Summary: What is a Gospel Neighboring Book Mash-Up? It’s obviously the Gospelicious Monster Truck Rally of book reviews. We take sacred and secular books and plunder them for Gospel Neighboring wisdom and fling said wisdom out into the interwebs for our fellow Gospel Neighbors to apply to their efforts at bringing the truth, goodness, and beauty of Jesus to their city, one neighborhood at a time. Mashed-Up in this Episode: Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die About the Authors Chip Heath is a Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. His research examines why certain ideas - ranging from urban legends to folk medical cures, from Chicken Soup for the Soul stories to business strategy myths - survive and prosper in the social marketplace of ideas. His research has appeared in a variety of academic journals, and popular accounts of his research have appeared in Scientific American, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, BusinessWeek, Psychology Today, and Vanity Fair. He lives in Los Gatos, California. Dan Heath is a consultant at Duke Corporate Education, one of the world's top providers of executive education. Prior to joining Duke, he was a researcher at Harvard Business School, writing 10 cases on entrepreneurship that are used in business school programmes. Heath is also the co-founder of Thinkwell, a publishing company dedicated to creating high-quality, multimedia university textbooks. Dan has an MBA from Harvard Business School. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. Big Ideas How do we nurture and craft and shape our ideas so that they actually stick around when they’re out there in the world? The arch enemy of an idea that’s made to stick is “The Curse of Knowledge“ where "You know things that others don’t know and you can’t remember what it’s like to not know these things.” This keeps ideas weak, pathetic, merely cerebral---they fall short of their intended target, which is to actually change the world. Plunder The ways to stickify an idea...SUCCESS Simplicity - Cut down multiplicity of options, which only lead to analysis paralysis. Unexpectedness - "Break people's guessing machines" by generating a “huh?” from them that provokes investigation or at least keeps their attention until they find a satisfying “a ha!” Concreteness - Imagine human faces and vivd images over abstractions. Experts have the luxury of abstractions, but novices crave concreteness! Credibility - Since you’re not JFK or Bono, ideas need to carry their own credentials and provoke testing. Emotions - Build a new bridge between something they don’t care about and something they already care deeply about. Stories - Place our hearers inside the story to help them imagine living there permanently. Stories almost single-handedly defeat the villain--- the curse of knowledge. “There is a curious disconnect between the amount of time we invest in training people how to arrive at the Answer and the amount of time we invest in training them how to TELL OTHERS.” Liberating Good News We need to move from making a point to showing a person, inviting people into a story, living out our script in that story in concrete, surprising, ways. The Big Challenge How do you know when you’ve practiced effective gospel neighboring? When your neighbors --- especially your non-Christian neighbors --- can and DO crystalize something about the gospel more clearly, succinctly, concretely, and passionately than maybe even you could.
