stickiness

To me stickiness is basically the definition in the article. It's the aptitude at which certain things are remembered based on how well the ideas are created. The article starts off with the organ thief story, and to be honest I didn't catch on until it was established that it was an urban legend. Right from the beginning the Heaths made the comparison between the urban legend story and a random excerpt from a paper by a non-profit organization. The argument was that if you took a minute to read both, you could remember the overall gist of the urban legend, but next to nothing on the excerpt from the boring paper. The urban legend just leaves you with a sense of "interesting" while the other does not; It has that "stickiness." Then there was the example about the elementary school teacher who is just trying to get her kids to understand the curriculum. "She knows how to speak effectively — she's a virtuoso of posture and diction and eye contact." This is interesting because it relates back to the article about the dog whisperer. You must make an impact or create a strong presence if you want people to listen to what you're saying or doing.

To create "stickiness" you can't just say it, you must prove it and show it. "Both made use of vivid, concrete images that cling easily to memory." Minds are able to cling to these "images" much more than a statistic or someone preaching that something is wrong or right. We must be concise and to the point. "The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it."