Made to Stick — The SUCCESs SixSimple · Unexpected · Concrete · Credible · Emotional · Story

An idea sticks, the Heaths argue, when it hits several of six petals. Sticky means understood, remembered, and capable of changing thought or action. This week we go deep on the first four — Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible. Emotional and Story were already covered in Weeks 3 and 4. But the truly sticky pieces of writing use all six at once.

The Heaths' core finding is that stickiness is not a stroke of genius; it is a set of learnable design choices. "It is far easier to uncover an idea that is already sticky than to manufacture stickiness from scratch." When writing an email, a decision memo, or a quarterly update, you don't need to be a creative wizard. You just need to walk the six petals one by one and fill in the blanks.

Simple does not mean dumbed-down. It means core plus compact. The Heaths borrow a concept from the U.S. Army's field manuals — Commander's Intent: every order must contain a single sentence that tells a soldier what to do if every plan fails. That sentence is the core. The writer's version is the same: strip your draft to a single line. If that line can stand alone, you have your core. If it can't, you haven't found it yet.

Cognitive science says it plainly: a reader's recall of "three priorities" is about the same as their recall of "one priority," and recall of "six" rounds to zero. But the mind resists cutting, because every item feels important. The Heaths offer an engineering fix: rank every candidate idea in absolute order (not by category — by number), then cut everything below position one and ask whether item one can carry the document alone. If yes, that is your core. If not, item one isn't sharp enough yet — sharpen it.

The famous bad example is the law firm whose tagline is "we provide comprehensive legal services" — a sentence that tries to cover everything and so says nothing. The famous good example is Southwest Airlines' "The low-fare airline" — three words sharp enough that, with no manual, any employee can decide whether to add a chicken-salad meal (no — it isn't low-fare).

• Strategic memos, annual letters, first slide of a pitch, all-hands openings, product OKRs
• Complex decision emails — put "I recommend X" in sentence one, with reasons below
• Skip for: operating manuals (must be exhaustive), API reference (must enumerate)
• Use with care in multi-stakeholder policy documents, where "one core" can be politically inconvenient — but keep the core clear in your own head even if not on the page

• Confusing simple with short — it's core plus compact, in that order
• Five parallel bullets used as a substitute for one ranked priority, then pretending it's prioritized
• Core stated as a noun phrase, not an actionable claim — "AI strategy" is not a core; "ship v1 to five design partners before September" is
• Cutting the secondary feels rude, so it stays — and dilutes the primary
• Different levels of the org write different "commander's intents" that don't fit together — the director's core and the engineer's daily are disconnected

Chip & Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, ch. 1 — Simple · U.S. Army Field Manual, source of the Commander's Intent concept

The opposite of attention is not distraction — it is the already-known. The brain filters anything it can predict. So you first break the reader's guessing model (the schema), forcing the realization "I thought I knew — actually I don't," and only then deliver the knowledge. The Heaths cite the psychologist George Loewenstein's gap theory: curiosity is the pain of "I know I don't know X." Open the gap first; fill it second.

The Heaths' classic example: in the 1980s, the Center for Science in the Public Interest analyzed movie-theater popcorn and found that a single medium bucket contained 37 grams of saturated fat — more than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac lunch, and a steak dinner combined. The fact has stuck for thirty years. Its engineering: first break the schema ("popcorn? a light snack, right?"); then close the gap with a visceral comparison (three meals in a bucket).

Crucially, the gap must be one your content can close. An empty surprise — clickbait — only triggers anger; the reader leaves feeling betrayed, and skips your byline next time.

• Headlines, openings, the first thirty seconds of a TED talk, sales-email subject lines, the first sentence of a thread
• Postmortems — a counterintuitive fact as the hook is ten times more memorable than a chronological recap
• Skip for: crisis announcements (be plain and direct), regulatory notices (no flourishes)
• Be very cautious in grave contexts — "Surprise!" as a rhetorical hook in a layoff announcement is a disaster

• Surprise without insight — the reader leaves confused or angry (clickbait)
• Surprise via inflated numbers ("300% surge!") — readers are desensitized to that register
• Wrong audience — telling seasoned practitioners a "counterintuitive" fact they already know just makes you look shallow
• Every paragraph surprises — when everything pops, nothing pops. Cadence beats frequency
• Open the gap and never close it — leftover curiosity curdles into distrust

Heath, Made to Stick, ch. 2 — Unexpected · George Loewenstein, "The Psychology of Curiosity" (1994), the original gap-theory paper

Abstract = hard to remember + easy to misread + hard to coordinate around. Concrete = easy to remember, shared understanding, executable. The Heaths offer the Velcro theory of memory: the mind is Velcro, and the more hooks, the more it sticks. An abstract "improve efficiency" is a smooth marble; "cut new-hire onboarding from fourteen days to three" is a ball of yarn covered in hooks. Concrete isn't dumbing down — it's translating an abstraction into something every reader can see in the same picture.

