Let’s say I have a friend called Dave. Dave was on a business trip to New York, and he had some time to kill before his flight. He went to a bar and ordered a drink. An attractive woman came and asked if she could offer him a drink. He was surely flattered, and he accepted her offer. She bought two drinks: one for herself and the other for him, and that’s the last thing he remembers. He, then, found himself lying in a bathtub surrounded by ice, and he found a note beside him that said “DON’T MOVE, CALL 911”. He reached for a phone that was placed beside him and called 911.  It turns out that his kidney was harvested.

Now let’s say you read something in the news that said: “In the broadest sense, monetary advancement may be seen as ‘any development in genuine salary per capita from whatever source’”. Bach has portrayed it as “development in the aggregate yield of products and enterprises in the economy”.

You finish reading both stories. Then, you call a friend to tell him about what you read. Which story are you most likely to remember? Definitely, the first one, because it’s more interesting; it’s made to stick!

The 6 principles to make a story stick are Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional & Story; the first letters of each of the previous words make up the word SUCCESs.

Why should you even read this Summary?

After finishing this Summary, the following questions will have been answered:

1)    How can you make your customers remember your message or the product that you sell?
2)    How can you make your customers act on your message?
3)    How can you make your customers pay attention to whatever you have to say?

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Chapter 1: Simple

An army can have an awesome plan for the war; yet, they might be defeated. Why is that? It’s because these plans simply do not work. Planning is important to give a feeling for the soldiers that something was planned; but, it won’t make them win the war. The reason behind this is that they might have the perfect plan. However, when they’re on the actual battlefield, sometimes, something happens that can disrupt the plan, like a key asset being destroyed or a surprise move made by the enemy. The soldiers then will ignore the plan and act on their instinct. It’s hard to make a plan to survive in a noisy, unpredictable environment. The thing is: you have to keep it simple, in other words, find the core of the idea.

To get to the core of the idea, you have to remove the unnecessary ideas. So far, that’s easy. The hard part would be: having to remove important ideas that are just not the most important ones. You have to be careful not to remove the most important idea, i.e. the core.

The two steps to reach the core are:
Step one: Find the core.
Step two: Translate the core using the SUCCESs checklist.

Southwest Airlines is a successful company. How did they achieve success? They reached the core of their idea, which is “THE low-fare airline”. In 1996, they received 124,000 applications for 5,444 openings only. The question here is: Why would anyone want to work for a company whose main idea is to reduce costs? The answer is that: while their main idea is to reduce the costs, their secondary idea is to make employees have fun at work. Employees are allowed to act on their instinct; for instance, is it okay to make fun of a flight attendant about her birthday over the P.A.? Sure, because it doesn’t affect the company’s status about being THE low-fare airline. Is it okay to throw some confetti over her? No, because that means extra working hours for cleaning employees; thus, higher fares. And that’s how, my friend, southwest reached their core idea.

Too much complexity can make people choose unimportant things and put them as a priority over critical issues.

An economist named Savage illustrated an idea that he called the “Sure-thing principle”. He gave an example about someone who wanted to buy a property; but then, remembered that there are elections coming soon. So, he considered both scenarios and how they would affect the property attractiveness: if group A wins, he’s going to buy the house, and if group B wins, he’s going to do the same thing. Thus, he decided to go ahead and buy the house anyway, regardless of the outcome. It’s as simple as that! However, two psychologists published a paper claiming that the “Sure-thing principle” was not always accurate. They said that the mere idea of the existence of uncertainty could alter people’s choices.

For instance, a college student had a final exam. The exam results would appear in two days. After finishing his exam, he went home and found an offer of a vacation. He had three choices: book the vacation, pay 5$ fees to lock its price for two days so that he would know his results before paying for the vacation, and the third option was not to pay for it.

Other students were put under an experiment whereby they were told about their grades early so that the uncertainty option would be eliminated. The only options they had were: either to pay or not to pay for the vacation. The students who passed the exam chose to go on vacation to reward themselves, while the other students who failed their exam also, chose to go as a recuperation for their bad grades. Although the students from the first experiment, who had the choice of uncertainty, reacted very differently, they all chose to pay the 5$ to lock the price of the vacation until their results come back, and that’s why the “sure-thing principle” isn’t always a sure thing.

The second step would be to translate the core using the SUCCESs checklist. Check a paragraph that you’ve written, and make a checklist composed of the six principles we’ve talked about before. Check the principles that are present in the paragraph and see which principles were checked off. Evaluate the paragraph, and rewrite it if you found out that it does not check off most of the principles.

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