Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath

“This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it” and “there are, in fact, only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge reliably. The first is not to learn anything. The second is to take your ideas and transform them” (pg 20).

Ideas that stick need to be “simple” elegent and prioritized. Not dumbed down. (pg. 30).

‘“Finding the core’ and expressing it in the form of a compact idea, can be enduringly powerful” (62).

“The linkages between emotion and behavior can be more subtle. For instance, a secondary effect of being angry . . . is that we become more certain of our judgments. When we’re angry, we know we’re right” (pg. 67).

“If you want to motivate people to pay attention, we should seize the power of big surprises” (pg 69).

“If you want your ideas to be stickier, you’ve to break someone’s guessing machine and then fix it” (pg. 71).

A good process for making your ideas stickier is:

1. “Identify the central message you need to communicate - find the core;

2. Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message - i.e. What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn’t it already happening naturally?

3. Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience’s guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension.” (pg 72).

“Journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point” (pg 76).

“Gaps cause pain. When we want to know something but don’t, it’s like having an itch that we need to scratch” (pg 84).

“The trick to convincing people that they need our message is to first highlight some specific knowledge that they’re missing . . . then challenge them to predict an outcome (which creates two knowledge gaps - what will happen? And Was I right?) - pg 85.

“Set the context and give people enough backstory that they start to care about the gaps in their knowledge . . . start by highlighting some things they already know” (gp 92).

“Novices perceive concrete details as concrete details. Experts perceive concrete details as symbols of patterns and insights that they learned through years of experience” (pg 114).

“We forget that other people don’t know what we know” (pg 129).

“Thinking about statistics shifts people into a more analytical frame of mind . . . the mere act of calculation reduced people’s charity. Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel” (pg 167).

“Belief counts for a lot, but belief isn’t enough. For people to take action, they have to care” (pg 168).

“Ask ‘Why’ three times . . . Three Whys can be useful in bypassing the Curse of Knowledge” (pg 201).

“Credible ideas make people believe. Emotional ideas make people care” (pg 206).

“Stories can almost single-handedly defeat the Curse of Knowledge . . . they reflect your core knowledge” (pg 237).

Grade: B

Although there are a few points and ideas I will take and carry with me forever, overall, it seemed a bit redundant. A shorter book would have been twice as better.

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The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, by Patrick Lencioni

Organizational health “doesn’t require great intelligence or sophistication, just uncommon levels of discipline, courage, persistence, and common sense” (pg 3)

“An organization has integrity - is healthy - when it is whole, consistent, and complete, that is, when its management, operations, strategy, and culture fit together and make sense” (pg 5).

“Most leaders prefer to look for answers where the light is better, where they are more comfortable. And the light is certainly better in the measurable, objective, and data-driven world of organizational intelligence than it is in the messier, more unpredictable world of organizational health” (pg 7).

“What they usually want to avoid at all costs are subjective conversations that can easily become emotional and awkward. And organizational health is certainly fraught with the potential for subjective and awkward conversations” (pg 7).

“The seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre or unsuccessful ones has little, if anything, to do with what they know or how smart they are; it has everything to do with how healthy they are” (pg 9).

“People in healthy organizations, beginning, with the leaders, learn from one another, identify critical issues, and recover quickly from mistakes . . . leaders who pride themselves on expertise and intelligence often struggle to acknowledge their flaws and learn from peers” (pg 9)

“People who work in unhealthy organizations eventually come to see work as drudgery” (pg 13).

“If an organization is led by a team that is not behaviorally unified, there is no chance that it will become healthy” (pg 19).

“A leadership team is a small group of people who are collectively responsible for achieving a common objective for their organization” (pg 21).

“When leaders preach teamwork but exclusively reward individual achievement, they are confusing their people and creating an obstacle to true team behavior” (pg. 26).

“Fundamental Attribution Error is the tendency of human beings to attribute the negative or frustrating behaviors of their colleagues to their intentions and personalities while attributing their own negative or frustrating behaviors to environmental factors” (pg 32).

“Seek to understand more than to be understood” (pg 33).

“Even well-intentioned members of a team need to be held accountable if a team is going to stick to its decisions and accomplish its goals” (pg. 54)

When members of a team go to their leader whenever they see a peer deviate from a commitment that was made, they create a perfect environment for distraction and politics” (pg 55).

