Dan Heath

• The surprising story of how his first book came to be (5:33)
• What he and his brother do to avoid sibling rivalry and work together as co-authors (8:29)
• Dan's approach to identifying whether an idea is good or bad (18:38)
• What strikes fear into his heart as a writer (31:14)
• And lastly, we'll spend a lot of time talking about his new labor of love, a very crazy good turn podcast called "What It's Like to Be." (9:38)

FRANK BLAKE: Dan, welcome to Crazy Good Turns.

This is an enormous privilege to have you on the podcast today.

DAN HEATH: It's great to be with you, Frank. Thanks for having me.

FRANK BLAKE: I have a lot of topics I want to cover with you and a lot on your current podcast, but before we get to that, one of the reasons I'm most excited about having you on the podcast is the impact you made on me personally through your book "Made to Stick," which came out about the same time as I became CEO of Home Depot and made an enormous impact on me.

First, I'd like to recognize that, and second, I'd like to just give you an opportunity at the start to talk a little bit, tell our listeners a little bit about that book.

DAN HEATH: Well, first of all, thanks for saying that. What an extraordinary compliment.

FRANK BLAKE: It's very true.

DAN HEATH: Appreciate that.

That was my first book that I wrote with my brother, Chip. It's a book about "How do you make your ideas stick with other people?"

That is, how do you communicate in a way that lasts, that sparks some action.

I think we've all had the experience in our lives where we feel like we have a really good idea and then it goes nowhere, because we just couldn't get other people on our team.

We couldn't excite them about it the way that we're excited ourselves.

So, the departure point for the book is when you have one of those ideas that needs the support of other people to thrive in the world, how do you make it stick?

In the book, we propose a series of principles that you can use to make your ideas stickier.

So, that's the sales pitch.

FRANK BLAKE: And, and, I will say on the sales pitch, for anybody who wants to pick up a great business book, it's terrific...

Actually, it's a great life book. It's not just a business book.

Your principles are, as you would expect, easy to understand, compelling, and memorable.

But let me just ask one question, which is other than wanting to come out with this book to help me whom you didn't know, what generated the idea for the - why did you write the book?

What prompted you to write the book?

DAN HEATH: Well, it's funny.

My brother had the first leg with this book, so he was an academic for most of his career and he had been studying what he called the marketplace of ideas.

So, the book really started as a description of the way the world works.

So, he had been studying, for instance, urban legends and why are urban legends and conspiracy theories and things like that so sticky.

He'd done an exploration and he found that they really were propelled by emotion and surprise and some other features.

Then slowly, it started to transform from a book about describing the way the world works to "Hey, wait a second, if we really understand carefully why things operate as they do, can't we equip people in the real world to make their ideas stickier?"

So that was the metamorphosis that sparked the idea for the book is to spin these principles around as advice for people like you.

FRANK BLAKE: It was a tremendously successful book, right?

DAN HEATH: It did very well, which surprised both of us, because this was primarily just something we did for fun as brothers to have a project to work on together.

So, we figured this would be a one-time thing. We'd write the book and we'd sell 38 copies mainly to our family.

Then some really weird things started to happen, like Time Magazine wrote about us back when Time Magazine was a thing and the Today Show had us on the first week of release.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow.

DAN HEATH: So we were just shaking our heads through this whole process, but obviously got really lucky and enjoyed the run.

FRANK BLAKE: Well, there's a lot more than luck. But did that then turn you into "Okay, now that we've done this, now we've become a writing duo, we got a new thing to do"?

DAN HEATH: That's pretty much exactly what happened.

I mean, we had so much fun doing this and we got so much satisfaction from hearing people tell us the stories of how they'd used these ideas and actually made a difference in their lives that it got addictive.

We were thinking, "Well, maybe we have a knack for this. Maybe we can go into other domains and do some synthesis and help people understand things like how do you make changes in your life or in your work?"

That turned out to be our second book, but it was definitely not in the master plan that we would write a bunch of books together.

