Made to Stick

The Idea That Wouldn't Die

A friend of a friend went to Atlantic City on a business trip. He met a beautiful woman at the hotel bar. She offered to buy him a drink. He woke up the next morning in a bathtub full of ice with a phone next to his head and a note taped to the wall telling him to call 911. The note said his kidneys had been removed.

You have probably heard some version of that story. The location changes. So does the gender of the victim. The setup might be a prostitute, a married man on a guilt trip, a college kid at a conference. The constants are the ice, the bathtub, the missing organ. Those three details have carried this fully invented urban legend around the planet for decades. Nobody bought a billboard for it. No advertising agency optimized its open rate. It spread because it was built to spread.

Chip and Dan Heath wrote "Made to Stick" to figure out why some ideas behave that way and others don't. Why does the kidney heist travel for thirty years without losing a step, while the mission statement your company spent four months drafting can't survive a single elevator ride? Why does a twenty-five-hundred-year-old fable about a fox and some sour grapes still land, while a CEO's State of the Company memo is forgotten by Friday? The brothers spent years working on this from opposite ends. Chip ran stickiness experiments at Stanford with hundreds of subjects. Dan edited textbooks for K-12 teachers and watched ideas die in classrooms. In 2004 they realized they were chasing the same animal. This book is what they caught.

Their answer comes in two parts, and the two parts are inseparable. First, sticky ideas share a common skeleton. Second, the reason most of our ideas fail to stick is not that we lack imagination — it is that we already know too much. The villain has a name. They call it the Curse of Knowledge, and it shows up every time an expert opens their mouth in front of someone who isn't one. Hold that idea, because everything that follows is a workaround for it.