Quotes from Chip Heath

INSIGHT: Defining moments rewire our understanding of ourselves or the world. In a few seconds or minutes, we realize something that might influence our lives for decades: Now is the time for me to start this business.

In the identity model3 of decision making, we essentially ask ourselves three questions when we have a decision to make: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? What would someone like me do in this situation?

Knowledge does not change behavior," he said. "We have all encountered crazy shrinks and obese doctors and divorced marriage counselors." He knew that telling the mothers about nutrition wouldn't change their behavior. They'd have to practice it.

Some powerful defining moments contain all four elements. Think of YES Prep's Senior Signing Day: the ELEVATION of students having their moment onstage, the INSIGHT of a sixth grader thinking That could be me, the PRIDE of being accepted to college, and the CONNECTION of sharing the day with an arena full of thousands of supportive people. (See the footnote for a mnemonic to remember this framework for defining moments.)

Solutions-focused therapists learn to focus their patients on the first hints of the miracle—"What's the first small sign you'd see that would make you think the problem was gone"—because they want to avoid answers that are overly grand and unattainable:

Big problems are rarely solved with commensurately big solutions.

What's working and how can we do more of it?" That's the bright-spot philosophy in a single question.

Relationships don't deepen naturally. In the absence of action, they will stall.

Creating more memorable and meaningful experiences is a worthy goal—

Beware the soul-sucking force of "reasonableness." Otherwise you risk deflating your peaks. Speed bumps are reasonable. Mount Everest is not reasonable.

When you're at the beginning, don't obsess about the middle, because the middle is going to look different once you get there. Just look for a strong beginning and a strong ending and get moving.

You want to invent new ideas, not new rules.

Clarity dissolves resistance.

Journalists obsess about their leads. Don Wycliff, a winner of prizes for editorial writing, says, "I've always been a believer that if I've got two hours in which to write a story, the best investment I can make is to spend the first hour and forty-five minutes of it getting a good lead, because after that everything will come easily.

So, rather than guess about whether people will understand our ideas, we should ask, "Is it concrete?" Rather than speculate about whether people will care, we should ask, "Is it emotional? Does it get out of Maslow's basement? Does it force people to put on an Analytical Hat or allow them to feel empathy?

What they realized was that they didn't need their colleagues to understand something, they needed them to feel something.

Culture change is difficult and slow. To have any chance to succeed, the meeting needed to deliver a jolt.

Good ideas are often adopted quickly. When all retailers adopt centralized checkout as a "best practice," it's no longer a competitive advantage for anyone.

Most PowerPoints aren't creating a lot of emotion. We decided to flip this on its head. Let's have people do something active and immersive. That's going to generate more of an emotional response so they will feel something. And then they can think about what they've learned.

Buckingham has a fine series of books on making the most of your strengths rather than obsessing about your weaknesses.)

Moments matter. And what an opportunity we miss when we leave them to chance!

This is how concreteness helps us understand—it helps us construct higher, more abstract insights on the building blocks of our existing knowledge and perceptions. Abstraction demands some concrete foundation. Trying to teach an abstract principle without concrete foundations is like trying to start a house by building a roof in the air.

We cut back on expenses today to yield a better balance sheet next year. We avoid ice cream today for a better body next year.)

Good metaphors are "generative."13 The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate "new perceptions, explanations, and inventions." Many