We will give you suggestions for tailoring you ideas in a way that makes them more creative and more effective with your audience. We’ve created our checklist of six principles for precisely this purpose.

But isn’t the use of a template or a checklist confining? Surely we’re not arguing that a “color by numbers” approach will yield more creative work than a blank-canvas approach?

Actually, yes, that’s exactly what we’re saying. If you want to spread your ideas to other people, you should work within the confines of the rules that have allowed other ideas to succeed over time. You want to invent new ideas, not new rules.

-Page 24, Made to Stick

The concept described here is so powerful. It took a little while to really sink in when I first read it. But I find myself referencing this idea ALL THE TIME.

Don’t just read what this passages says, but what it implies. What they’re describing here applies to so much more than just creating sticky ideas. It describes the process for effectively doing almost ANYTHING.

The message: Don’t start from scratch and try to reinvent the wheel. The things that work almost always follow a common pattern. Research what others have said the successful pattern looks like. If you can’t find any research, at least make an attempt to infer the pattern on your own.

A page earlier the authors write,

Highly creative ads are more predictable than uncreative ones. It’s like Tolstoy’s quote: “All happy families resemble each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” All creatives ads resemble one another, but each loser is uncreative in its own way.

Whatever you want to do there’s a small finite number of effective approaches that are far superior to randomness or just “trying stuff and seeing what happens”, whether it’s creating sticky ideas, creating a startup, getting people to like you or achieving happiness.Taking this idea a level of abstraction higher is an homage to the patternist view of life. We are not our matter, we are our pattern.