Top 31 Quotes & Sayings by Chip Heath

When you’re at the beginning, don’t obsess about the middle, because the middle is going to look different once you get there.

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

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

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?

Create a need for closure.

What’s working, and how can we do more of it?

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

There's no such thing as a passive audience.

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

The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be.

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

This is the biggest problem in analytics today.

Stories are flight simulators for our brains.

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.

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

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

Knowledge is rarely enough to spark change; it takes emotion to bring knowledge to a boil.

What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.

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

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.

Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And that’s the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.

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

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

What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.

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.

What’s broken, and how do we fix it?

The Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it's preceded by the huh experience.

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

What questions do I want my audience to ask?

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

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.