You should buy this book if you want to improve your own communication or want to identify good stories and examples that will convey your message.
The authors of this book define a sticky idea as one that is communicated in a way that other people listen and care. Before you can do that, though, you need to know why it's so hard to do.
The authors suggest that one reason is "The Curse of Knowledge" which they define this way: "Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it's like not to know it." The Curse of Knowledge leads us in the direction of more abstraction and fewer stories, which make our communications less likely to stick.
The authors identify six key qualities of an idea that will make it sticky
They call the first quality simplicity. The idea is that you must identify your core message. This is the weakest section of the book. When the authors say, "simplicity" they don't necessarily mean "something that's simple." They really mean "core message," the most important single thing about your message and the only thing you should concentrate on getting across.
Alas, even with exercises, the authors don't do a good job of defining what this is. There is good advice here, but I still decided to think of "core" message as "topic sentence" and find help defining it in other books.
The core advice of the book is: "Identify your core message and then use the other five qualities as a kind of checklist to help you improve your message's stickiness." Here are the five checklist qualities.
Unexpectedness. You capture people's attention by breaking the pattern they expect. The authors spend a lot of time on this and leave out other methods of capturing attention like mentioning the name of the person or the group they belong to in the headline. As one guru has said, "You can increase the sales of a book dramatically by adding the words 'for women' to the title." Of course, if your audience is police officers, you would want to add "for police officers."
Concreteness. Use concrete examples and language. Our brains are wired to remember concrete examples. When I give a speech, folks may write down the statistics and lists, but they remember the examples.
Credibility. The kind of proof that people are likely to believe.
Emotional. For people to take action, they have to care, so you have to enrich your message with emotion.
Stories. Stories are the way that human beings have passed along both knowledge and lore since we crawled out of caves. Stories are where you bring together the other checklist qualities. The authors identify three basic plots that create sticky stories.
The bottom line for me is that after reading the book, I have specific knowledge tools that I can apply to my writing and marketing messages that will make those messages better.
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