Quotes from Chip Heath

If you want people to change, you must provide crystal-clear direction.

making messages "emotional" is to make people care.

Compounding this preference for the status quo is another bias called loss aversion, which says that we find losses more painful than gains are pleasant.

That's not intuitive knowledge.

The lesson for the rest of us is that if we want to make people care, we've got to tap into the things they care about. When everybody taps into the same thing, an arms race emerges. To avoid it, we've either got to shift onto new turf, as Thompson did, or find associations that are distinctive for our ideas.

Because identities are central to the way people make decisions, any change effort that violates someone's identity is likely doomed to failure. (That's why it's so clumsy when people instinctively reach for "incentives" to change other people's behavior.)

in recalling an experience, we ignore most of what happened and focus instead on a few particular moments.

it was like "peeling an onion" where we were going just slightly deeper on each exchange and when finished, we had moved quite a bit.

The point we're emphasizing here is that certain circumstances demand attention

researchers have found again and again that people act as though losses are from two to four times more painful than gains are pleasurable.

Language is often abstract, but life is not abstract. Teachers

That's the paradox of the growth mindset. Although it seems to draw attention to failure, and in fact encourages us to seek out failure, it is unflaggingly optimistic. We will struggle, we will fail, we will be knocked down—but throughout, we'll get better, and we'll succeed in the end.

Research tells us that brainstorming becomes more productive when it's focused. As jazz great Charles Mingus famously said, "You can't improvise on nothing, man; you've gotta improvise on something.

And those bonds can continue to strengthen with astonishing speed. A defining moment of connection can be both brief and extraordinary.

It will come as no surprise that one reliable way of making people care is by invoking self-interest.

Identity is going to play a role in nearly every change situation.

5. In individual relationships, we believe that relationships grow closer with time. But that's not the whole story. Sometimes long relationships reach plateaus. And with the right moment, relationships can deepen quickly.

Top management challenged employees to be on the lookout for potential innovations—

Lots of things are out of our control. But the goal is to be wise about the things that are under our control. And one thing we can control is how we define the ultimate victory and the small victories that lead up to it.

5. In individual relationships, we believe that relationships grow closer with time. But that's not the whole story. Sometimes long relationships reach plateaus. And with the right moment, relationships can deepen quickly. • Fisherow and her team turned around the troubled Stanton Elementary School by relying, in part, on short parent-teacher home visits before the start of school. 6. According

finding the core," and expressing it in the form of a compact idea

Big changes can happen.

What's indisputable is that when we assess our experiences, we don't average our minute-by-minute sensations. Rather, we tend to remember flagship moments: the peaks, the pits, and the transitions.

This is an economic issue as well as an emotional one: In a survey of 10,000 employees from the 1,000 largest companies, 40% of workers cited "lack of recognition" as a key reason for leaving a job. This