The wish list is growing

Thanks to this article (Christian Science Monitor January 23, 2007), found through Arts and Letters Daily, this book is now on my amazon.com wish list:


Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die By Chip Heath and Dan Heath.

From the article:

In separate chapters for each of the six principal characteristics, "Made to Stick" explores in depth exactly how, say, concreteness provides more hooks for recall (the "Velcro theory of memory") and why abstraction is often what unintentionally results from expertise.

"This is the Curse of Knowledge," the Heaths write, describing what they consider the single biggest reason so many messages fail to stick. "Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. [It] becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind."

The expert "wants to talk about chess strategies, not about bishops moving diagonally."