The first principle we'll talk about to making ideas stick is simple. The simple idea behind simple is that less is more. Imagine for a moment you're a business traveler, you need to buy a new laptop. Well, there are different ways to pitch a product like that. If you go to Dell's website, for example, you might see a long list of information. There's a type I or type II PC card. There's an optional media base with a variety of different options. There's docking like a D port or a D doc or D view laptop stand. There're different modular options, different types of DVDs and memory keys. The information goes on and on. Do you want an 8X DVD or do you want a 24X CDRW/DVD, Floppy disk drive? You're probably sitting there going, I have no clue. It's a huge amount of information and even if you're in IT or you know technology, it's still pretty difficult to parse. But that's not the only way to present information. Let's watch a different approach to how a different company thought about presenting a laptop. Watching this video is great. It's really emotional. It's really exciting to watch, but think about how many attributes they talked about in that video. Think about how much you learned about that laptop. Well, if you think about it at the core, you don't know anything about the number of module options, about the docking ports, about the PC card. You only know one thing. You know that laptop is really thin. How do you know that? Well, you saw the side picture was very thin, but you also saw that it fit in an envelope, think about that. It must be thin if it can fit in an envelope. They didn't say, "Hey, we make a laptop that's a half-inch small or an inch small." They said look at it, it fits in a laptop. We all know what an envelope is. We all know how thick and envelope is and because that we get a sense of how thick that laptop is. The important idea here is simple. Tell people 10 things. They aren't going to remember any of them. They're focusing their attention on all 10 of them and one tenth of their attention gets to each of those things. But you tell people one thing and only one thing. They'll remember because they focus all their attention on that one particular thing. But in thinking about what should we focus on or how we can communicate that one particular thing. Analogies are really useful tool. Think for a moment about a pomelo. Do you know what a pomelo is? If you've never heard of it before, you probably don't. But if you do know what it is, imagine you had to tell someone else what a Pomelo is? How would you describe it to a friend or a peer? Well, you might say it's a large grapefruit and it's a color of a tennis ball. Now, for those of you who didn't know a pomelo is. Do you have some sense of what it is? Probably, you don't know perfectly exactly what it is. But if you had to guess, you have some sense of how big it is, it's larger than a grapefruit. Some sense of what color it is, it's a light green color and some sense of the other attributes it might have. It's probably a fruit, given it was compared to a grapefruit, It's probably sour, just like a grapefruit might be. The point is while analogies don't tell us everything about a product or idea, they get us to 90 percent of that idea pretty quickly. They give us some good sense of what's there by quickly comparing it to something we all know. By taking something everybody knows and relating this new idea that they don't understand to that thing they all know, it helps them get a good sense of that idea quite quickly. When thinking about applying simple, what we want to do is find the core. Too often when we're communicating, we say, "Well, this ideas, it can't be simplified. It's too nuanced and complex." Particularly we're talking about a new piece of technology or a complex message that you want people to understand. We think we need to tell people everything to make sure they get the idea. But importantly, if we tell them everything, they're going to remember nothing. so we have to think about that one, maybe two things that are most important for them to remember from a message. If the listener walked away with just one thing, what would that one thing be? What's that core idea that we want to make sure they remember? As we discussed, analogies can help. It's like X, but with Y. For example, when Facebook came out, people described it as an online yearbook. They took Facebook, something that no one had ever heard of before and they compared it to a yearbook, something that most people, at least who've had a high school yearbook can understand. By comparing it to something that everyone else understands, something they know, we get some sense of what this new thing is. Simple also has other benefits, as we'll talk about soon, it leaves people wanting more. It opens up what we'll call a curiosity gap and it's an appetizer that pulls people in rather than pushing them away.