It was just a one-off that opened the door for us.

FRANK BLAKE: I'm just curious, on a personal level, how did it work writing with your brother? How do you split up the duties?

DAN HEATH: It's funny how often we get that question.

It's like people just cannot fathom the idea of writing a book with their siblings.

FRANK BLAKE: Well, it's either going to be really fun or really tense or maybe elements of both.

DAN HEATH: Maybe a little bit of both. It was mostly fun.

We don't have a dramatic relationship like some brothers do.

I think the saving grace for us was that we're 10 years apart.

So, growing up, we certainly never had any sibling rivalry, because it would've been pointless for him as an 18-year-old to play basketball with his 8-year-old brother or something.

So, I think that helped. Also, what we enjoyed doing was very different.

So, he was more the researcher between the two of us, and I was more the writer.

So, that was just a natural complementary division of skills.

So, I think that helped us from having the usual sibling battles.

FRANK BLAKE: Well, they're great books and I recommend them highly to our listeners.

Now, we turn to something else that I think is really exciting that you're doing.

You recently launched a podcast called "What It's Like To Be..."

If you'd give what you're trying to do with that podcast, why you decided to launch it, give some of the background there.

DAN HEATH: Yes. So, What It's Like To Be is a podcast about what it's like to walk in the shoes of people from different professions.

So, in every episode, we profile one profession, a couple of examples, a couples therapist, a stadium beer vendor, a criminal defense attorney, and a piano teacher.

We just ask them all the nosy questions that are probably in the back of your mind that you may have never had the chance to ask.

What are the highs? What are the lows? What annoys you about your job? What gives you satisfaction?

It has just been absolutely fascinating. It's probably the most fun I've had with anything professional in the last year.

So, it has been a pure labor of love to date.

FRANK BLAKE: I have to say, having listened to them, your episodes, they're great.

First, you keep it compressed. So, it's a give or take a half hour.

As you say, you're asking questions that, I mean, these are great questions to be able to go in with someone.

I'd never really thought about beer vending, the vendors in baseball games with beer.

I didn't realize that that was a job. I thought that was a part-time gig that people did.

DAN HEATH: I thought the same thing.

In fact, that was our first episode and it's still one of my favorites just because I think it shows how many layers are beneath the surface.

So, when I set up the interview, I was thinking, "This will be fun. It'll be fun to hear about some of the games he's witnessed over the years and maybe how you deal with unruly drunk patrons or that thing."

Then it turned out to be this really deep conversation about community.

What I mean is I had never realized that if you're a stadium beer vendor with a stadium like he worked a Baltimore Orioles game for literally decades and he had the same area of the stadium to serve.

So, I mean, he basically has his own neighborhood there, where there are dozens and dozens and dozens of people who know him by name and they ask about each other's kids.

They might have a relationship for 15 years that was built on the back of beer transactions.

It just became this beautiful unlocking of the meaning that can often be below the surface of what looks like a very transactional job.

FRANK BLAKE: I have to say, the last thing I expected on the podcast talking about a beer vendor was an emotional connection to the story, but it's actually quite an emotional story.

DAN HEATH: It was an emotional story.

He was just in a mood where I think he was reflecting on his life.

Toward the end of the interview, if those listening go and check it out later, I asked a question, "Do you think you'll ever vend again?" Because he's recently retired.

I think it just struck a chord with him and he got really reflective.

He just said this beautiful thing about, "Oh, I would love to do that. I would love to go back to spring training in Florida and I would just love to see that ballpark one more time."

We were both in tears by the end of it.

Like you said, it was a beautiful thing to come in thinking it was one thing and to realize it was so much more.

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah, I mean, what I love about the show and what makes it fit I think very much in the Crazy Good Turns universe is that you approach all of your guests with such both curiosity and kindness.

I mean there's no negative judgment on what profession they've chosen.

You're not trying to dig in for some weird quirk in their lives. It's just a kind of curiosity.

