Best 24 quotes of Chip Heath on MyQuotes

Anger prepares us to fight and fear prepares us to flee.

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

Just look for a strong beginning and a strong ending and get moving.

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.

Many armies fail because they put all their emphasis into creating a plan that becomes useless ten minutes into the battle

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.

Most analysts are SO SMART and have amazing ideas, but they can't convey their genius ideas to others.

Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it.

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.

Stories are flight simulators for our brains.

Success emerges from the quality of the decisions we make and the quantity of luck we receive. We can't control luck. But we can control the way we make choices.

The Curse of Knowledge: when we are given knowledge, it is impossible to imagine what it's like to LACK that knowledge.

The first problem of communication is getting people's attention.

The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory.

This is the biggest problem in analytics today.

What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.

When people know the desired destination, they’re free to improvise, as needed, in arriving there.

You've got a good idea, how do you make it stick?

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.

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)

People tend to overuse any idea or concept that delivers an emotional kick.

Stephen Covey, in his book The 8th Habit, decribes a poll of 23,000 employees drawn from a number of companies and industries. He reports the poll's findings: * Only 37 percent said they have a clear understanding of what their organization is trying to achieve and why * Only one in five was enthusiastic about their team's and their organization's goals * Only one in five said they had a clear "line of sight" between their tasks and their team's and organization's goals * Only 15 percent felt that their organization fully enables them to execute key goals * Only 20 percent fully trusted the organization they work for Then, Covey superimposes a very human metaphor over the statistics. He says, "If, say, a soccer team had these same scores, only 4 of the 11 players on the field would know which goal is theirs. Only 2 of the 11 would care. Only 2 of the 11 would know what position they play and know exactly what they are supposed to do. And all but 2 players would, in some way, be competing against their own team members rather than the opponent.

The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: Break a pattern.

To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from "What information do I need to convey?" to "What questions do I want my audience to ask?