Top 160 Chip Heath Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The Curse of Knowledge: when we are given knowledge, it is impossible to imagine what it’s like to LACK that knowledge.”

— Chip Heath

2. “What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.”

— Chip Heath

3. “What’s working, and how can we do more of it?”

— Chip Heath

4. “Fundamental Attribution Error.” The error lies in our inclination to attribute people’s behavior to the way they are rather than to the situation they are in.”

— Chip Heath

5. “Just look for a strong beginning and a strong ending and get moving.”

— Chip Heath

6. “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

— Chip Heath

7. “The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern.”

— Chip Heath

8. “You can be the architect of moments that matter.”

— Chip Heath

9. “Grit is not synonymous with hard work. It involves a certain single-mindedness. An ungritty prison inmate will mount a daring new escape attempt every month, but a gritty prison inmate will tunnel his way out one spoonful of concrete at a time. Grit.”

— Chip Heath

10. “Big changes can start with very small steps. Small changes tend to snowball. But this is not the same as saying that change is easy.”

— Chip Heath

11. “Beware the soul-sucking force of reasonableness.”

— Chip Heath

12. “Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it.”

— Chip Heath

13. “The Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it’s preceded by the huh experience.”

— Chip Heath

14. “As Mark Twain said, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.”

— Chip Heath

15. “Beware the soul-sucking force of “reasonableness.” Otherwise you risk deflating your peaks. Speed bumps are reasonable. Mount Everest is not reasonable.”

— Chip Heath

16. “Our lives are measured in moments, and defining moments are the ones that endure in our memories.”

— Chip Heath

17. “Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And that’s the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.”

— Chip Heath

18. “The first problem of communication is getting people’s attention.”

— Chip Heath

19. “Big problems are rarely solved with commensurately big solutions.”

— Chip Heath

20. “Mother Teresa once said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” In.”

— Chip Heath

21. “Success emerges from the quality of the decisions we make and the quantity of luck we receive. We can’t control luck. But we can control the way we make choices.”

— Chip Heath

22. “INSIGHT: Defining moments rewire our understanding of ourselves or the world. In a few seconds or minutes, we realize something that might influence our lives for decades: Now is the time for me to start this business.”

— Chip Heath

23. “You’ve got a good idea, how do you make it stick?”

— Chip Heath

24. “Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something. But it’s the next best thing. And the right kind of a story is a simulation.”

— Chip Heath

25. “What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.”

— Chip Heath

26. “In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought.”

— Chip Heath

27. “Relationships don’t deepen naturally. In the absence of action, they will stall.”

— Chip Heath

28. “Lots of us have expertise in particular areas. Becoming an expert in something means that we become more and more fascinated by nuance and complexity. That’s when the Curse of Knowledge kicks in, and we start to forget what it’s like not to know what we know.”

— Chip Heath

29. “A million seconds is 12 days. A billion is 1,000 times greater than 1,000,000. A billion seconds is 32 years.”

— Chip Heath

30. “Create a need for closure.”

— Chip Heath

31. “In life, we can work so hard to get the kinks out that we forget to put the peaks in.”

— Chip Heath

32. “Transitions should be marked, milestones commemorated, and pits filled. That’s the essence of thinking in moments.”

— Chip Heath

33. “An old advertising maxim says you’ve got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children’s pictures.”

— Chip Heath

34. “Generative metaphors and proverbs both derive their power from a clever substitution: They substitute something easy to think about for something difficult.”

— Chip Heath

35. “When people know the desired destination, they’re free to improvise, as needed, in arriving there.”

— Chip Heath

36. “British Medical Journal asked its readers to vote on the most important medical milestone that had occurred since 1840, when the BMJ was first published. Third place went to anesthesia, second place to antibiotics. The winner was one you might not have expected: the “sanitary revolution,” encompassing sewage disposal and methods for securing clean water. Much of the world, though, is still waiting for that revolution to come.”

— Chip Heath

37. “Failing is often the best way to learn, and because of that, early failure is a kind of necessary investment.”

— Chip Heath

38. “Ethically challenged people with lots of analytical smarts can, with enough contortions, make almost any case from a given set of statistics.”

— Chip Heath

39. “For individuals’ behavior to change, you’ve got to influence not only their environment but their hearts and minds.”

— Chip Heath

40. “The old pattern is powerful, so make sure to script the critical moves, because ambiguity is the enemy.”

— Chip Heath

41. “Roy Baumeister draws an analogy to driving – in our cars, we may spend 95% of our time going straight, but it’s the turns that determine where we end up.”

— Chip Heath

42. “Big-picture, hands-off leadership isn’t likely to work in a change situation, because the hardest part of change – the paralyzing part – is precisely in the details.”

— Chip Heath

43. “Finding bright spots, then, solves many different problems at once. That’s no surprise; successful change efforts involve connecting all three parts of the framework: Rider, Elephant, and Path.”

— Chip Heath

44. “Knowledge does not change behavior,” he said. “We have all encountered crazy shrinks and obese doctors and divorced marriage counselors.” He knew that telling the mothers about nutrition wouldn’t change their behavior. They’d have to practice it.”

— Chip Heath

45. “A good change leader never thinks, “Why are these people acting so badly? They must be bad people.” A change leader thinks, “How can I set up a situation that brings out the good in these people?”

— Chip Heath

46. “When you say three things, you say nothing.”

— Chip Heath

47. “Challenge plot, the Connection plot, and the Creativity plot.”

— Chip Heath

48. “When you’re at the beginning, don’t obsess about the middle, because the middle is going to look different once you get there.”

— Chip Heath

49. “One way to motivate action, then, is to make people feel as though they’re already closer to the finish line than they might have thought.”

— Chip Heath

50. “One of IDEO’s designers even sketched out a “project mood chart” that predicts how people will feel at different phases of a project. It’s a U-shaped curve with a peak of positive emotion, labeled “hope,” at the beginning, and a second peak of positive emotion, labeled “confidence,” at the end. In between the two peaks is a negative emotional valley labeled “insight.”

— Chip Heath