DAN HEATH: Thank you for saying that because that is our intention.

It's funny, that basic idea seems somehow counter to trends. I remember when I was looking for producers for the show, a number of the people that I interviewed, they were very talented people.

It was like they were looking for the edge. You know what I mean?

It was like-

FRANK BLAKE: Who dies in this episode?

DAN HEATH: It's like if you look at the podcast charts, the top podcasts are basically true crime, celebrities interviewing other celebrities, celebrities interviewing other celebrities about true crime.

And so people kept looking for, like…

A welder is an episode that I had when I was interviewing producers and they were like, "Well, I feel like we need to get into the macroeconomic environment and how the society is tilting against the wages of the working class and blah, blah, blah."

I was like, "I don't have anything to say about that."

It's not that I think that's unimportant.

I just think that there's a massive media infrastructure that cares about that and would do a far better job than me of covering it.

What I care about is actually the much more simple stuff of "What does a welder do and what would it be like to walk in the shoes of a welder for a day?"

"What kinds of injuries do you have to be aware of and what makes an awesome day as a welder?

When do you leave going, 'Man, that was the best day I've had in months'?"

It's that stuff that I think doesn't really have a home in the media environment. I find it just endlessly fascinating.

FRANK BLAKE: It is both fascinating, when I think about "What are the advantages of the technology that we have now?", one of the advantages of something like a podcast is that you can see a really well-thought-out interview with someone and leave with the notion of "Oh, okay, I get what it might be like."

Interestingly, just as another check on how great your podcast is, my daughter writes mystery novels.

DAN HEATH: Oh, wow.

FRANK BLAKE: So you have one on what it's like to be a mystery writer.

You have this question that you ask all your guests of "What's a phrase that's unique to your profession?"

I asked her, and she had exactly the same phrase that-

DAN HEATH: Oh, really?

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah, pantser. She said-

DAN HEATH: Pantser. Really?

FRANK BLAKE: I said, "Oh, wow, that's exactly what's on this podcast."

Then she listened to the podcast and loved it, which is a great test if you can have someone who's in that profession go, "Oh, yeah, that captures what it's like."

DAN HEATH: That's amazing. I actually wasn't sure about that.

I wasn't sure if people from the same profession would enjoy it or if it would just be all the basics to them.

That's great.

FRANK BLAKE: It was right on spot, right on target.

As I said, I think what we have available to us now are ways of learning about people and satisfying some basic curiosity.

That was never the case before.

I mean, if you said you'd have a hard time unless fate just threw you together with a beer vendor about learning what it would be like to sell beer.

DAN HEATH: So true.

FRANK BLAKE: Really well done.

DAN HEATH: Yeah. So, two thoughts on that.

One is we should tell your listeners what a pantser is, which is-

FRANK BLAKE: Yes, please.

DAN HEATH: So, apparently, there are two schools that thought about writing mysteries.

You can be a pantser, which means you fly by the seat of your pants.

Meaning you just write a scene and then it unlocks some door in your mind.

You write the next scene and its stream of consciousness, cumulative, spontaneous.

Then by contrast, you can be a planner or plotter, I forget which one.

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah, plotter.

DAN HEATH: But that speaks for itself where you outline in advance and you know the big picture.

Yeah, I take your point about it. I mean technology has just enabled shows like ours.

I mean, it is not that long ago that would've been totally impossible for us to do what we're doing right now.

We would've had to get through so many gatekeepers.

It's not like the gatekeepers were trying to keep people like us down. It's just that when you deal with a public radio station that has a finite number of hours in the day or if you deal with a cable station that has to slot one program against another, it's just like there's so many people jockeying for the same slots.

To pitch a show about people who do good things for others or in my case, to pitch a show about, "Hey, what does a welder do all day?", I mean, unthinkable.

There's no way that beats out a sitcom or even the local access programming.

FRANK BLAKE: So how did the idea occur to you?

What prompted you, yeah, this would be interesting and fun to do?

DAN HEATH: It was a slow burn for me.