“Firing someone is not necessarily a sign of accountability, but is often the last act of cowardice for a leader who doesn’t know how or isn’t willing to hold people accountable” (pg 57)

“To hold someone accountable is to care about them enough to risk having them blame you for pointing out their deficiencies” (pg 57).

“Conflict is about issues and ideas, while accountability is about performance and behaviors” (pg 60).

“When leaders - and peers - limit their accountability discussions to private conversations, they leave people wondering whether those discussions are happening” (pg 63).

“Some leaders of teams that don’t regularly succeed will insist that they have a great team because team members care about one another and no one ever leaves the team” (pg 65).

“They asserted that successful, enduring organizations understood the fundamental reason they were founded and why they exist” (pg 82).

“When it comes to creating organizational clarity and alignment, intolerance is essential. After all, if an organization is tolerant of everything, it will stand for nothing . . . successful companies adhered strictly to a fundamental set of principals that guided their behaviors and decisions over time, preserving the essence of the organization . . . values are critical because they define a company’s personality. They provide employees with clarity about how to behave, which reduces the need for inefficient and demoralizing micromanagement” (pg 91).

“An organization knows that it has identified its core values correctly when it will allow itself to be punished for living those values and when it accepts the fact that employees will sometimes take those values too far” (pg 94).

“Identify the employees in the organization who already embody what is best about the company and to dissect them, answering what is true about those people that makes them so admired by the leadership team . . . as well as identify employees who, though talented, were or are no longer a good fit for the organization” (pg 102).

“What a crisis provides an organization is a rallying cry, a single area of focus around which there is no confusion or disagreement” (pg 121).

“If we accomplish one thing during the next x months, what would it be?” (pg 122).

“Messaging is not so much an intellectual process as an emotional one” (pg 143).

“The single most important reason to reward people is to provide them with an incentive for doing what is best for the organization” (pg 164).

Grade: A++

A must read for any leader.

Love this obok.

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Say Yes : Discover the Surprising Life Beyond the Death of a Dream, by Scott Erickson

“You can always tell a voice is fear when it asks you to leave instead of show up” (pg 17).

“We’re transformed when we sing songs together. We’re transformed when someone shares their story. We’re transformed when we care for others” (pg 28).

“What needed to die in your dream, your envisioned ideal, was a version of you without vulnerabilities . . . the you that was in there was someone without weaknesses. A version of you that is tough as nails, unwaveringly confident, knows everything, never makes a mistake, has no regrets, is able to do anything on your own, never has a moment of self-doubt, figured it all out early on, is the best of the best in your field . . . vulnerability is our relationship to our weaknesses” (pg 35).

First Argument : Nothing is Going to Change

“ We really don’t see anything as it is now. We only see now through the lens of the past” and “how we see the world is rarely the same thing as how the world actually is” (pg 46, 47).

“Familiarity kills wonder and stands in the way of the ever-evolving future” (pg 55).

Ostranenie: “To defamiliarize yourself with knowing something” . . . to ask, “What don’t I know?”

Out of our own wreckage and failure, become a gift to others - story of the wrecked ship (pg 69)

The Second Argument : You Suck and are Ugly

“Exposer to highly idealized representations of peers on social media elicits feelings of envy and the distorted belief that others lead happier, more successful lives” (pg 102).

“You suck at being someone else” (pg 110).

“Everything that exists was created by the slow, daily work of contribution” (pg 111).

“Once it became a possibility for one person, it became a possibility for many more” (pg 133)

Third Argument : Dying is Better than Living

“We don’t have to end our lives completely, but we can kill off the parts of it that remind us of how disappointed we are in the way life turned out” (pg 163).

“Regrets are defined as a sense of loss, a disappointment in some kind of action or lack of action. The reason regrets are so poignant is that they point to our deepest longings - the path of desire that has been put in us to walk, the path we stopped walking because of fear, disappointment, unworthiness, or brokenheartedness” (pg 168)

“Nobody escapes being wounded. We are all wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. The main question is not ‘How can we hide our wounds?’ so we don’t have to be embarrassed, but ‘How can we put our woundedness in the service of others?’ When our wounds cease to be a source of shame, and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers” (pg 176).

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive” (pg 187).

