Complete Fulfillment

The current book I am reading is Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. I am only about half way through the book but I wanted to make a post based on what I have gleamed so far. The book is interesting but the concepts seem simple but not obvious. Most of the concepts to this point are around how stories are constructed that make people remember stories.

The point that I found very interesting and useful for me was the concrete idea. This is one of the most simple and most overlooked concepts I have read about in a long time. I have just completed the first year of an MBA program that ended with a Finance class. You could tell that the teacher was smart but could not get the ideas across in class. I thought that the class was going to revolt after the first couple of weeks. Most people realized it was not going to change and just accepted it. People struggled and I was fairly frustrated myself. Then he instituted a project that the class had to go and figure out the weighted cost of capital for their own company. This was finally something concrete that was close to home for all of us. All the sudden people started learning something! Because of a concrete idea they could latch onto. I learned more from that project than hours of teaching or problems. As I looked back on most of the classes we took the concepts I remember and will take away are concrete examples that I could relate to. I will give another update when I finish the book.