Book

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Chip Heath and Dan Heath · Random House Paid Beginner

The reason technical founders write copy that experts respect but nobody acts on has a name, and this book coined it: the curse of knowledge, where once you know something deeply you can no longer imagine not knowing it. The Heaths show, with the famous tapper-and-listener experiment, why that gap opens and give you a concrete toolkit (their Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Story framework) for closing it without watering the idea down. It is the single best explanation of why you and your buyer keep talking past each other.

• The curse of knowledge is why experts miscommunicate: you cannot un-know what you know, so you overestimate how obvious your message is to a first-time reader
• You do not fix this by dumbing down, you fix it by making the idea concrete and credible, using specifics and details that only an insider would know
• Credibility can come from letting the audience test the claim themselves, so give buyers a vivid, checkable detail instead of asking them to trust an adjective