Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

The takeaway is that it can be the honesty and trustworthiness of our sources, not their status, that allows them to act as authorities. Sometimes antiauthorities are even better than authorities.

The lesson for the rest of us is that if we want to make people care, we’ve got to tap into the things they care about. When everybody taps into the same thing, an arms race emerges. To avoid it, we’ve either got to shift onto new turf, as Thompson did, or find associations that are distinctive for our ideas.

All Connection plots inspire us in social ways. They make us want to help others, be more tolerant of others, work with others, love others.

On average, the people who read the statistics contributed $1.14. The people who read about Rokia contributed $2.38—more than twice as much. It seems that most people have something in common with Mother Teresa: When it comes to our hearts, one individual trumps the masses. The researchers believed that the smaller donations for the statistical let

The people who thought John had taken off his sweatshirt before the jog took more time to read the sentence than the people who thought John had it on. This result is subtle but fascinating. It implies that we create a kind of geographic simulation of the stories we hear. It’s one thing to say “Reading stories makes us see pictures in our head.” We

Generative metaphors and proverbs both derive their power from a clever substitution: They substitute something easy to think about for something difficult.

The first problem of communication is getting people’s attention. Some communicators have the authority to demand attention. Parents are good at this: “Bobby, look at me!” Most of the time, though, we can’t demand attention; we must attract it. This is a tougher challenge.

You don’t have to promise riches and sex appeal and magnetic personalities. It may be enough to promise reasonable benefits that people can easily imagine themselves enjoying.

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”