One thing I've learned about myself over the years is I consider myself a creative person.

I have lots and lots of ideas, and most of them are terrible if I'm being honest.

Most of them are terrible.

The hard thing is at the moment, it's really hard to distinguish a terrible idea from a good idea.

So, one of the tests that I've learned to use is to just live with ideas for a while, because thankfully, a lot of the terrible ones just degrade as time goes by.

I realize a few weeks or months later, oh, that was stupid.

This one just lingered for a couple of years. In retrospect, I think one of the foundational experiences was very simple.

I had a plumber come out to my house. I had a problem with the toilet.

I just remember having all these questions pop to mind. I am an ignoramus.

I mean, as somebody who ran the Home Depot, I suspect you're in a different camp, but I couldn't tell you how a toilet worked if my life depended on it.

So, I was wondering, "Does the plumber look down on laptop people like me, or am I the best customer, just a total ignoramus because it's more profitable?"

Then I started thinking, "What was the grossest job this guy had ever done? Was there ever a Stranger Things worthy moment that was just beyond comprehension?

"What makes a good job for a plumber and what's his favorite tool to use?" and on and on.

Of course, I didn't ask any of those, because I'm a little bit of an introvert, but I think what was brewing in the back of my mind is I just have an abnormal level of nosiness about what people do, the specifics of what they do, not just like I don't want to know your job title or whatever.

I want to know "What do you do all day? What's fun about it? What's weird about it?"

So I think what came out of that was just the knowledge that I could create my own little platform where I would have an excuse to be as nosy as I wanted to be.

FRANK BLAKE: Is there a dream interview for you, a profession that boy, you'd just love to get this?

DAN HEATH: Oh, there's so many.

I mean, I wish you could see our current wish list for professions.

We're always scouting months in advance. It runs the gamut.

I mean, my dream is that the 200th episode, we're on episode 10 now just for context, but episode 200 will be president of the United States and to get into the nitty-gritty of what that's like, the day-to-day, not the big foreign policy wins or whatever, but on the other end of the spectrum, I mean some of the things we're looking for now are truck driver, call center employee, home health aide.

This is not dirty jobs. It is not a show about especially lurid or weird or obscure jobs.

It's just about the everyday glory and dignity of normal jobs.

So, I have to say I'm like 90% as excited to talk to a truck driver as I am to the president of the United States.

I suspect that a truck driver might be easier to find.

FRANK BLAKE: What I have always been interested in are the people who do jobs that are boring in the moment, but that require your total attention.

So, think about Secret Service or jobs that just how do you keep from your mind just wandering off and not being always present.

DAN HEATH: Or think about the TSA, I mean saying the same deal.

How do you possibly on your thousandth scan of the day, how do you stay alert?

FRANK BLAKE: Exactly.

DAN HEATH: It's funny, bodyguard is one of the ones on our slate right now, which is not exactly Secret Service, but it shares that quality of focused attention.

So, if any of you listening have somewhere in your family tree a bodyguard, you know who to call.

FRANK BLAKE: Are there some threads that you are starting to see connecting through your discussions?

DAN HEATH: I think it's probably a little too early to have threads, but I'm hoping by episode 50, there will be some.

I think what's more interesting is that in every episode, something bubbles out that I'd never really thought of before.

Over this past holiday season, we interviewed a professional Santa Claus.

I won't recount the whole interview, but one thing that just came to mind was the difference between a professional and amateur.

Because probably a lot of people listening have either put on a Santa suit themselves or had a family member that did it.

That's fine. I mean, look, that was a great time.

When you're a professional Santa Claus, if you think about what really the difference is, I argued that it boiled down to two things.

One is this guy, Larry got fantastically better at handling exceptions.

So, the 1 kid in 50 who maybe has experienced a trauma or who has some special needs or who is unusually shy, how do you handle those things? Well, that's the work of an expert.

Then also Larry had gotten really good at elevating the experience for everyone.

