, and what do they do different from others.

And in the book 'Made to stick', the authors introduces six principles to make your ideas 'sticky'.

PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY — 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.

PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS — We can use surprise to grab people’s attention. But surprise doesn’t last. For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity.

PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS — Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images, our brains are wired to remember concrete data. Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.

PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY — We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves—a “try before you buy” philosophy for the world of ideas.

PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS — How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something.

PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES —- Hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.

Those are the six principles of successful ideas. To summarize, here’s our checklist for creating a successful idea: a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. A clever observer will note that this sentence can be compacted into the acronym SUCCESs.

With all those principles, you can create an idea 'sticky', and next time when you find you loss people's attention, or forget what you said easily, before you start to blame them not listen to you, please kindly wait a minute and check the list to see if your ideas are 'sticky' or not.