Quotes from Chip Heath

Make the change small enough that they can't help but score a victory.

Any new quest, even one that is ultimately successful, is going to involve failure.

Because day-to-day change is gradual, even imperceptible, it's hard to know when to jump. Tripwires tell you when to jump.

If you want a reluctant Elephant to get moving, you need to shrink the change.

Ethically challenged people with lots of analytical smarts can, with enough contortions, make almost any case from a given set of statistics.

So how can you avoid letting these subtle emotions get the best of you? Get some distance.

If you want your ideas to be stickier, you've got to break someone's guessing machine and then fix it.

If you want to help people understand quickly, define your new concept in terms of something your audience already knows.

A friend of a friend . . ." Have you ever noticed that our friends' friends have much more interesting lives than our friends themselves?

For individuals' behavior to change, you've got to influence not only their environment but their hearts and minds.

An accurate but useless idea is still useless.

The other advantage of scaling the miracle is that it demystifies the journey. Let

The value of the miracle scale is that it focuses attention on small milestones that are attainable and visible rather than on the eventual destination, which may seem very remote.

The old pattern is powerful, so make sure to script the critical moves, because ambiguity is the enemy.

if people are facing a daunting task, and their instinct is to avoid it, you've got to break down the task. Shrink the change. Make the change small enough that they can't help but score a victory.

What looks like a person problem is often a situation problem.

By using Kamb's level-up strategy, we multiply the number of motivating milestones we encounter en route to a goal. That's a forward-looking strategy: We're anticipating moments of pride ahead.

Everything can look like a failure in the middle." A similar sentiment is expressed by marriage therapist Michele Weiner-Davis, who says that "real change, the kind that sticks, is often three steps forward and two steps back." If failure is a necessary part of change, then the way people understand failure is critical.

should not be "losing 10 pounds," it should be something intrinsically motivating, such as "Fitting into my sexy black pants (without gastrointestinal distress)." Suddenly, your weight-loss mission starts looking more like a playful quest, with frequent victories along the way, and less like a daily weigh-in on the bathroom scale

ELEVATION: Defining moments rise above the everyday. They provoke not just transient happiness, like laughing at a friend's joke, but memorable delight.

marry your long-term goal with short-term critical moves.

My father wanted us to try everything and feel free to push the envelope. His attitude taught me to define failure as not trying something I want to do instead of not achieving the right outcome.

Finding bright spots, then, solves many different problems at once. That's no surprise; successful change efforts involve connecting all three parts of the framework: Rider, Elephant, and Path.

when you seek out situations where you might fail, failure loses some of its menace. You've been inoculated against it.