Concrete isn't just more detail — it's a picture the reader can draw in their own head. Three engineering moves:

• Replace abstract nouns with observable behaviors: "improve execution" → "before each weekly, every owner posts a three-line status"
• Replace vague magnitudes with concrete units: "millions of users" → "a small city's worth of people installed it"
• Replace concepts with images: "we want to be the industry leader" → "competitors quote our product as the baseline in their own weeklies"

The Heaths cite JFK in 1961: "Land a man on the moon and return him safely before the decade is out." Every word is something a six-year-old can draw — man, moon, home. That is why 300,000 NASA engineers could walk in the same direction.

• Any document that requires cross-functional collaboration — concrete is the greatest common denominator of coordination
• Explaining technical work to non-engineers — one good analogy beats a half-hour at the whiteboard
• Education, training, family letters, life advice to your kids
• Skip for: legal contracts (which deliberately use abstractions to cover future cases) and mathematical proofs
• Be careful across cultures — your concrete picture ("like a Saturday at Costco") may be empty in another country

• Jargon dressed up as concreteness — "enable," "leverage," "synergize" are abstractions in costume; you can't draw them
• Concrete only in the headline; the body slides back into abstraction — the reader feels like they watched a great trailer then read the warranty
• Over-detailing into noise — pick one or two representative details, don't dump them all
• Vivid image unrelated to the point — the reader remembers the picture but forgets the claim
• Idioms passing for images — phrases like "moving the needle" have abstracted with use

Heath, Made to Stick, ch. 3 — Concrete · William Zinsser, On Writing Well, "Words" chapter — the hazard of abstract nouns

Credibility isn't "add a CEO title" or "paste a McKinsey logo." The Heaths offer three internal credibility moves: (1) the Sinatra Test — "if I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere": one unimpeachable hard case beats ten soft proof points; (2) anti-authority — let the ordinary person who was affected do the testifying, not the expert; (3) tangible statistics — translate every number into a physical quantity the reader can feel.

Each move maps to a psychological mechanism:

• Sinatra Test — one extreme success carries the implied argument "if they pulled that off, the rest is easy." The Indian logistics firm Safexpress delivered the launch shipments of new Harry Potter books for Bollywood — and after that, every customer believed Safexpress could handle confidential cargo.
• Anti-authority — a late-stage lung-cancer patient talking about quitting smoking is more persuasive than ten doctors. Readers run a silent substitution: "if they could change, why can't I?"
• Tangible statistics — "our power plant produces X MWh per year" goes nowhere; "enough to power Los Angeles for a week" lands. The Heaths call it the Human Scale Principle — squeeze numbers back to the dimensions of human senses.

The deeper insight: credibility isn't "more authority"; it's "less friction." Every moment the reader has to pause, convert, or speculate is leaking trust. A reader who clicks on the first pass — that is credibility.

• The Traction slide of a pitch deck, annual reviews, customer case studies, promotion narratives
• Internal budget asks — decision-makers tire of Gartner and respond to a first-line case
• Public communication — expert authority is in steady decline; ordinary stories are rising
• Skip for: regulatory filings and clinical research (which must lean on external authority and sample sizes)
• Use with care for hyper-rational engineering audiences — they want distributions, not N=1

• Logo soup as a proxy for credibility — "Used by 500+ companies including…" — readers tune it out
• A statistic without a baseline — "we improved 30%" — improved over what?
• Sinatra examples too extreme — listeners write them off as outliers
• Anti-authority picked badly — a small-time influencer instead of the actual person changed by your work
• Decimal-point precision as a trust signal — "23.47% improvement" is more suspicious than "about a quarter" (over-precision triggers alarm)

Heath, Made to Stick, ch. 4 — Credible · Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow — anchoring and the psychology of credibility