With less than a week to go to the start of my MIT Bootcamp, I am focusing on getting through the pre-Bootcamp checklist. To that end, I finished listening to the Made to Stick Audible over the weekend. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. The book was well written and made me flashback a lot of the mental models, schema and other things I learnt during my PhD and my post-doc with Middlesex University. Marketing is not my strong sweet, and while I have no issues speaking in public, I always felt I communicated less then I intended. So this book covered exactly what I need to know about effective messaging.

The book promotes the "SUCCES" (with the last s omitted) model where each letter refers to a characteristic that can help make an idea "sticky".

Simple – find the core of any idea
Unexpected – elements grab people’s attention
Concrete – examples make the ideas easier to remember and recall
Credible – give an idea believability
Emotional – can help people see the importance of an idea
Stories – narrative empower people to use an idea

The most interesting part of the book to me was the concept of the “Curse of Knowledge”. While not a term I used in my PhD, but Loculus was all about computers supporting novices through their gap in knowledge. Made to Stick, talks about the reverse, what happens when experts get lose their audience in the details or on concepts that are obvious to them because they are experts. But we need experts to talk to novices in a way that the novices understand. Because based on my observation, a lot of bullshit movements like the anti-vax movement are a result of the fact that people understand the misinformation more readily than the actual science.

For example, people understand mercury is poisonous, and so it’s easy to make the idea that mercury in vaccines is bad “sticky”. But the truth is that mercury wasn’t present in the vaccines in quantities to make it harmful and the only thing removing mercury did was make vaccines more expansive for poor people. But such is life, the great thinkers are not always the greatest talkers, and the greatest talkers are often full of misinformation. But that’s another topic.

Overall, I enjoyed this book very much, and I would recommend it to everybody who wants to learn how to communicate better!