So, one thing I didn't know about professional Santas because I'm a little out of date is they get advanced dossiers on the kids that come visit them, because it's all done by appointments now.

I shouldn't say all. It's frequently done by appointments.

So, the parents, you know how parents are these days, they'll send 2,000 words in advance about their kids.

So, when the kid walks in to see Santa, Santa knows their name without asking, because it was in the dossier and Santa knows what they like to do.

This was something that really cracked me up.

A lot of times parents will try to smuggle in discipline messages.

Can you work some of your Santa magic and get Johnny to listen to his parents better or stop making such a mess or whatever?

So the professional Santas have learned how to take a B+ experience with somebody like me wearing a red suit and elevate it to higher and higher levels.

FRANK BLAKE: That's very cool. That is very cool.

What, um, I'm going to turn your questions, because you asked these questions in your podcast.

So, I'm going to turn-

DAN HEATH: Oh, nice.

FRANK BLAKE: ... the questions on you.

What is the phrase or word that only an insider as a business writer or a podcaster would know?

DAN HEATH: Ooh, that's a good one. Yeah, let me think about that.

I'll think about the business book side, because I don't consider myself a very experienced podcaster.

With business books, what is the word or phrase that only someone from our profession would know?

I feel like there are just certain foundational business concepts that pretty much every business book writer would know, but maybe a lay businessperson or reader wouldn't.

You just absorb things like the flywheel from Jim Collins or Porter's Five Forces or the Strategy Canvas from Blue Ocean Strategy.

There's this greatest hits carousel in our brains of great business concepts that were also brilliantly explained.

It's like the duo that we all aspire to.

FRANK BLAKE: Then is there something that strikes fear when you hear as a business writer?

DAN HEATH: Yes, and I've experienced it.

That is oh, a book just came out with that title.

FRANK BLAKE: Oh, no.

DAN HEATH: Yeah, so we talked earlier about "Made to Stick."

The working title was "What Sticks."

I mean, that was what it was. That was how we knew the project. That was how we sold it.

I think we already had some covers even.

Then about maybe four or five months before our book was due to be published, another book called "What Sticks" came out.

We were like, "Oh, my gosh. Our moment in the limelight has just been totally squashed."

So we had to think of a new title. We had to scurry to read the book and see if it overlapped.

And fortunately, it surprisingly didn't overlap that much.

It was more of an advertising specific focus, but that was needless to say, a moment of terror.

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah. Well, yeah.

I have to admit, I've never heard of "What Sticks."

So, they didn't do as good a job marketing their book, I guess.

DAN HEATH: Well, I don't wish them ill, but I think the good news was we eventually landed on a better title by accident, because I think "Made to Stick" is just a little bit more intentional, which probably serves the purpose.

FRANK BLAKE: So we have our own rapid-fire questions here.

The first one is, who in your life has done a crazy good turn for you?

DAN HEATH: Well, I've talked several times about my brother and co-author and that's one of the first that comes to mind is back in the old days, when I was just out of college, I was a liberal arts grad.

Then in the grand tradition of liberal arts grads who don't know what they want to do with their lives, I had applied to law school and been accepted to law school and was fully intending to go the fall after I graduated.

My brother, I think, knew me well enough to know this was just a catastrophically bad decision.

So, he put his money on the line.

He said, "Hey, defer law school for a year and come up." He was teaching at University of Chicago at that time.

He said, "I will fund you an apartment for a year. You can get a job to pay for your living expenses, whatever, but I'll fund the apartment out of pocket and we'll work on some projects together."

We had a couple of irons in the fire, even back then.

This was a decade before we were going to write a book, but we played around.

This was the early days of the internet. We played around on Internet Magazine.

We worked on a very early crude form of the recommendation engines like you have on Amazon or Netflix or whatever.

So, we were definitely on point with the goal.

I think we were hopelessly lacking in expertise in management sophistication, but anyway, we spent that year working together.

In the course of that year, I came to realize I really don't want to go to law school.

