• Making Numbers Count

  • The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers
  • By: Chip Heath, Karla Starr
  • Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
  • Length: 4 hrs and 35 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (187 ratings)

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Making Numbers Count  By  cover art

Making Numbers Count

By: Chip Heath, Karla Starr
Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
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Publisher's summary

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.

What listeners say about Making Numbers Count

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Not his best work, choose another title

Not enough research for a book. There are occasional partial nuggets, however the political points of view thinly veiled are not what I prefer in a book that should be educational. I prefer to keep the author’s narrative on the subject matter not on his personal social policy. I am returning it, which is the first time in over 2 years and 20+ titles.

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7 people found this helpful

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Making political comments apparently counts.

Audible must include political bias in all of the listening versions on this platform. Please. Eventually I will quit this venue, unless I am given a warning about possible, statistical, examples that show the cards being dealt.

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3 people found this helpful

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Making Numbers Count Makes It Real

Great practical insights in communicating complex even simple numbers with impact. If 87% of statistics are made up, 9 of 10 facts are fiction.

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2 people found this helpful

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Thought provoking

Really enjoyed this read. Will change the way i convey information

Now pls make a kids version!

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I feel smarter already!

If you’ve ever wanted to understand how to communicate data effectively, this is for you. I learned lots (pun intended)! Get this book to improve your communications skills no matter your field.

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informative, structured and a little too obvious

You know that feeling of reading something that is well structured, well phrased (but very much using North American examples), and helps you consolidate the obvious and intuitive? Well, if you do, this is what this book helps you doing. I did finish with a better grasp and awareness of how to think about and use statistics in a variety of contexts, but also a sensation of superficiality and sometimes even apology of lack of rigor on behalf of message efficacy.

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Easy to understand harder to apply

This is great stuff. As a statistician, I fully appreciate their approach to numbers. It does take some effort to apply, but worth it.

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Concise & clear; concrete examples

book is concise and clear. gives concrete examples of good ways to express complex ideas. very good narration.

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Love the perspective

Numbers are important in life, not just mathematics but meaningful in every way, after this reading guarantee a new perspective.

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Great author, terrible book.

After consuming hundreds of audible titles, this is my first review as I want to save your money and the pain of suffering through this book. That’s how bad this book was to be.

I love Chip and Dan Heath. I took Chip’s class in business school and have read every single one of his books. This is by far his worst and there’s diminishing returns in my opinion writing solo vs with his brother. I share this context to recognize my bias as it’s hard not to hold this literary piece to the standard of his other page turning masterpieces.

Pros: The concept of contextualizing numbers to make them more understandable and have more utility is generally useful.

Cons: The narration is painful to listen to, that’s an indictment of the content more so than the narrator. Key points become belabored with repetitive examples of never ending lists of numbers read aloud. Not a lot of interesting research referenced that you’d expect from the author. Entire book could have been summed up in a LinkedIn post, or single page blog post.

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