Made to Stick
SUCCESs checklist makes ideas unforgettable. Simple beats complex every time.
marketingUltimately, the test of our success as idea creators isn’t whether people mimic our exact words, it’s whether we achieve our goals.
AQ's take: Obsession with perfect phrasing wasted years. Goals hit? Ship it.
Dec 27, 2022Here’s the rub: The same factors that worked to your advantage in the Answer stage will backfire on you during the Telling Others stage. To get the Answer, you need expertise, but you can’t dissociate expertise from the Curse of Knowledge. You know things that others don’t know, and you can’t remember what it was like not to know those things. So when you get around to sharing the Answer, you’ll tend to communicate as if your audience were you.
AQ's take: Expertise blinded me sharing fixes. Forgot newbie terror. Curse real.
Dec 27, 2022Einstein protested, “Philosophers play with the word, like a child with a doll…. It does not mean that everything in life is relative.”
AQ's take: Relativity BS? Einstein calls out my excuse-making perfectionism.
Dec 4, 2022“First and foremost, try to get self-interest into every headline you write. Make your headline suggest to readers that here is something they want. This rule is so fundamental that it would seem obvious. Yet the rule is violated every day by scores of writers.”
AQ's take: Self-interest headlines? My feature dumps ignored what customers crave.
Dec 4, 2022“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!).”
AQ's take: Advertiser ego? Killed my pitches. Now customer pain first.
Dec 4, 2022An old advertising maxim says you’ve got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children’s pictures.
AQ's take: Nailed it. I sold server specs forever. Nobody cared until I showed filled calendars.
Dec 4, 2022He says that the WIIFY—“what’s in it for you,” pronounced whiff-y—should be a central aspect of every speech.
AQ's take: WIIFY whiffed my pitches. Listened once, audience vanished. Selfish hook next time.
Dec 4, 2022It’s important, Caples says, to keep the self in self-interest: “Don’t say, ‘People will enjoy a sense of security when they use Goodyear Tires.’ Say, ‘You enjoy a sense of security when you use Goodyear Tires.’”
AQ's take: 'You enjoy' vs 'people enjoy'? My vague copy bombed. Direct 'you' wins.
Dec 4, 2022What we should learn from urban legends and the Mrs. Johnson trial is that vivid details boost credibility. But what should also be added is that we need to make use of truthful, core details. We need to identify details that are as compelling and human as the “Darth Vader toothbrush” but more meaningful—details that symbolize and support our core idea.
AQ's take: Vivid details build trust? My dry facts bored everyone. Now I spice truth.
Nov 13, 2022Geoff Ainscow and other leaders of the Beyond War movement in the 1980s were determined to find a way to address the following paradox: When we see a child running with scissors, we wince. We shout at her to stop. Yet when we read newspaper articles about nuclear weapons—which have the power to destroy millions of children—it provokes, at best, only a moment of dismay.
AQ's take: Beyond War paradox? Stats numb me too. Need emotional punch for impact.
Nov 13, 2022Then Covey superimposes a very human metaphor over the statistics. He says, “If, say, a soccer team had these same scores, only 4 of the 11 players on the field would know which goal is theirs. Only 2 of the 11 would care. Only 2 of the 11 would know what position they play and know exactly what they are supposed to do. And all but 2 players would, in some way, be competing against their own team members rather than the opponent.”
AQ's take: Covey's soccer stats? My teams fought each other. Clarity fixed it.
Nov 13, 2022When it comes to statistics, our best advice is to use them as input, not output. Use them to make up your mind on an issue. Don’t make up your mind and then go looking for the numbers to support yourself—that’s asking for temptation and trouble.
AQ's take: Stats as input? Stopped cherry-picking to justify dumb calls.
Nov 13, 2022Novices perceive concrete details as concrete details. Experts perceive concrete details as symbols of patterns and insights that they have learned through years of experience. And, because they are capable of seeing a higher level of insight, they naturally want to talk on a higher level. They want to talk about chess strategies, not about bishops moving diagonally.
AQ's take: Experts curse of knowledge wrecked my team talks. Now I dumb it down.
Aug 18, 2022Concreteness makes targets transparent.
AQ's take: Concrete targets? My fuzzy KPIs hid failures. Transparency hurts but works.
Aug 18, 2022When Boeing prepared to launch the design of the 727 passenger plane in the 1960s, its managers set a goal that was deliberately concrete: The 727 must seat 131 passengers, fly nonstop from Miami to New York City, and land on Runway 4-22 at La Guardia. (The 4-22 runway was chosen for its length—less than a mile, which was much too short for any of the existing passenger jets.) With a goal this concrete, Boeing effectively coordinated the actions of thousands of experts in various aspects of engineering or manufacturing. Imagine how much harder it would have been to build a 727 whose goal was to be “the best passenger plane in the world.”
AQ's take: Boeing's runway goal? My vague launches crashed. Concrete specs save ass.
Aug 18, 2022Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it. It also makes it harder to coordinate our activities with others, who may interpret the abstraction in very different ways. Concreteness helps us avoid these problems. This is perhaps the most important lesson that Aesop can teach us.
AQ's take: Concrete details? Stopped my abstract pitches bombing with clients.
Aug 17, 2022It’s the nature versus nurture debate applied to ideas: Are ideas born interesting or made interesting?
AQ's take: Nailed me. My ideas flop unless I craft them sticky. No more boring births.
Aug 3, 2022To 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.
AQ's take: Spot on. SUCCESs checklist? My marketing brain just got a cheat code. Game changer.
Aug 3, 2022The Combat Maneuver Training Center, the unit in charge of military simulations, recommends that officers arrive at the Commander’s Intent by asking themselves two questions: If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission, we must _________________. The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is ________________.
AQ's take: Ouch. My vague goals tanked projects. Commander's Intent forces laser focus now.
Aug 3, 2022The French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once offered a definition of engineering elegance: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
AQ's take: Perfection hit. I bloated products with extras. Now I subtract ruthlessly.
Aug 3, 2022Southwest has a Commander’s Intent, a core, that helps to guide this coordination. As related by James Carville and Paul Begala: Herb Kelleher [the longest-serving CEO of Southwest] once told someone, “I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds. This is it: We are THE low-fare airline. Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company’s future as well as I can. “Here’s an example,” he said. “Tracy from marketing comes into your office. She says her surveys indicate that the passengers might enjoy a light entrée on the Houston to Las Vegas flight. All we offer is peanuts, and she thinks a nice chicken Caesar salad would be popular. What do you say?” The person stammered for a moment, so Kelleher responded: “You say, ‘Tracy, will adding that chicken Caesar salad make us THE low-fare airline from Houston to Las Vegas? Because if it doesn’t help us become the unchallenged low-fare airline, we’re not serving any damn chicken salad.’”
AQ's take: Kelleher's low-fare rule? Explains why my ops decisions finally click.
Aug 3, 2022schemas enable profound simplicity—is
AQ's take: Schemas simplify? My ADHD brain loves this shortcut to clarity.
Aug 3, 2022If a message can’t be used to make predictions or decisions, it is without value, no matter how accurate or comprehensive it is.
AQ's take: Brutal truth. My data dumps were pointless without decisions. Lesson learned.
Aug 3, 2022An accurate but useless idea is still useless.
AQ's take: Accurate but useless? Burned me on endless reports that changed nothing.
Aug 3, 2022Curiosity, he says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.
AQ's take: Curiosity gap? Explains why my hooks finally pull readers in.
Aug 3, 2022