Quotes from Chip Heath

The destination was crystal clear:

companies often emphasize features when they should be emphasizing benefits. "The most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments (the world's best seed!) that they forget to tell us why we should buy

If you want your ideas to be stickier, you've got to break someone's guessing machine and then fix it. But in surprising people, in breaking their guessing machines, how do we avoid gimmicky surprise, like the wolves? The easiest way to avoid gimmicky surprise and ensure that your unexpected ideas produce insight is to make sure you target an aspect of your audience's guessing machines that relates to your core message. We

Grit is not synonymous with hard work. It involves a certain single-mindedness. An ungritty prison inmate will mount a daring new escape attempt every month, but a gritty prison inmate will tunnel his way out one spoonful of concrete at a time. Grit

Target a specific moment and then challenge yourself: How can I elevate it? Spark insight? Boost the sense of connection? Life is full of "form letter in an envelope" moments, waiting to be transformed into something special.

You'll direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, and shape the Path.

Because when a customer says thanks, they make you happy, but they make themselves even happier.

Whether the switch you seek is in your family, in your charity, in your organization, or in society at large, you'll get there by making three things happen. You'll direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, and shape the Path.

we've seen how massive changes often hinge on single moments

Our good intentions to create these moments are often frustrated by urgent-seeming problems and pressures.

To ooch is to construct small experiments to test one's hypothesis.

Sternin's strategy was to search the community for bright spots—successful efforts worth emulating. If some kids were healthy despite their

In the short term, we prioritize fixing problems over making moments, and that choice usually feels like a smart trade-off. But over time, it backfires.

Sternin's strategy was to search the community for bright spots—successful efforts worth emulating.

Of all the ways we can create moments of pride for others, the simplest is to offer them recognition.

And when people exhaust their self-control, what they're exhausting are the mental muscles needed to think creatively, to focus, to inhibit their impulses, and to persist in the face of frustration or failure. In other words, they're exhausting precisely the mental muscles needed to make a big change.

What the Magic Castle has figured out is that, to please customers, you need not obsess over every detail. Customers will forgive small swimming pools and underwhelming room décor, as long as some moments are magical. The surprise about great service experiences is that they are mostly forgettable and occasionally remarkable.

If you want to change the culture of your organization, you've got to get the reformers together. They need a free space.

The proper pace of recognition is weekly or even daily, not monthly or yearly.

crystallization of discontent

So when you hear people say that change is hard because people are lazy or resistant, that's just flat wrong. In fact, the opposite is true: Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And that's the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.

the failure will trigger the "flight" instinct

There are a little more than 50 million people in England, and around 50 deaths each day via accidental causes (slipping in the tub; being swept away in a flooding river; falling from a ladder). The daily risk of dying there in an accident is roughly 1 in a million. Your risk of dying unexpectedly in England on any given day is the same as your odds of having to guess which date someone is thinking of between 500 BC and August 1, 2200.

For formal recognition programs, they recommend using objective measurements, such as sales volume