Stephen Monrad

I posted all last week about the book “Made to Stick” and what it means for the material I am writing for my site.

I’m going to finish up my discussion by talking about the last two chapters today – Emotion and Story.

Emotion is easy because people get worked up about economic issues. Money and work are key parts of people’s lives. Losing a job or the risk of losing a job can be very upsetting. The only trick for engaging emotion on economics issues is to ensure that people feel that something can be done. If people feel that a situation is hopeless, they can just give up altogether.

The story part is a little tricky. I think my strategy on story is going to be to try to get people to imagine themselves in the situations I am describing. I will try to add more detail so that the reader can visualize the situation.

I’ve gone through the six chapters in the book now. It’s easy to remember the chapters because the first letters of the chapter titles are the first 6 letters of the word “success”. Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Story.

This is post 5 in the series I started on Monday.

The chapter “Credible” in “Made to Stick” addresses what could be a big problem for me. Why should anybody believe what I have to say?

I’m not an authority. I don’t have a PH.D. in Economics. I don’t work for a well known think tank. I have no track record to support my claims. Fortunately, there is an alternative to this type of external credibility. The story I tell needs to have internal credibility.

I need to make my message credible by writing clearly enough that the reader can easily see that the ideas make sense. While economics can be complicated, it is ultimately about people and the things they make and use. All readers  have intimate knowledge of most of what I am talking about. I need to strive to be persuasive enough that intuition convinces people my ideas are credible. If people can visualize how my system works, they might believe in it.

To get published, I may have to resort to getting quotes from established experts. Of course, the only way I am going to get the quotes is if the material has internal credibility.

This is the fourth post in a series I started on Monday about the book “Made to Stick” and how it affects my writing plans.

In the chapter “Concrete”, the authors make the point that people respond much better to examples than abstract theory. While I have tried to use examples where I can, I need to be relentless in my avoidance of the abstract. I had thought that so long as I avoided graphs, jargon,  and mathematics, I was being concrete. Not so.

What I need to do is bring the reader into the picture. The economy is about real world things such as work. I need to use examples where people can visualize exactly what I am talking about.

I need to use examples that illustrate the abstract concepts instead of trying to explain the abstract concepts in plain language. While this seems obvious, it is amazingly difficult to do. I have spent years studying mathematics and economics. I am constantly tempted to fall back onto abstract concepts that I am comfortable with.

This is a continuation of the discussion I started on Monday about my writing and the book “Made to Stick.” Today I am going to write about the chapter “Unexpected” in “Made to Stick.”

“Made to Stick” says that people respond to unexpected messages. This is good news for me because my core message that we can build an economy that works much better than current ones is definitely unexpected. Most people believe that market based economies are the best option available. While there are problems, alternatives have even greater problems. The idea that major improvements to the economy are possible is certainly unexpected.

My problem is that my core idea is too unexpected. Readers are going to respond to my core message with disbelief. Like if I announced that aliens from Mars were living among us, people will immediately be skeptical. If I launch into a long discussion of my vision for how a better economy could be built, people will lose interest or find fault with what I am saying before I can fully make my case. The easiest criticism to make is that my ideas sound like communism and communism failed.

“Made to Stick” has an answer for this. They say that the way to sustain interest is to open a series of small gaps in people’s understanding and then fill them. People respond well to a series of manageable challenges to their understanding of the world. They don’t respond well to a huge chasm.

So, once I state my goal of trying to convince people that a much better economic system is possible, I need to drop back onto familiar ground. I then need to create and fill gaps in a way that leads people towards the conclusions I have reached. I need to think of my story as a mystery. Readers don’t understand why I believe my core message. I need to work bit by bit using the gap method until people see why.

This suits me just fine because I can use all the messages I had to filter out when I honed in on my core message as stepping stones. For example, I can talk about irrationality as a step towards understanding why a better economy is possible.

This is a follow-up from yesterday’s post where I talked about the book “Made to Stick” and my need to improve my writing.

The chapter “Simple” says that to communicate an idea effectively, a core needs to be identified and clearly articulated. I don’t do this. I try to communicate a lot of messages and in the end communicate nothing clearly.

I want to convince people that our current economic system is a failure. I want to explain why it is a failure. I want to talk about the importance of human irrationality. I want to present a bunch of ideas about how I think the economy can be made to run better. These are all good ideas that need to be written about. To communicate effectively, though, I need to pick only ONE idea to be my main point.

I may change my mind. However, right now, I think THE core message I want to communicate is that we can build an economic system that works much better than systems that are used today. The test that makes me think that this is THE core message is that I would be happy if readers were convinced that we can build a much better economic system. If enough people believe that a much better system is possible, it is only a matter of time until one materializes.

I think everything else I have to say can be brought in to support the idea that a much better economic system is possible. I agree with the authors of “Made to Stick” that focusing on a single core message will help tie all that I write together better and make it more powerful.

Over the weekend, I began rereading the book “Made to Stick – Why some ideas survive and others die” written by Chip Heath & Dan Heath.I reread it because I think I need to rethink how I am approaching the process of writing material for my blog and website.

Early in the book, they talk about an interesting study that shows why writing about complex topics is difficult. In the study, one person (the tapper) was asked to tap out the rhythm of a commonly known song like Happy Birthday. Another person (the listener) was asked to guess what song was being tapped. The listeners rarely guessed correctly. The interesting thing about the study is that the tapper was asked to predict how likely it was that the listener would be able to guess the song correctly. They wildly over-estimated how successful the listeners would be.

The problem is that the tapper knows the name of the song and can hear it mentally while tapping. It seems obvious to the tapper what song is being tapped. The tapper can become exasperated by the inability of the listener to guess the name. The tapper finds it difficult to imagine what it is like to listen to the tapping without knowing what the song is already.

The problem with my writing so far is that I am not managing to make myself understood. I think my ideas are brilliant. I believe I am describing them accurately, but the result is turning out to be about as effective as a bunch of tapping. I need to write things that make sense to and engage  readers who don’t have the whole story already.

Made to Stick has 6 suggestions I can use to strengthen my writing. They are presented in chapters with the following one-word titles:

• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional
• Story

One word doesn’t do justice to their suggestions of course. I will write more about specifically what I think I need to do in posts over the next few days.