Bola is running a campaign to get young people in her school to register to vote. She has a full-page flyer with facts, statistics, and a list of seven reasons why civic participation matters. She stands outside the gate and hands them out. Two weeks later, not a single student can remember what the flyer said. Bola's problem is one that Chip and Dan Heath spent years studying: why do some ideas survive in people's minds while others disappear almost immediately? They call ideas that last sticky. A sticky idea is one that is understood, remembered, and has a lasting effect on how people think or behave. To show the difference between sticky and unsticky, the Heaths open their book with two contrasting examples. The first: an urban legend about a man who has a drink bought for him by a stranger in a bar, wakes up in a hotel bathtub full of ice, and discovers a tube has been inserted into his back — one of his kidneys has been stolen. You have probably never personally met someone this happened to, but you have heard the story. And you can retell it almost perfectly right now, without re-reading it. The second: a passage from a nonprofit document that says, in part: a factor constraining the flow of resources to community initiatives is that funders must often resort to targeting or categorical requirements to ensure accountability. Could you remember that passage in ten minutes? In five? The Heaths' question is not why kidneys sell better than funding reports. Their question is: what is it about the structure of the kidney story that makes it stick? And can we reverse-engineer that structure to make any idea stickier? Their answer is yes. And their framework is called SUCCESs: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories. But there is a villain standing between most of us and sticky communication. It is called the Curse of Knowledge. In a Stanford psychology experiment, participants were split into tappers and listeners. Tappers tapped out well-known songs by knocking on a table. Listeners had to guess the song. Tappers predicted that listeners would guess correctly about half the time. The actual result: listeners guessed correctly 2.5 percent of the time — one in forty. The tappers were bewildered. How could anyone not hear it? But the tappers were hearing the melody in their heads — something the listeners could not possibly access. Once you know something, it is almost impossible to imagine not knowing it. That is the Curse. Every teacher, manager, founder, and communicator fights this curse. We assume people share the context we carry. They do not. Good communication starts with overcoming that gap.