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Making Numbers Count

The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers

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Making Numbers Count

Written by: Chip Heath, Karla Starr
Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
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About this listen

A clear, practical, first-of-its-kind guide to communicating and understanding numbers and data - from best-selling business author Chip Heath.

How much bigger is a billion than a million?

Well, a million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is...32 years.

Understanding numbers is essential - but humans aren’t built to understand them. Until very recently, most languages had no words for numbers greater than five - anything from six to infinity was known as “lots”. While the numbers in our world have gotten increasingly complex, our brains are stuck in the past. How can we translate millions and billions and milliseconds and nanometers into things we can comprehend and use?

Author Chip Heath has excelled at teaching others about making ideas stick, and here, in Making Numbers Count, he outlines specific principles that reveal how to translate a number into our brain’s language. This book is filled with examples of extreme number makeovers, vivid before-and-after examples that take a dry number and present it in a way that people click in and say, “Wow, now I get it!”

You will learn principles such as:

  • Simple perspective cues: Researchers at Microsoft found that adding one simple comparison sentence doubled how accurately users estimated statistics like population and area of countries.
  • Vividness: Get perspective on the size of a nucleus by imagining a bee in a cathedral, or a pea in a racetrack, which are easier to envision than “1/100,000th of the size of an atom.”
  • Convert to a process: Capitalize on our intuitive sense of time (five gigabytes of music storage turns into “two months of commutes, without repeating a song”).
  • Emotional measuring sticks: Frame the number in a way that people already care about (“that medical protocol would save twice as many women as curing breast cancer”).

Whether you’re interested in global problems like climate change, running a tech firm or a farm, or just explaining how many Cokes you’d have to drink if you burned calories like a hummingbird, this book will help math-lovers and math-haters alike translate the numbers that animate our world - allowing us to bring more data, more naturally, into decisions in our schools, our workplaces, and our society.

©2022 Chip Heath. All rights reserved. (P)2022 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
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excellent

As a number person I now have a better understanding of how to...be understood.

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Great book, Narration and Production

I thought this was an excellent book, through and through. Very clear, concise and concrete whether you love numbers or not.

Excellent audiovook as well- Narrator is great and fits tone of the book.

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Great content, wrong narrator

Nice voice but too sleepy for the content, which was great. Too passive in a book about making the quiet meaningful.

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Great book, but get a physical copy instead

This book is full of useful tips and insights, but the audiobook is not how you’re going to get the most out of it. If you’re a communications person who is not highly advanced with working with numbers, you will find this book hard to digest and takeaway anything memorable from. Numbers are abstract and the way you process them heavily relies on your visual system to make them meaningful. Just got my copy of the physical book after struggling to takeaway anything from the first half of the audiobook, I highly recommend it! The physical copy is also beautifully designed and presents the many comparisons of different number messaging as side by side tables so you can easily contrast them and experience the difference for yourself rather than listening in linear sequence.

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