Chip Heath is one of my favourite non-fiction authors, and I’m honestly surprised I hadn’t read this book of his yet, given that it came out in 2022. Still, better late than never! Much like Heath’s earlier book Made to Stick talked about how to make ideas “sticky,” Making Numbers Count talks about how to translate abstract numbers / statistics to make them understandable and memorable. As Heath says in the introduction, the principles aren’t difficult, but often they’re not ones we’ve thought about before. Things like using small, whole numbers instead of fractions or decimals (“about 1 out of 5” instead of “3/17” or “17%”); translating big numbers into terms we can more instinctively understand (“a million seconds is about 12 days; a billion seconds is about 32 years”); and drawing on emotions, especially surprise (“if California were a free-standing country, it would be the 5th-largest economy in the world”). Despite this being a pretty short book, it’s full of immediately useable, high-value suggestions, and I plan to implement a lot of them moving forward. Good stuff!