How To Make Your Ideas Memorable

Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. New York: Random House, 2007.

A lawyer asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus tells him a story about a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho. The man gets attacked by robbers and left for dead. Two men, a priest and a Levite, pass by the injured man but do nothing to help. A Samaritan sees the injured man and gets him shelter and pays for his accommodations while he’s recuperating. Jesus then asks the lawyer, “Which of these three was a neighbor to the attacked man?”

The parable of The Good Samaritan does not appear in Chip and Dan Heath’s book Made to Stick, but it embodies the book’s core idea: communicating a message worth remembering in a memorable way.

First, it has a simple but profound core principle: we are to love everyone because everyone is our neighbor. This exemplifies the second greatest commandment which articulates the main intention behind all the Old Testament laws. If you forgot all of the details of Leviticus but remembered and acted on this principle, you would be doing something of eternal value (Luke 10:25).

Second, the story is unexpected. Instead of offering a theological analysis of the second great commandment, Jesus responds to the question with a story. The surprise continues within the story when he makes the hero of the story a Samaritan, someone who was a cultural outsider for Jews in the first century. The Samaritan was a person least likely to be chosen as a good neighbor, especially in comparison with two religious leaders like a priest and Levite.

Third, the story is filled with concrete details. We learn where the man is traveling, the vocations of those who pass the attacked man by, and the precise manner in which the Samaritan cared for the attacked man’s wounds. The story is still fiction (Jesus isn’t recounting a historical event), but its concrete details make it believable and provide opportune hooks for the lawyer to identify with the story.

Fourth, the story is credible. As the Son of God, Jesus has more personal authority than anyone who has ever walked the earth. More than that, he earns the lawyer’s trust by asking the man to respond to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” We know the lawyer has listened because he gives the correct answer.

Fifth, the story elicits an emotional response: of pity when the man is attacked, of indignation when the man gets passed by, and of elation when the Samaritan does the right thing. It also seems clear that the story is meant to convict the lawyer of his own self-righteousness, and so regret may be the most important emotion Christ evokes.

Sixth, Jesus tells a story, which, when added to the previous criteria, is far more memorable than a series of talking points. Jesus provides the lawyer with a simulation of how to live out the second great commandment. The story invites the lawyer to consider: if placed in this situation, would you have acted more like the priest or the Samaritan? With this concrete story, Jesus squashes the lawyer’s attempts to justify himself.

If you take the first letter of each of those six qualities, you get SUCCES, a memorable acronym for a memorable message. This is just one of the ways in which the Heath brothers practice what they preach. You wouldn’t want a book about making memorable messages that wasn’t itself memorable, right? The pair are great and frequently funny storytellers (you’ll remember the urban legend and real-life test case from the introduction long after you’ve finished the book), and they fill their chapters with Workshop case studies to demonstrate their ability to change worthwhile but forgettable messages to memorable ones.

The book’s thesis is to find your core idea and translate it into a memorable form using the qualities above. Memorable ideas are made, not born. They are the product of nurture, not nature. To make your idea memorable, you don’t need a class in creativity so much as you need to figure out how to practice the six steps. This insight has ramifications for business and education, the profit and non-profit world. It helps explain why certain urban legends gain remarkable traction while important information concerning our bodies and souls goes in one ear and out the other. The Heath brothers provide examples from Southwest Airlines, psychology textbooks, Wendy’s advertisements, public service commercials on smoking, and American history (Kennedy’s man-on-the-moon challenge) to bolster their credibility and demonstrate their template’s broad applicability.

Alas, finding the core and translating it into a memorable form is easier said than done. Our two main adversaries are our own knowledge and decision paralysis. The two work hand-in-hand to sidetrack us. Our own expertise handicaps us because we can’t see our content from the point of view of a novice. We try to make 10 main points instead of one because we think each point is equally important. This results in decision paralysis. If we can’t decide what the main point is, we can’t decide how to which ideas to connect to memorable details and emotional, credible stories.

So why start my review with the parable of The Good Samaritan? Because I am trying to follow the Heath brothers’ lead and because an unmemorable book review of truly memorable book would be a shame.