So, in my last book, Upstream, I dedicated the book to Chip for keeping me out of law school, which is the greatest gift he could have given me.

FRANK BLAKE: That's great. That's great.

Who's someone that not enough people know about in your opinion?

So you've got an audience here. Who should they know about that they're unlikely to know about?

DAN HEATH: I'm going to go in an organizational direction and say there's an entity called GiveWell that I've followed for years and really admire and has directly influenced my decisions.

So, GiveWell is like a consumer reports for charity.

So, when you're thinking about where to give your charitable donations, they do just insanely exhaustive research to figure out if you're not dead set on giving your money to your college or to a local charity or something, if you just want your money to do as much good for the world as possible, how do you do that?

So they'll do these exhaustive reports on comparing the cost-effectiveness of malaria nets in Africa versus some vitamin fortification program.

Every year they'll release a set of recommendations to all of us to guide our giving.

I find that even though they've been around probably 15 years now, 10 years, they're surprisingly under the radar.

So, if you want your charitable dollars to go farther, check it out, givewell.org.

FRANK BLAKE: That's great. That's great.

Who has inspired you? Where do you draw inspiration from?

DAN HEATH: Oh, so many people. Gosh, where do you even start?

I'll pick somebody that's close to the business book world since I've told some of the origin story of "Made to Stick."

One of the foundational influences on that book was a gentleman named Edward Tufte, who is a graphic designer, an information design specialist.

He wrote a book called The Visual Display of Quantitative Information that's absolutely brilliant and just beautiful to look at. It's like an art book and aesthetics.

What is so distinctive about his work and what really inspired us was he has a set of principles to guide how you can share information with people in a way that they can get, that has nuance, that helps reveal the reality underneath the noise.

He will explain his thinking and his principles, but he'll also show you.

So, he'll show you, this was a graph that appeared in USA Today and here's why it's so horrible and here's how you could do it better.

It's like before and after and it's just boom, you get it.

FRANK BLAKE: That's brilliant.

DAN HEATH: I mean, it is so, so good.

I remember Chip and I having these conversations, where it was like, "We want to write an Edward Tufte book about sticky communication.

"We don't want to just blah, blah, blah, blah. We want to show you, okay, here's an idea. Here's one way of communicating it that's not sticky, and here's how you punch it up to make it stickier."

So right out of Tufte's book, we created this thing called clinics in our books where we take a before and after version of an idea to show off here's how you can put these ideas into practice.

So, that's one of many, many, many inspirations.

FRANK BLAKE: Oh, that's terrific, because I also believe, I mean that there's so much on the visual side that again, in most businesses, people don't understand it and don't do it.

That's brilliant.

DAN HEATH: I mean, he is a true genius.

This is a guy whose obsessiveness about publishing was so high that he eventually decided he couldn't get what he wanted through traditional publishers.

So, he just created his own publishing company just to do his own books to his exacting standard, which I also admire, that control-freakery.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow. All right. He's still writing?

DAN HEATH: Still writing, yeah.

In fact, I think he's got an online course now, a pandemic-era online course that was quite good.

FRANK BLAKE: All right. All right, terrific. Well, that's great.

I've never heard of him and that sounds fascinating.

So, how can our listeners find out more about you, keep in touch, and follow your work?

What's the best way to keep in touch with you?

DAN HEATH: So two ways. If you're intrigued by the idea behind What It's Like to Be, wherever you're getting this podcast, just go search for that.

You can search for my name, Dan Heath, or What It's Like to Be.

I have a website at danheath.com and you can find out about my books. Of course, there's a link to the podcast there as well.

FRANK BLAKE: Well, that's terrific. I've so enjoyed this.

Again, it's a great podcast. I highly recommend it to all of our listeners and you're a great writer.

I think in truth, your concepts and books go well beyond the business world and they're useful well beyond the business world and our personal lives as well.

So, thank you.

DAN HEATH: Thank you so much, Frank. Thanks for the show and thanks for what you do.