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141 " Journalists obsess about their leads. Don Wycliff, a winner of prizes for editorial writing, says, “I’ve always been a believer that if I’ve got two hours in which to write a story, the best investment I can make is to spend the first hour and forty-five minutes of it getting a good lead, because after that everything will come easily. "
― Chip Heath , Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
142 " So, rather than guess about whether people will understand our ideas, we should ask, “Is it concrete?” Rather than speculate about whether people will care, we should ask, “Is it emotional? Does it get out of Maslow’s basement? Does it force people to put on an Analytical Hat or allow them to feel empathy? "
143 " What they realized was that they didn’t need their colleagues to understand something, they needed them to feel something. "
― Chip Heath , The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact
144 " Culture change is difficult and slow. To have any chance to succeed, the meeting needed to deliver a jolt. "
145 " Good ideas are often adopted quickly. When all retailers adopt centralized checkout as a “best practice,” it’s no longer a competitive advantage for anyone. "
― Chip Heath , Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
146 " Most PowerPoints aren’t creating a lot of emotion. We decided to flip this on its head. Let’s have people do something active and immersive. That’s going to generate more of an emotional response so they will feel something. And then they can think about what they’ve learned. "
147 " (Buckingham has a fine series of books on making the most of your strengths rather than obsessing about your weaknesses.) "
― Chip Heath , Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
148 " Moments matter. And what an opportunity we miss when we leave them to chance! "
149 " This is how concreteness helps us understand—it helps us construct higher, more abstract insights on the building blocks of our existing knowledge and perceptions. Abstraction demands some concrete foundation. Trying to teach an abstract principle without concrete foundations is like trying to start a house by building a roof in the air. "
150 " Compared with a typical mail-order ad, the “imagine cable television” appeal is a much more subtle appeal to self-interest. Note that the benefits offered were not fantastic in a Caples-esque way. The gist was that you could avoid the hassle of leaving home (!) by ordering cable. Indeed, just hearing about the benefits, in the abstract, wasn’t enough to lure additional subscribers. It was only when people put themselves in the starring role—I can see myself watching a good movie at home with my hubby, and I can get up and check on the kids in the next room whenever I like … and think of all that babysitting money I’d save!—that their interest grew. This finding suggests that it may be the tangibility, rather than the magnitude, of the benefits that makes people care. You don’t have to promise riches and sex appeal and magnetic personalities. It may be enough to promise reasonable benefits that people can easily imagine themselves enjoying. "
151 " (We cut back on expenses today to yield a better balance sheet next year. We avoid ice cream today for a better body next year.) "
152 " Good metaphors are “generative.”13 The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate “new perceptions, explanations, and inventions.” Many "
153 " Make the change small enough that they can’t help but score a victory. "
154 " Any new quest, even one that is ultimately successful, is going to involve failure. "
155 " Because day-to-day change is gradual, even imperceptible, it’s hard to know when to jump. Tripwires tell you when to jump. "
156 " The psychologists Amos Tversky and Eldar Shafir offered college students a five-dollar reward for filling out a survey. When given a five-day deadline, 66% of the students completed the survey and claimed their rewards. When given no deadline, only 25% ever collected their money. "
157 " If you want a reluctant Elephant to get moving, you need to shrink the change. "
158 " Studies of the elderly show that people regret not what they did but what they didn’t do. "
159 " Challenge plot, the Connection plot, and the Creativity plot. "
160 " Ethically challenged people with lots of analytical smarts can, with enough contortions, make almost any case from a given set of statistics. "