Last week, I leisurely walk around a bookstore near my house. I love the feeling of seeing books, they just there on their selves neatly arranged. When I went to the second floor of the store where another set of shelves are there. I walked around on the second floor, I look at books that put on Novel section shelves, lots of novel but none piqued my interest, and I moved to self-improvement section. After browsing several book, my eyes falls on “Made to Stick”. A book written by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. I pick on the book, and walked to the cashier in second floor. After buying this book, I kept strolling around the bookstore, a bad habit of mine. After spending almost one hour there, and I ended up just buying one book I go back to my house.
To amble around a book store, it’s been a while since the last time I did that due to this pandemic. I always take a great pleasure on my trip in bookstores. After arriving in my house, I open up the plastic and yeah, I miss this smell, smell of newly unwrapped book. The smell of the paper, the cover, it’s been a while. After fancying my new book, I started to read this book.
It took a while to finish this one, since I was working at the same time, and distractions that kept me from finishing this book. Fortunately, today I finish this book. Made to Stick is one of the best books I have read this year. The language was clear and the vocabulary is not too advance. Furthermore, the content was a good. In short, there 6 ways that you can follow to make something sticky. By using acronym SUCCES, the book explained 6 ways that we can follow to make our messages stand out.
- Simple, the motto/message or whatever you tried to convey must be simple. If you used 3 sentences to explain it, then it’s not simple. Motto like Name, Name, Name or It’s the economy, idiot or providing cheap fare air flight service, those are pretty simple. Of course some elaboration needs to be made, but the core message is there. Simple. Make sure you can convey your core message by using simple words
- Unexpected, to make your words sticky, it must be unexpected, uncommon or like didn’t see that coming kind of feeling. Saying things like that you will be more likely to be killed by thunder than winning a lottery. For many people they didn’t know about it. Some even can’t believe that’s the case.
- Concrete, you message must be concrete, if it’s tangible it would be better. When you tried to to tell something, people could understand it better if it’s concrete thing, not something abstract. For example, when a teacher tried to teach law of conservative energy, he can show some demonstration, like Walter Lewin did.
- Credential, your message must have some credential, either from the expert or the person who experienced it firsthand. Story about someone who was success on his diet by consuming subway is one example. He is living example of that, he got a good credential, because he did it.
- Emotional, okay, so far you message has been good, but so what? It must have power to move people to do what you want. Your message must invoke emotion from the audience so it’s work. People will be more inclined to give charity to single person, whom they hear the story about than to group of people that they don’t even know.
- Lastly, Story. I can’t agree more for this part, it’s always interesting to hear a story from other people. However, in this case, your story must support your core value. You should be able to use story to convey your Core value. In this book they used Costco’s story as an example. It’s a good story.
It’s been a pleasure reading this book. The insights I gained is worth the time I invest. However, the important part comes after I closed the book, after I finished reading it. How can I apply what I have read on my daily life? I need to practice it on my daily life, so that SUCCES, the outline to made something stick, would stick with me. Practice, practice, and practice.
