11 min · 10 chaptersNarrated in your voice
What it's about
Chip Heath and Dan Heath ask why some messages spread and endure while most vanish, and argue the answer is not truth or importance but structure. Drawing on marketing folklore, urban legends, classroom experiments, and corporate case studies, they distill six traits — simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotion, and story — that make ideas memorable and actionable. The book reframed communication training across business, education, and public health after its 2007 release.
Reading plan
Pick a finish date and Genius lays out the days — the plan shows today's target and keeps you honest.
Read together
Start a circle and share the code — everyone sees everyone's honest place in the book. Accountability, not leaderboards.
Who it's for
- A manager writing a strategy memo that nobody outside the room will remember by Friday - A teacher or trainer whose lessons get nodded at and then forgotten - A marketer or nonprofit communicator competing for attention against louder, richer messages
What’s inside
- 1The Curse of Knowledge1 min
Once you understand something well, you lose the ability to imagine not understanding it, which makes experts the worst people to explain their own expertise.
- 2Simple: Find the Core1 min
A sticky message is not dumbed down, it is stripped down to one priority so ruthlessly that everything else can be cut without losing the point.
- 3Unexpected: Break the Pattern1 min
Attention is not free, and ideas that fit smooth expectations get filtered out before they can be evaluated, so a message must first violate a schema to earn a hearing.
- 4Concrete: Make It Graspable1 min
Abstract language, however precise, fails to stick because it can only be understood by people who already share the same mental models, while concrete sensory detail works for everyone.
- 5Credible: Give People a Reason to Believe1 min
People do not believe ideas because of the authority behind them; they believe ideas that include specific, checkable, human-scale details they can test for themselves.
- 6Emotional: Make People Feel Something1 min
People act on feelings about individuals, not on statistics about populations, so an idea that wants to move behavior must appeal to identity and specific human stakes rather than aggregate data.
- 7Stories: Give People a Simulation1 min
A well-told story does more than illustrate an idea; it functions as a mental rehearsal that teaches an audience how to act, which makes it more useful than a list of abstract principles.
- 8Putting SUCCESS to Work1 min
Sticky ideas rarely emerge fully formed from a single flash of insight; they are the product of deliberately checking a message against all six traits and revising the ones that are missing.
About Chip Heath
Chip Heath is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he studies why bad ideas spread and good ones stall. He co-wrote Made to Stick with his brother Dan Heath, a former Harvard Business School case writer and Duke fellow. Together they built a career studying and teaching the mechanics of memorable communication.
