Made to Stick
Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it.
Chip and Dan Heath's methodology for why some ideas thrive and others die. It diagnoses the Curse of Knowledge in your communication and re-engineers any message — pitch, strategy, campaign, lesson — with the six traits sticky ideas share: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories.
“It's our all-hands announcement about the reorg. Draft: 'To better align our resources with strategic priorities, we are evolving our organizational…”
Run your message through the SUCCESs checklist until it survives the retelling
Made to Stick rests on one diagnosis and one checklist. The diagnosis is the Curse of Knowledge: once you know something, you can't remember not knowing it, so you communicate in abstractions your audience can't use. The checklist is SUCCESs — Simple (find the core via forced prioritization and Commander's Intent; never bury the lead), Unexpected (break a pattern, then open a curiosity gap about the core), Concrete (film-able, sensory language — the Velcro theory of memory), Credible (human-scale statistics, the Sinatra Test, testable credentials), Emotional (make people care about the one, not the mass), and Stories (spot real Challenge, Connection, or Creativity plots — never invent them). A sticky message rarely needs all six: the audit finds the two traits doing the most damage and the rewrite targets those.
Your ideas are dying in the retelling. The pitch gets polite nods and no follow-up; the strategy never leaves the slide deck; a week later people repeat your message back wrong or not at all. More detail and more slides haven't fixed it — because the problem is the Curse of Knowledge, not the idea.
Take any message that matters and re-engineer it so people understand it, remember it, and repeat it accurately days later — using a checklist, not creative genius.
- A real message: a pitch, announcement, landing page, deck, or lesson
- Who the audience is and what you need them to do
- Your best statistic, even if it isn't landing
- Raw material where stories might hide — customer calls, tickets, history
- A Message Makeover: six-trait scorecard with evidence, plus a rewrite targeting the two weakest traits
- A Commander's Intent card — the one sentence everything else serves
- Your key number restated at human scale, banked for reuse
- A growing story bank of real, sourced anecdotes typed by plot
Watch the methodology work.
Three specimens from a single real session: the same situation, before and after, the full transcript, and the skill answering live in the channel where the work happens.
Your seed round deck leads with 'We leverage AI to optimize cross-functional workflow efficiency for mid-market teams.' Investors nod, ask polite questions, and can't describe what you do to their partners on Monday.
Your deck leads with the one customer whose Tuesday changed: 'Acme's ops lead used to spend three hours a day chasing status updates. Now it's eleven minutes.' The partner who wasn't in the room hears about you accurately — that's the message surviving the retelling.
The same skill, where the work happens.
No new app to learn. The methodology runs over the WhatsApp Business API, so the answer lands as a reply in the thread you’re already in — same rigour, zero context-switch.
What it does, specifically.
Each capability is a distinct move drawn straight from the source methodology — not a generic assistant guessing.
SUCCESs Audit
Scores your actual draft against all six traits with evidence quoted from your own words, then targets the two weakest for the rewrite — never all six at once.
Commander's Intent Extraction
Forces the one-sentence core before any copy exists: the single message your audience must remember for everything else to work. Brutal prioritization, applied kindly.
Curse-of-Knowledge Detection
Flags the jargon, abstractions, and buried leads that experts can no longer see in their own writing, and converts each into something a stranger could picture.
Human-Scale Statistics
Rescales your most important number until an audience can feel it — the difference between '37 grams of saturated fat' and 'more than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries, and a steak dinner, combined.'
Story Spotting
Mines your real material — support tickets, sales calls, history — for stories that already exist, and types each one as a Challenge, Connection, or Creativity plot. Never fabricates.
Graded before it shipped.
Every skill is scored against independent scenarios for methodology fidelity before it goes live — not vibes, a rubric.
Message Makeover
Six-trait SUCCESs scorecard with evidence quoted from your own draft, the two targeted fixes, and the rewrite — plus what was deliberately left alone.
Commander's Intent Card
The one sentence your audience must remember, stress-tested until a stranger could act on it — the core every later draft is audited against.
Story Bank
Real, sourced anecdotes spotted in your own material, dated and typed by plot — Challenge, Connection, or Creativity — ready to deploy in future messages.
Grounded in the original work.
Every answer traces back to a real source and the practitioner who wrote it — not a secondhand summary. Here is the source of record.
Chip Heath & Dan Heath
Chip Heath is a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business; his brother Dan Heath is a senior fellow at Duke University's CASE center. Made to Stick (2007) launched a run of four New York Times bestsellers between them, including Switch and The Power of Moments.
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Stanford GSB professor + Duke senior fellow; four NYT-bestselling books on communication and change
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