I rarely read for pleasure. And by rarely, I mean r-a-r-e-l-y.
Between prepping for class (I enjoy the material, but it’s not for “pleasure”), client work (research! research! research!) and raising a happy, healthy, if not a little goofy, 14 month old, it’s all I can do not to drop into a coma at the end of the day.
However, I broke this trend recently when I kept hearing so much great stuff about the Heath Brothers’ book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
It took me longer than it should to get through the book (review paragraph 2), but let me tell you… I loved it!
The Heaths break the concepts of “stickiness” into six major criteria. They give lots of great examples and make it easy to think about how this information might be useful for lectures, clients, getting my partner to work on his honey-do list…. okay, maybe not the honey-do, but very useful nonetheless.
I’ve already started doing a mini “lecturette” on the six criteria and I start with the same story that starts the book – the kidney heist legend. I’ve done this in two classes now. The first class… very savvy. They’d either heard the legend, or they were Nip/Tuck fans. So that ruined the punchline (even though they still loved the example). The second class had never heard the story before! Not one! The looks on their faces were priceless.
We’ve been working with a lot of start-ups and small companies lately and for the work I do for them, the sticky criteria have been a great start to some creative thinking.
It’s an easy read with lots of fun stories (principle #6) and food for thought. You can read an excerpt here.
Comments
One response to “Pleasure Reading: Made to Stick”
Actually, this is the first time I read your blog….be honest.
I really like your tone of the blogs you post.For this one, on the beginning of the post, I know you really rarely to read for pleasure according to your word.
Also, on paragraph 3, the way you describe the online shopping this book is so lively (do I have a correct word choice here?). I heard another story that are similar with “the kidney heist legend.” But the ending is to cut off all a person’s arms and legs and putting he/she into a deformed show displayed in somewhere. I sort of forgot how this story begin, but that main idea is same as “the kidney heist legend.” After reading this post, I also want to do a little “click- click” as you did for this book.
However, not for this term but for the spring break would be better!!