What is it that makes many urban legends persist for years or even decades? Why don’t important, true ideas have the same longevity? Are there common elements to what Malcolm Gladwell termed “sticky ideas” that anyone can tap into? Entrepreneur brothers Chip and Dan Heath believe that there are.

Back in the 1990s, movie theater popcorn was made with coconut oil, which made it light and fluffy, but also full of saturated fat. So what does a small health non-profit have to communicate in order for this important piece of information to have staying power? To simply report that a medium-sized popcorn at the movie theater contains 37 grams of saturated fat would be ineffective because most people don’t know that you only need half of that amount each day. Even to say that it’s twice the daily amount doesn’t arrest people in the same way. What the Center for Science in the Public Interest did with their one shot at making a splash in the media was create messaging that was simple, unexpected, concrete, and credible: There is more fat in a medium-sized popcorn at the movies than a bacon and eggs breakfast, Big Mac and fries lunch, and steak dinner—combined! This is the kind of messaging that sticks.

There are many urban myths that have a longevity far exceeding that of ideas that are actually true and useful. Chances are you’ve heard that we only use 10 percent of our brain. If that were true, brain injury probably wouldn’t be such a big deal. You’ve probably also heard that the Great Wall of China can be seen from space. If that were true, why wouldn’t other, far bigger structures also be visible from space?

This matters because many falsehoods stick while numerous good, true, and useful ideas do not. The Curse of Knowledge is a major culprit in this. People are so familiar with a field, its culture, and its jargon, that their knowledge prevents them from connecting with the average person. We see it in politics with statesmen and presidents, in the business world with CEOs, in the classroom with educators, and in the home with parents. They can’t “unknow” all they’ve learned, so they have a hard time putting themselves in the shoes of the lesser learned—be they constituents, customers, students, or children.

There are two ways to deal with the Curse of Knowledge: stop learning things or learn how to package your ideas in a way that’s unforgettable. The keys to sticky ideas are contained in the acronym SUCCESs (with one “s”): simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotion, and story.

Simple ideas are better than cluttered ones. We can define simplicity as compact and core. Experts love nuance and complexity, but to avoid the Curse of Knowledge and communicate ideas that stick, simple trumps. Bill Clinton’s advisor in the 1992 presidential election would tell Clinton that saying three things was like saying nothing at all. He advised Clinton to stick to one point. A political campaign can be a hotbed for indecision, but by finding the core (revitalize the economy) and communicating it simply (“It’s the economy, stupid”)—campaigners kept the often-pedantic Clinton from muddling the message.

News reporters use an inverted pyramid approach to building their stories. The first sentence (the lead) should communicate the most pertinent facts. If the news read like a murder mystery, that’d be infuriating for the reader and inconvenient for the writers and editors. They’d have to do thorough read-throughs of articles before shortening them if a more critical story came in last minute. And the reader would have to read the whole article to find out who won the election. The reader should know by the end of the first sentence—not by the end of the article. When the vital idea sinks to the bottom of your story, whether you’re a reporter or a teacher or a businessman, you’re burying the lead.

How do you get people’s attention? How do you keep their attention? Central to these two questions are the emotions of surprise and interest. Surprise is the attention-getting side of the equation. Surprise happens when you break your audience’s guessing machine by telling a story or identifying a fact that they were unable to predict. Your idea is stickier if you break and then repair their guessing machine. Avoid hokey surprises. The best surprises are the ones that directly connect to the core of your message.

It’s one thing to get the audience’s attention. It’s quite another thing to keep it.

Interest is the attention-keeping side of the equation. This is especially important (and challenging) when the message to be conveyed is complex. How do you get people to stick with you, and for your idea to stick with them?

The best way to retain interest is the introduction of a mystery that is begging to be solved. Curiosity comes when there is a gap in our understanding, and the gap causes a kind of pain—an itch only knowledge can assuage. Even better than an Aha! moment is an experience of Huh? followed by an Aha!

One social psychologist, Robert Cialdini, saw the power of mystery first-hand when he picked up a 20-page journal article about the composition of Saturn’s rings. It sounds like a snoozer, but he was struck by the delivery of the findings. It read like a mystery, and, much to Cialdini’s surprise, it was a scintillating page-turner. He wanted to know what happened next, how three top universities in the world came to different conclusions and how the matter was resolved. The answer to the riddle was dust: the rings of Saturn are dust encased in ice. Dust and planets had little to do with his interest or his life experience and yet he couldn’t put the article down.

Cialdini began to employ a similar approach to his classes, beginning each class with a mystery which would only be solved at the very end. While most students typically pack up their bags five minutes before the end of class, his students stayed glued to their seats, awaiting the resolution of the mysteries Cialdini introduced. They would wait patiently, sometimes even after the bell had rung.

Making ideas concrete is probably the most powerful aspect of idea SUCCESs, and the easiest to implement. Anyone can tell the difference between an inaccessible abstraction and a tangible, easy-to-imagine idea.

It’s often easiest to make ideas concrete when they are in response to the particular needs of clients, customers, readers, and so on. General Mills is one of the largest food corporations on earth. They own Pillsbury, Chex, Yoplait, Betty Crocker, and Cheerios—among many others. In 2005, General Mills subsidiary, Hamburger Helper, was losing money hand over fist. They hired a young woman named Melissa Studzinski to stop the bleeding and improve profit.

