Made to Stick is a book about ideas — ideas that thrive, and how we can communicate these ideas.

I read this for ECE297 — Software Design and Communication.

Key ideas

Principles

Review

There are a few great books that preach self-improvement. Often it’s easy to feel turned off by them, because the ones peddling them are exactly the ones that turn out to be terrible people. You and I know them well — maybe they’re business students, or tech workers that do nothing but wake up and grind.

Made to Stick may be one of them. It’s a book made for self-obsessed people in professions that are self-obsessed. I was assigned this book in an absolutely superstar software design course earlier in the semester, and looking back I think it was probably the most valuable assigned reading in many years of schooling.

Fundamentally the book distils communication into six key principles that are clear, concrete, and easy to follow. The lessons are especially relevant for those in a technical field that need to communicate — probably why the book was assigned for an engineering class.

The lessons may be self-evident for students that write essays frequently, but for others (myself included) the book turns out to be quite valuable.

5/5