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Deep Kindness: A Revolutionary Guide for the Way we Think, Talk and Act in Kindness, by Houston Kraft

“Just be Kind . . . Kindness is free. Sprinkle that stuff everywhere”

These kinds of sayings, although “make for good posters, they can do more harm than good. Without paying proper attention, we’ve started to “fluffify” the thing. We are talking about Kindness in an oversimplified way” (pg 11).

“Common kindness is knowing why working out is important and getting yours steps in when you can. Confetti Kindness is taking Pilates class with a friend or getting a run in when it works with your schedule. Deep Kindness is the culmination of years of thoughtful nutrition and habitual exercise that results in ongoing health, wellness, and real physical transformation. One can lead to the other, but it doesn’t happen by accident” (pg 13).

“Deep kindness requires empathy and perspective-taking. How am I supposed to give you something you truly need if I don’t attempt to understand what you need first? (pg 13)

Deep kindness requires forgiveness (pg 14)

“Neuroscience tells us that it is actually moments of boredom where empathy and creativity are cultivated . . . we have more access to content than ever before, and the direct by-product is more anxiety . . . when anxiety increases, empathy decreases . . . the more worried I am about what’s going on in my life, the harder time I will have worrying about what going on in yours'“ (pg 20)

“When we focus too much on independence, we subtly dismiss the critical need to be able to work in teams, be a part of a community, collaborate on big problems, and ask for help. When we are independent but not connected, we can quickly find ourselves successful but not supported” (pg 21).

“Character is habit . . . Personality is what we prefer to where to the gym. Character is how hard we work out” (pg. 24).

“The kind of Kindness the world needs is rooted in a desire for the common good. It’s the kind of willing to get sweaty in pursuit of selflessness and do the hard work necessary to cultivate their character - their habits - toward compassion” (pg 25)

“In its most raw and rewarding form, the skill of the compliment is the skill of seeing good in others and having the vocabulary and vulnerability to tell them about the good you see” (pg 40).

“Leadership is about your willingness to choose service over selfishness and compassion over convenience” (pg 44).

“It is easier to relate to the cause of an ugly behavior that it is to claim familiarity with the behavior itself” (pg 50).

“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed” (pg 62).

“The act of caring is terrifying and that’s what makes it vulnerable. There is a frustratingly direct relationship between Kindness and vulnerability: the more I care, the more likely I am to get hurt. And so we collectively put our tails between our legs and try to pretend that an apathetic life is anything but the smallest, most selfish way to live” (pg 66).

“When we are emotionally unhealthy and find ourselves humbled, we turn off the potential for wisdom in favor of weapons. It’s easier to lash out than it is to simply listen” (pg 74).

“We do bad things; we are not bad people” (pg 75).

“Separating the person from the behavior doesn’t justify the behavior. We can and should hold people accountable when they do things that hurt us, and draw clear boundaries that say, ‘This is not okay. You don’t do this to me again.’
Forgiveness just means that we do not take pain as personally. IT gives us freedom from a terrible fear: that we actually deserve the damage we were dealt. The Kindest thing you can do for yourself is to forgive those people who’ve hurt you the most. Along the way, you may discover that you’re high on that list” (pg 76).

“Proximity is Powerful” (pg 100).

Four Burners Theory:

Your life is represented by a stove with four burners, each one symbolic of a major piece of your life:

1. Family

2. Friends

3. Health

4. Work

The stove has limited amount of gas. So, in order to be successful at work, you have to turn off one of the burners. In order to be really successful, you have to turn off two.

“Kindness doesn’t have strings attached. It doesn’t wait for something to happen, it makes things happen. It goes out of its way to look for people who need help, and then figures out the best way to help them. You shouldn’t have to have someone be nice to you first before you are kind to them. You shouldn’t even have to agree with someone to show them they are worthy of your kindness” (pg 119).

“People who are most effective at changing their lives, schools, or communities focus daily on small moments instead of the large-scale events” (pg 140).

Grade: A

Being nice is reactive. Being Kind is Proactive. It is a habit. It is a choice.

Love this book.

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Nickle and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich

No favorite quotes, just a strong recommendation for all to read. Especially for educators.

Want to know why so many of your children don’t complete their homework or get a good night’s rest? Read this and you will discover a great deal about the world our students - our colleagues - live in.

So good. So convicting.

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