INTRODUCTION
14-18 “Six Principles of Sticky Ideas…” [XXXXX]
20 “the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.” [EDIT] !!
20 “There are, in fact, only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge reliably. The first is not to learn anything. The second is to take your ideas and transform them.” !!!
CHAPTER 1: SIMPLE
62 “Proverbs are the Holy Grail of simplicity. Coming up with a short, compact phrase is easy. Anybody can do it. On the other hand, coming up with a profound compact phrase is incredibly difficult. […] the effort is worth it—[.] “finding the core,” and expressing it in the form of a compact idea, can be enduringly powerful.” !!
CHAPTER 2: UNEXPECTED
71-72 “To be surprising, an event can’t be predictable. Surprise is the opposite of predictability. But, to be satisfying, surprise must be “post-dictable.” […]
If you want your ideas to be stickier, you’ve got to break someone’s guessing machine and then fix it. […] target an aspect of your audience’s guessing machines that relates to your core message. […]
(1) Identify the central message you need to communicate—find the core; (2) Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message—i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn’t it already happening naturally? (3) Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience’s guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.
Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. When messages sound like common sense, they float gently in one ear and out the other.” !!
83 ROBERT MCKEE “Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.” !!
84-85 “Curiosity […] happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.
[…] gaps cause pain. When we want to know something but don’t, it’s like having an itch that we need to scratch. To take away the pain, we need to fill the knowledge gap. We sit patiently through bad movies, even though they may be painful to watch, because it’s too painful not to know how they end.
This “gap theory” of interest seems to explain why some domains create fanatical interest: They naturally create knowledge gaps. […]
One important implication of the gap theory is that we need to open gaps before we close them. Our tendency is to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts. The trick to convincing people that they need our message […] is to first highlight some specific knowledge that they’re missing. We can pose a question or puzzle that confronts people with a gap in their knowledge. We can point out that someone else knows something they don’t. We can present them with situations that have unknown resolutions, such as elections, sports events, or mysteries. We can challenge them to predict an outcome (which creates two knowledge gaps—What will happen? and Was I right?).” !!
88 “To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from “What information do I need to convey?” to “What questions do I want my audience to ask?”” !!
CHAPTER 3: CONCRETE
104 “Concrete language helps people, especially novices, understand new concepts. Abstraction is the luxury of the expert.” !!
CHAPTER 4: CREDIBLE
143 “Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It’s more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.” !!
CHAPTER 6: STORIES
210 “When we hear a story, our minds move from room to room. When we hear a story, we simulate it.” !!!
EPILOGUE: WHAT STICKS
240 “in making ideas stick, the audience gets a vote. The audience may change the meaning of your idea […] The audience may actually improve your idea […] Or the audience may retain some of your ideas and jettison others” !!
241 – 242 “The barrier to idea-spotting is that we tend to process anecdotes differently than abstractions. If a Nordstrom manager is hit with an abstraction, such as “Increase customer satisfaction scores by 10 percent this quarter,” that abstraction kicks in the managerial mentality: How do we get there from here? But a story about a tire-chain-exchanging, cold-car-warming sales rep provokes a different way of thinking. It will likely be filed away with other kinds of day-to-day personal news—interesting but ultimately trivial […] In some sense, there’s a wall in our minds separating the little picture—stories, for instance—from the big picture. Spotting requires us to tear down that wall.
How do we tear down the wall? [… : by] maintaining a deeply ingrained sense of the core message that we want to communicate [^..] a little nagging process [.] opens up in our minds, reminding us […] allowing us to filter incoming ideas from that perspective. […]
If you’re a great spotter, you’ll always trump a great creator. Why? Because the world will always produce more great ideas than any single individual, even the most creative one.” !!!!