Top 100 Chip Heath Quotes
#1. An old advertising maxim says you've got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don't buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children's pictures.
Chip Heath
#2. Not cocky overconfidence that comes from collecting biased information and ignoring uncertainties, but the real confidence that comes from knowing you've made the best decision that you could.
Chip Heath
#3. Big-picture, hands-off leadership isn't likely to work in a change situation, because the hardest part of change - the paralyzing part - is precisely in the details.
Chip Heath
#4. What's working, and how can we do more of it?" Sounds simple, doesn't it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: "What's broken, and how do we fix it?
Chip Heath
#5. If forensic analysts confiscated your calendar and e-mail records and Web browsing history for the past six months, what would they conclude are your core priorities?
Chip Heath
#6. When you're at the beginning, don't obsess about the middle, because the middle is going to look different once you get there.
Chip Heath
#7. The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory.
Chip Heath
#8. We can't unlearn what we already know and there are only two ways to beat the curse, the first is not to learn anything, the second is to transform our ideas.
Chip Heath
#9. As stories are told and retold, they evolve. They come to emphasize individuals, not organizations; to celebrate a flash of insight over stepwise improvements; and to exaggerate obstacles while downplaying institutional support.
Chip Heath
#11. Generative metaphors and proverbs both derive their power from a clever substitution: They substitute something easy to think about for something difficult.
Chip Heath
#12. a secondary effect of being angry, which was recently discovered by researchers, is that we become more certain of our judgments. When we're angry, we know we're right, as anyone who has been in a relationship can attest.
Chip Heath
#13. Challenge plot, the Connection plot, and the Creativity plot.
Chip Heath
#14. Lots of us have expertise in particular areas. Becoming an expert in something means that we become more and more fascinated by nuance and complexity. That's when the Curse of Knowledge kicks in, and we start to forget what it's like not to know what we know.
Chip Heath
#15. punch line: The most basic way to make people care is to form an association between something they don't yet care about and something they do care about.
Chip Heath
#16. Confirmation bias is probably the single biggest problem in business, because even the most sophisticated people get it wrong. People go out and they're collecting the data, and they don't realize they're cooking the books.
Chip Heath
#17. Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timely
Chip Heath
#18. The Curse of Knowledge: when we are given knowledge, it is impossible to imagine what it's like to LACK that knowledge.
Chip Heath
#19. If I already intuitively "get" what you're trying to tell me, why should I obsess about remembering it? The danger, of course, is that what sounds like common sense often isn't ... It's your job, as a communicator, to expose the parts of your message that are uncommon sense.
(p.72)
Chip Heath
#21. For individuals' behavior to change, you've got to influence not only their environment but their hearts and minds.
Chip Heath
#22. Just look for a strong beginning and a strong ending and get moving.
Chip Heath
#23. A good change leader never thinks, "Why are these people acting so badly? They must be bad people." A change leader thinks, "How can I set up a situation that brings out the good in these people?
Chip Heath
#24. Stories are flight simulators for our brains.
Chip Heath
#25. And that's the first surprise about change: What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.
Chip Heath
#26. If the Rider isn't sure exactly what direction to go, he tends to lead the Elephant in circles. And as we'll see, that tendency explains the third and final surprise about change: What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.
Chip Heath
#27. This is the biggest problem in analytics today.
Chip Heath
#28. Good metaphors are "generative."13 The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate "new perceptions, explanations, and inventions." Many
Chip Heath
#29. There's a good reason why change can be difficult: The world doesn't always want what you want.
Chip Heath
#30. When people know the desired destination, they're free to improvise, as needed, in arriving there.
Chip Heath
#31. Failing is often the best way to learn, and because of that, early failure is a kind of necessary investment.
Chip Heath
#32. More options, even good ones, can freeze us and make us retreat to the default plan,
Chip Heath
#33. Mental practice alone produced about two thirds of the benefits of actual physical practice
Chip Heath
#34. As we gain information we are more likely to focus on what we don't know : Someone who knows the state capitals of 17 of 50 states may be proud of her knowledge. But someone who knows 47 may think of herself as not knowing 3 capitals
Chip Heath
#35. Knowledge curses us, if we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. And it becomes difficult to share our knowledge with others because we can't readily re-create our listener's state of mind.
Chip Heath
#36. If an atomic bomb fell on Raleigh, it wouldn't be news in Benson unless some of the debris and ashes fell on Benson.
Chip Heath
#37. Many armies fail because they put all their emphasis into creating a plan that becomes useless ten minutes into the battle
Chip Heath
#38. Multitracking keeps egos in check. If your boss has three pet projects in play, chances are she'll be open to unvarnished feedback about them, but if there's only one pet project, it will be harder for her to hear the truth. Her ego will be perfectly conflated with the project.
Chip Heath
#39. Smart enough to get into Yale. Economists studied students who had been admitted to two schools of higher and lower prestige but decided to attend the school with lower prestige. Estimated sacrifice in lifetime earnings from attending the less prestigious school: none.
Chip Heath
#40. The status quo feels comfortable and steady because much of the choice has been squeezed out. You have your routines, your ways of doing things.
Chip Heath
#41. The Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it's preceded by the huh experience.
Chip Heath
#42. What should a Pegasus person do in this situation?
Chip Heath
#43. The simple act of committing to an answer makes the students more engaged and more curious about the outcome.
Chip Heath
#44. An accurate but useless idea is still useless.
Chip Heath
#45. Fundamental Attribution Error. The error lies in our inclination to attribute people's behavior to the way they are rather than to the situation they are in.
Chip Heath
#46. What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?
Chip Heath
#47. What if we started every decision by asking some simple questions: What are we giving up by making this choice? What else could we do with the same time and money?
