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Made to Stick
A book on why some ideas survive and others die, and the six traits that help an idea stay in people's heads
Why it’s worth your time
An idea can be right and still not stick, especially when the person explaining it knows too much to remember what it was like not to. Chip and Dan Heath looked at why urban legends spread and sensible ideas sink, and settled on six traits: simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and told as a story. At work, that can mean updates, pitches and plans that people remember and act on.
How to make your ideas stick at work
The book · About 7 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
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- Start with the first part of the book.
It opens with an urban legend and sets out the six traits, and the rest of the book is organized around them, with sidebars that rework bland messages into memorable ones. After the opening, go to the trait your next update or pitch needs most.
- Find the core of your next update.
Take something you're about to send: a status update, a proposal, a plan. Write its single most important point in one sentence. Then replace one abstract line with a concrete example, a number people can picture, or a short account of what happened.
Good moments for this: before a big presentationwhen writing a weekly updatewhen a proposal isn't landing
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
What feels like the obvious core to you may rest on context your manager or another team doesn't have. Asking someone outside your team to say your point back to you is a quick test.
What might make this harder
Keep the format, and put the one-sentence core at the top. One concrete example inside a standard template can still change what people take away.
Questions people ask
What are the six principles of Made to Stick?
Simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories.
What is the curse of knowledge?
A term from economics, coined in 1989 by Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber, that the Heaths make the main villain of their book: once you know something, it's hard to imagine not knowing it.
Is Made to Stick worth reading?
It came out in 2007, so its examples are older now, and the six traits work better as a checklist for your own message than as rules.
What it says, and how it holds up
Made to Stick starts from a contrast: a ridiculous tale about a stolen kidney travels the world, while important ideas struggle to be remembered. Chip Heath, who teaches at Stanford's business school, and his brother Dan Heath, now a senior fellow at Duke, set out to find what the stories that survive have in common. Their answer is six traits, and the obstacle they keep coming back to is the curse of knowledge, the way expertise makes it hard to explain from the beginning.
At work, simple and concrete are probably the traits that pay off fastest. Simple means finding the core, the one thing that should get through if nothing else does. Concrete means trading abstraction for things people can picture. The other four, being unexpected, credible, emotional and story-shaped, help a message get attention and survive being retold.
Publishers Weekly and The Guardian reviewed it. It extends the idea of stickiness that Malcolm Gladwell popularized in The Tipping Point, and like Gladwell it builds its case from stories and case studies, drawing the general principles out after them. That tends to make it easy to read and easy to borrow from; whether a trait works for your message is something only your audience can tell you. Its examples come from before 2007, so expect to translate some of them to the way you work now. If you'd like to see whether it's for you, the first chapter is free on the authors' site if you register.
It helps with how an idea is told; it won't rescue an idea that isn't ready, or a room that has already decided. If a proposal keeps failing because the people deciding care about different goals, it usually pays to understand what they're trying to achieve and reshape the idea around it, before polishing how it sounds.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.