Making Numbers Count: the art and Science Of Communicating Numbers

Concise, breezy and pragmatic Wall Street Journal

Remarkably practical techniques for comprehending and communicating the maths that really matters’ Adam Grant

Until very recently, most languages had no words for numbers greater than five – anything from six to infinity was known as lots . Understanding numbers is essential in the modern world, but we simply aren’t built to understand them.

What does 5GB of storage actually mean? (Two months of commutes, without repeating a song.) What’s the size of a nucleus compared to a cell? (Imagine a bee in a cathedral.) How much bigger is a billion than a million? (Well, a million seconds is twelve days. A billion seconds is…thirty-two years.)

Drawing on years of research into making ideas stick, Chip Heath and Karla Starr outline six critical principles that will give anyone the tools to understand and communicate numbers with more transparency and meaning. Offering practical principles to help us imagine numbers at all scales, Making Numbers Count shows us how to transform them into concrete, vivid and meaningful messages so that we can make better decisions every day.