After poring over reams of data for months, Studzinski and her team decided to try a different approach than data analysis. They met with and observed the lives of customers willing to have corporate representatives in their homes. The most faithful consumers of Hamburger Helper products were mothers. The team visited dozens of homes. Studzinski later reported that, although she knew customer demographics backwards and forwards, there was nothing like have a conversation with a young single mom with a toddler on her hip preparing dinner for her family.

What Studzinski learned through spending time with actual customers was that both moms preparing Hamburger Helper and kids devouring it put a premium on predictability. Mothers wanted a quick, easy meal, one they knew their kids would readily accept. The kids didn’t care about the 11 different shapes. They did care about getting the same flavors they were used to. The insights gained from on-the-ground interviews led to Studzinski’s insistence that Hamburger Helper streamline their products. Over 30 flavors made their line less—not more—desirable. Moms wanted to locate readily the flavors their kids liked and move on, rather than spending extra minutes scanning the grocery aisle. This removed an extraneous burden and cost on the manufacturing side, and made moms and kids happier on the customer side. That year, Hamburger Helper sales were up 11 percent.

For an idea to stick, it must be credible. There are a few different ways to make your idea more believable. Some people add statistics, which are helpful when they are given within a context and scale that people can understand. 37 grams of saturated fat in a medium popcorn isn’t a sobering statistic until one learns that a person should not consume more than 20 grams’ worth in a day. Remember to use statistics to make up your mind rather than make up your mind and then look for statistics.

Other people use details to powerful effect. When a person offers compelling details, she establishes credibility not just for herself, but for her idea. The details make it concrete, which adds realism and credibility.

Another lesser-known but extremely effective way of making an idea credible is the Sinatra Test. In his classic song, “New York, New York,” Frank Sinatra sings, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” The Sinatra Test uses the same principle. If you have done something remarkable somewhere, people will believe that you can do it anywhere else. If you’ve done art restoration at the Metropolitan or the Louvre, you are a competitor for a contract anywhere else, too. If you’ve taught at Harvard or Oxford, you have a good shot at teaching anywhere else. If you’ve been part of the Secret Service detail for the White House, you probably won’t have a hard time landing any other security jobs.

Statistics and appeal to authority are the most common methods of gaining credibility, but they’re not necessarily the best. Some surprising and captivating details can be far more persuasive than a maelstrom of facts and figures. And if a story passes the Sinatra Test, even the most skeptical can be moved to take your ideas seriously.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta offered the famous remark that, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University decided to put this insight to the test. To find out if people prefer to give to an individual rather than an abstraction like world hunger, research participants were given a survey that, unbeknownst to them, was utterly irrelevant to the purposes of the study. The survey completed, they gave subjects five one-dollar bills as well as a request for a charitable donation, which they could include in an envelope that researchers also furnished. Half the subjects were given a document that listed staggering statistics about world hunger rates and invited the reader to contribute to the cause. The other half of participants were given a paper that had a picture of a girl named Rokia from Mali, Africa, with  information about her age, her struggles, and dreams. Any money contributed would go directly to her family, and support her dietary and educational needs.

The results of the study were revealing: Those given a list of statistics gave an average of $1.14 toward the cause of world hunger whereas those who read about Rokia’s situation gave an average of $2.38—more than twice as much for the micro than the macro view of poverty! It seems Mother Teresa was right.

Further studies revealed that the individual approach was more effective than statistics, but it was also more effective than using a combination of statistics and personal stories of people in poverty. Stats put people into a more analytical frame of mind. People who did math problems before being petitioned for a charitable donation were far less likely to give than people who, prior to the request, were reflecting on the feelings that the word “baby” arouses in them.

The findings that 1) people are far more likely to give to an individual than to an organization and 2) that people put into an analytical frame of mind are far less likely to give than people in an emotional frame of mind demonstrate the power of emotion to make people more suggestible and open. Guiding people from their head to heart is vital to moving them to action. People who stay in their head will stay stuck.

At a psychology conference, the organizer asked researcher and psychologist Gary Klein to condense the conference lectures into key points. Klein’s group attended all the panel discussions, but instead of looking for the main thesis of the speakers’ papers and comments, they wrote down the stories that the speakers told to illustrate their central points. The anecdotes were often humorous or moving. 

The organizer who’d requested the distillation of the conference was thrilled with the outcome: numerous memorable stories in a highly readable format. The speakers themselves, however, were livid. Many found it insulting that the stories had been ripped from their supporting contexts. The researchers’ furor continued even after Klein explained to the speakers that little snatches of wisdom like, “Keep communication lines open” and “Address problems before they start building up” were empty and unmemorable compared to the stories they shared to illustrate those points. The fact that researchers had spent countless hours coming to those conclusions didn’t make the conclusions more interesting or memorable. It’s like the researchers hear a beautiful song in their head after years invested in their work. They can’t, however, make everyone else hear that song—the Curse of Knowledge strikes again!

A common assumption about communicating ideas is that creative and artistic people do it best. The implication is that some people have a natural knack and others don’t. But creating sticky ideas is a skill that can be cultivated. Some of the best evidence of this is that anyone can tell a story. A story naturally involves the SUCCESs elements (simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotion, and story). It beautifully combats the Curse of Knowledge that makes people inaccessible, and it doesn’t even require a whole lot of creativity. It just requires attentiveness to the memorable moments that life generously doles out.

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