Chip Heath
#48. When you engineer early successes, what you're really doing is engineering hope. Hope is precious to a change effort.
Chip Heath
#49. One of my favorite bloggers who can articulate his ideas clearly is Avinash Kaushik. The only problem? His ideas are so awesome his posts are a mile long, but I promise they are worth the time.
Chip Heath
#50. Most analysts are SO SMART and have amazing ideas, but they can't convey their genius ideas to others.
Chip Heath
#51. Work to make the core message itself more interesting.
Chip Heath
#52. Anger prepares us to fight and fear prepares us to flee.
Chip Heath
#53. A friend of a friend . . ." Have you ever noticed that our friends' friends have much more interesting lives than our friends themselves?
Chip Heath
#54. The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be.
Chip Heath
#55. What is the ratio of the time I spend solving problems to the time I spend scaling successes?
Chip Heath
#56. Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages, if I already "get" what you're trying to tell me, why should I be obsessed about remembering it.
Chip Heath
#58. Knowledge does not change behavior," he said. "We have all encountered crazy shrinks and obese doctors and divorced marriage counselors.
Chip Heath
#59. the more successful change transformations were more likely to set behavioral goals: 89 percent of the top third versus only 33 percent of the bottom third. For instance, a behavioral goal might be that project teams would meet once a week
Chip Heath
#60. You don't have to speak monosyllables to be simple. What we mean by simple is finding the core of the idea.
Chip Heath
#61. One of his friends, a marketing professor at Stanford, said, "Think about this from a marketing perspective. We can change behavior in a short television ad. We don't do it with information. We do it with identity: 'If I buy a BMW, I'm going to be this kind of person.
Chip Heath
#62. successful change transformations were more likely to set behavioral goals:
Chip Heath
#63. The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: Break a pattern.
Chip Heath
#64. Researchers have found again and again that people act as though losses are from two to four times more painful than gains are pleasurable.
Chip Heath
#65. Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something. But it's the next best thing. And the right kind of a story is a simulation.
Chip Heath
#66. When you say three things, you say nothing.
Chip Heath
#67. How can you make your change a matter of identity rather than a matter of consequences?
Chip Heath
#68. As I see it, I am not just in charge of food service; I am in charge of morale.
Chip Heath
#69. Priestley, a brilliant man with an astonishing variety of talents, did not lack for career options. He was employed as a minister for a Dissenting church in Leeds, England. ("Dissenting" meant that it was not affiliated with the Church of England, the state-sanctioned religion.) But
Chip Heath
#70. In Sternin's judgment, all of this analysis was "TBU" - true but useless.
Chip Heath
#71. Plans are useful in the sense that they're proof that planning has taken place. The planning process forces people to think through the right issues. Bus as for the plans themselves they just don't work on the battle field
Chip Heath
#72. Stories should put knowledge into a frame work that is more lifelike.
Chip Heath
#73. It takes emotion to bring knowledge to a boil.
Chip Heath
#74. Any time in life you're tempted to think, 'Should I do this OR that?' instead, ask yourself, 'Is there a way I can do this AND that?
Chip Heath
#75. The problem is that urgencies - the most vivid and immediate circumstances - will always hog our spotlight.
Chip Heath
#76. Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And that's the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.
Chip Heath
#77. There's no such thing as a passive audience.
Chip Heath
#78. TO OOCH IS TO ask, Why predict something we can test? Why guess when we can know?
Chip Heath
#79. To get someone's attention break a pattern of thinking.
Chip Heath
#80. Don't obsess about the failures. Instead, investigate and clone the successes.
Chip Heath
#81. Kotter and Cohen observed that, in almost all successful change efforts, the sequence of change is not ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE, but rather SEE-FEEL-CHANGE. You
Chip Heath
#82. It seems some CEOs who pay extremely large acquisition premiums ... come to believe their own press.
Chip Heath
#83. Why are habits so important? They are, in essence, behavioral autopilot. They allow lots of good behaviors to happen without the Rider taking charge. Remember that the Rider's self-control is exhaustible, so it's a huge plus if some positive things can happen "free" on autopilot.
Chip Heath
#84. You say 10 things, you say nothing.
Chip Heath
#85. One solution to this is to bundle our decisions with "tripwires," signals that would snap us awake at exactly the right moment, compelling us to reconsider a decision or to make a new one. Think of the way that the low-fuel warning in your car lights up, grabbing your attention.
Chip Heath
#86. ladder your way down from a change idea to a specific behavior, you
Chip Heath
#87. The pros-and-cons approach is familiar. It is commonsensical. And it is also profoundly flawed.
Chip Heath
#88. In this chapter, we've seen that what looks like a "character problem" is often correctible when you change the environment. The
Chip Heath
#89. (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.)
Chip Heath
#90. Make a switch, you need to script the critical moves
Chip Heath
#91. The problem is this: Often the heart and mind disagree. Fervently.
Chip Heath
#92. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it.
Chip Heath
#93. 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
Chip Heath
#94. Rather than focusing solely on what's new and different about the change to come, make an effort to remind people what's already been conquered.
Chip Heath
#95. The company wants to sell you more shampoo, your friend doesn't, so she gets more trust points.
Chip Heath
#96. Weaknesses - the tendency to get lost in analysis.
Chip Heath
#97. What's broken, and how do we fix it?
Chip Heath
#98. Research has found that interviews are less predictive of job performance than work samples, job-knowledge tests, and peer ratings of past job performance. Even a simple intelligence test is substantially more predictive than an interview.
Chip Heath
#99. You've got a good idea, how do you make it stick?
Chip Heath
#100. Exception Question: "When was the last time you saw a little bit of the miracle, even just for a short time?
Chip Heath
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