This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Made to Stick" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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How can you keep people’s attention once you have it? How can you create interest so people don’t tune you out?
It’s one thing to grab attention. It’s another to keep it. You can create interest in two ways—by presenting a mystery or by generating curiosity.
Read more to learn about these two ways of creating interest and keeping it.
Keep Their Attention
While surprise gets people’s attention and can even hold it for a short time, sometimes you need to keep people’s attention longer in order to convey a complex message. You do this by creating interest in two ways: 1) create a mystery or 2) generate curiosity.
Create a Mystery
Mysteries create interest and sustain it because people want closure. When intrigued by a puzzle or question, they’ll follow a story to get to a conclusion without knowing exactly how they’ll get there. It can be a painless and memorable way of absorbing a complicated message.
For example, an Arizona State University professor was searching for ways to engage his students and found a scientific article that used mystery to pull in readers and hold their interest. It began by asking, “What are Saturn’s rings made of?” The writer then told a story of numerous theories and investigations that led nowhere, before he presented the surprising answer: dust.
The professor began using the mystery technique to present concepts in his classes. He introduced a mystery at the beginning of a lecture, but held off on revealing the answer until the end. In one instance, he ran out of time before the bell rang, but his students didn’t want to leave until he provided the answer.
Mysteries sustain attention by going beyond the first moment of surprise and leading listeners on a journey.
Generate Curiosity
You can also create interest and hold it by making people curious. According to the “gap theory” of interest, our curiosity is aroused when we encounter a gap in our knowledge. Wanting to know something causes a sort of pain and to relieve it, we need to fill the gap in our knowledge. For example, we’ll sit through a bad movie because not knowing the end would be painful.
Movies make us want to know what’s going to happen. Similarly, mystery novels raise the question of who did it. We watch sports to find out who will win.
To craft a message that holds attention, before telling people the facts, you need to create or exploit a knowledge gap by suggesting there’s something important that they don’t know. Ways to do this include:
- Pointing to some knowledge people are missing.
- Presenting a puzzle or asking a question they don’t know the answer to.
- Asserting that someone else knows something they don’t.
- Getting listeners to predict an outcome.
Local news programs highlight a knowledge gap by teasing upcoming news stories: “Find out which local restaurant was cited for not cleaning the silverware.” (Shortform note: Other examples today are Facebook’s “clickbait” headlines like “Shutdown of nuke plant has a surprising stinging consequence” and the chyrons on cable news like “The most dangerous celebrity online is revealed”.)
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Chip Heath and Dan Heath's "Made to Stick" at Shortform .
Here's what you'll find in our full Made to Stick summary :
- What makes some messages “stick” while others go unremembered
- The six criteria for shaping your message so it resonates
- Why many companies are blinded by “the curse of knowledge”
