Made to Stick

Reviewed by Diario de un Inversor · UpdatedJuly 17, 2026

Our review

The Heath brothers — Chip, a Stanford professor; Dan, a Duke researcher — started from an irritating asymmetry: urban legends, with no budget or author, survive for decades, while corporate messages backed by millions die on leaving the room. Dissecting hundreds of «sticky» ideas they found six recurring traits, summarized in the SUCCES acronym: simple (one core idea, not three), unexpected (break a pattern to capture attention), concrete (sensory images, not abstractions), credible (verifiable details or authority), emotional (make people feel, not just know), and stories (which work as mental simulation). The enemy running through the whole book is the «curse of knowledge»: whoever masters a subject no longer remembers how it sounds to someone who doesn't, and therefore communicates in the abstract. Each principle comes with memorable examples — from the «Don't Mess with Texas» campaign to Subway's Jared — and applicable exercises. For anyone who communicates — teaches, sells, writes, or presents — it is one of the few books in the genre whose advice actually gets used the next day.

Key takeaways

• The curse of knowledge is communication's enemy number one: knowing too much makes you forget how not knowing sounds.
• Simple is not simplistic: it means finding the core of the idea and expressing it compactly, like a proverb.
• Concrete sticks and abstract slides: «chicken wings» communicates; «value proposition optimization» does not.
• Stories work as simulations: whoever hears a story mentally rehearses the action — something no list of facts achieves.

Fact

Chip Heath is a professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and Dan Heath a senior fellow at Duke; published in 2007, the book spent over two years on the BusinessWeek bestseller list.