Making Your Message Stick

What happens when you finish a presentation? What happens to your words and ideas? Are they carried in the hearts and minds of your audience out into the world or are they instantly forgotten?

As presenters we want to give our words and ideas a long life and a good place to start is with “Made to Stick”.

This book is all about how to get your message across clearly and effectively and it does exactly that. It takes the six principles of its SUCCESs model (Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotion, Stories) and applies them effectively throughout the book. But where it comes out strongest is in its use of Principal 6 (Stories) as each point they make is illustrated by a collection of well-chosen stories.

The stories are great, the type of stories that stick in your mind. There’s one about how one teacher explained racism to a class of young children after the death of Martin Luther King by dividing them into blue eyes and brown eyes and treating each group differently and that lesson was so powerful for the class that they all remember it 30 or 40 years later and it’s a story I won’t forget anytime soon.

Their message is simple and clear and the way they get it across is both thoughtful and entertaining. Definitely a book worth reading for anyone who wants to become a better presenter and speaker.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die – Chip Heath & Dan Heath