p. 57 We discussed the Curse of Knowledge in the introduction - the difficulty of remembering what it was like not to knew something. Accuracy to the point of uselessness is a symptom of the Curse of Knowledge. To a CEO, "maximizing shareholder value" may be an immensely useful rule of behavior. To a flight attendant, it's not. To a physicist, probability clouds are fascinating phenomena. To a child, they are incomprehensible. People are tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, than a little more.
p. 64 The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: Break a pattern. Humans adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patterns. Consistent sensory stimulation makes us tune out: Think of the hum of an air conditioner, or traffic noise, or the smell of a candle, or the sight of a bookshelf. We may become consciously aware of these things only when something changes: The air conditioner shuts off. Your spouse rearranges the books.
p. 85 One important implication of the gap theory is that we need to open gaps before we close them. Our tendency is to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts. The trick to convincing people that they need our message, according to Loewenstein, is to first highlight some specific knowledge that they're missing. We can pose a question or puzzle that confronts people with a gap in their knowledge. We can point out that someone else knows something they don't. We can present them with situations that have unknown resolutions, such as elections, sports events, or mysteries. We can challenge them to predict an outcome (which creates two knowledge gaps - What will happen? and Was I right?)
p. 88 The news-teaser approach can be used with all sorts of ideas in all sorts of contexts. To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from "What information do I need to convey?" to "What questions do I want my audience to ask?"
p. 110 Memory, then, is not like a single filing cabinet. It is more like Velcro. If you look at the two sides of Velcro material, you'll see that one is covered with thousands of tiny hooks and the other is covered with thousands of tiny loops. When you press the two sides together, a huge number of hooks gets snagged inside the loops, and that's what causes Velcro to seal. Your brain hosts a truly staggering number of loops. The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory. Your childhood home has a gazillion hooks in your brain. A new credit card number has one, if it's lucky. Great teachers have a knack for multiplying the hooks in a particular idea.
p. 129 Of the six traits of stickiness that we review in this book, concreteness is perhaps the easiest to embrace. It may also be the most effective of the traits. To be simple - to find our core message - is quite difficult. (It's certainly worth the effort, but let's not kid ourselves that it's easy.) Crafting our ideas in an unexpected way takes a fair amount of effort and applied creativity. But being concrete isn't hard, and it doesn't require a lot of effort. The barrier is simply forgetfulness - we forget that we're slipping into abstractspeak. We forget that other people don't know what we know. We're the engineers who keep flipping back to our drawings, not noticing that the assemblers just want us to follow them down to the factory floor.
p. 150 When we use statistics, the less we rely on the actual numbers the better. The numbers inform us about the underlying relationship, but there are better ways to illustrate the underlying relationship than the numbers themselves. Juxtaposing the deer and the shark is similar to Ainscow's use of BBs in a bucket.
p. 179 Caples says companies often emphasize features when they should be emphasizing benefits. "The most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments (the world's best seed!) that they forget to tell us why we should buy (the world's best lawn!)." An old advertising maxim says you've got to spell out the benefit of the benefit.
p. 234 The problem is that when you hit listeners between the eyes they respond by fighting back. The way you deliver a message to them is a cue to how they should react. If you make an argument, you're implicitly asking them to evaluate your argument - judge it, debate it, criticize it - and the argue back, at least in their minds. But with a story, Denning argues, you engage the audience - you are involving people with the idea, asking them to participate with you.
p. 237 Stories can almost single-handedly defeat the Curse of Knowledge. In fact, they naturally embody most of the SUCCESs framework. Stories are almost always Concrete. Most of them have Emotional and Unexpected elements. The hardest part of using stories effectively is making sure that they're Simple - that they reflect your core message. It's not enough to tell a great story; the story has to reflect your agenda.
p. 246 The SUCCESs checklist is a substitute for the framework above, and its advantage is that it's more tangible and less subject to the Curse of Knowledge. In fact, if you think back across the chapters you've read, you'll notice that the framework matches up nicely:
1. Pay attention (UNEXPECTED)
2. Understand and remember it (CONCRETE)
3. Agree/Believe (CREDIBLE)
4. Care (EMOTIONAL)
5. Be able to act on it (STORY)
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