10/8 Reading

Chapters “Simple” an “Unexpected” from Heath & Heath’s Made to Stick provide useful insight to what makes stories “stick.” I have picked out what I took to be key points from the reading.

First, we must have an understanding of what “simple” truly means. Simple, in terms of Heath & Heath, is finding the core of the idea: “finding the core means stripping an idea down to its most critical essence. To get to the core, we’ve got to weed out superfluous and tangential elements (28).” The process might seem like an easy thing to do, but the authors point out that sometimes tough decisions have to be made in terms of scratching ideas that are important to the core but are not the most important to the core.

After finding the core, we can see how it fits in with Heath & Heath’s equation on page 45: “Simple = Core + Compact.” “The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be” (47). It seems like this is commonsense. I felt like the quote on 48 summed up this part of the chapter nicely when it alters the Golden Rule to fit this topic specifically, “ideas that are compact enough to be sticky and meaningful enough to make a difference” (48). Nobody wants to be bogged down with an idea that contains too much mess surrounding it making it unclear as to where the appeal is so I felt like this section was really important to the overall goal of what we were supposed to be getting out of this. Side note, just because ideas are simple, doesn’t mean they cannot create complex messages (55).

The chapter “Unexpected” was common sense but very much needed in to be taken into consideration when considering ideas and people. The chapter starts with the age old flight attendant’s message that 99% of the time falls on deaf ears because of the fact that no one’s interested and everyone’s heard it a million times before. The authors mention a flight attendant in particular that handled the situation by improvising a unique script instead of the standard run through. This change made all the difference.

The key aspects of this chapter “focuses on two essential questions: How do I get people’s attention? And, just as crucially, How do I keep it?” (65) These essential questions stem from understanding essential emotions: surprise and interest. Heath & Heath specifically choose these two emotions because “surprise gets our attention” and “interest keeps our attention” (65).

An interesting look at was for the television commercial for the new “Enclave minivan.” The authors use this example to show how something unexpected is a great attention grabber. We are all accustom to car commercials and this commercial starts no differently as it boats specs and perks of this “new” car. When approaching an intersection, however, the van is slammed by a speeding car and we view a horrifying wreck only to have the screen go black and a message that says “Didn’t see that coming” followed by “No one ever does, following finally by “Buckle up.. Always.”

We all have expectations built by our individual schemas. The car commercial turned informative message violated our schema (67). This is so important to keep in mind because advertisers and others play on our schemas constantly as we construct our world by what we see and experience around us.