And the way this work is she would pair off two people, one would be the tapper and one would be the listener. HEATH: So, in 1991, a graduate student at Stanford, named Elizabeth Newton, ran a very interesting game called tappers and listeners. MONTAGNE: There's an experiment that you have in the book that demonstrates the curse of knowledge, and that's a tapping experiment. And what it says is, the more we know about something, the harder it is for us to imagine what it's like not to know that. The curse of knowledge is the arch villain in our book. MONTAGNE: And you do speak about something called the curse of knowledge in your book. You know, we're talking about weeding your idea down to its fundamental essence. Urban legends inevitably have a concrete image associated with them. I mean that image of winding up in an ice-filled bathtub calls to mind a very visual image, it's sensory, you can imagine shivering in the ice. And the question is could we steal the playbook of these ideas to make our own idea stick with our co-workers or our kids? So one of the principles that we talk about is being concrete.

CHIP HEATH (Co-author, 'Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die'): This is Chip.

One of our favorites is the legend, maybe you've heard this one, of the business traveler who accepts a drink from an attractive stranger and next thing he knows, he wakes up in a bathtub full of ice and his kidney has been removed. We studied everything from 'Aesop's Fables' from 2,500 years ago to sticky history lessons thought by a high school teacher to urban legends, which are frankly some of the stickiest ideas around. DAN HEATH (Co-author, 'Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die'): Sticky ideas cut across lots of domains. Dan Heath says Kennedy's pledge had all the qualities of an idea that was made to stick. MONTAGNE: That idea energized the country and brought the world the first man to walk on the moon in 1969. KENNEDY: I believe that his nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the man and returning him safely to the earth. They say a classic sticky idea is one put forth by President John F. Having a good idea is nice, but if you want to get it out there, you have to make it stick - which is the idea behind the book 'Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.' Authors and brothers, Chip and Dan Heath say most people don't know how to frame their ideas in a clear and compelling way.

Heath brothers made to stick