Making Numbers Count

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:

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.