Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Heath Brothers Review

Recommended Read: Yes

Rate: 5/5

This book goes through the SUCCESS method. Here's the outline for the whole book:

Simple - don't lose your core message in a lot of pomp and circumstance
Unexpected - make your idea jump out and grab people's attention
Concrete - keep it easy to grasp vs. mind boggling statistics or huge numbers
Credible - is your idea believable?
Emotional - people react to emotion and it creates an empathetic bond
Stories - story telling is an age old form of communication

Every part of the SUCCESS letters has amazing examples outlined. For example, based on the book's title the author starts off with the history of why ideas stick. He gives examples of the oldest short stories which stuck with us throughout the times. Such as "Kill two birds with one stone". People now believe it to be "saying" but it was a one line story. Then he goes on explaining the examples tested in real life by university professors and students in doing focus groups for analyzing different concepts.

Right before reading this book, I was watching Randy Pausch's lecture on Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. Out of many things I learned from that lecture, I remember him saying "Luck is when opportunity meets preparation". After reading this book I was able to use concepts from this book during my volunteer term in a variety of projects I was involved in from planning stages to execution. This book has given me the resources to use when I get ideas.

It's never as easy as it looks. The book will get you excited and empowered to do things in your own life with your ideas. However, you'll see that the successful examples are not always the outcome you are going to get in life. I learned that and idea has to go through a lot of unsuccessful stages. Then as we change them, they get molded and may even change completely into something that can work. Now we have something that works and work on turning that into making it stick. This should be done before doing stratgic analysis of planning. Ones everything works out, you'll end up with a scope to start the planning stages and then implement.

Overall an amazing read. This is not a novel, but a guide to change our ways of thinking.  Therefore there is no moral of the whole book.