Surprise and Interest:

 Chip Heath & Dan Heath, Make to Stick:

"Surprise gets our attention. Some naturally sticky ideas propose surprising 'facts'."

"Interest keeps our attention. There are classes of sticky ideas that maintain our interest over time."

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"We wrote this book to help you make your ideas stick. By 'stick,' we mean that your ideas are understood and remembered, and have a lasting impact - they change your audience's opinions or behavior."

"If you have to tell someone the same thing ten times, the idea probably wasn't very well designed. No urban legend has to be repeated ten times."

"The broad question, then, is how do you design an idea that sticks?"

"Chip, as a professor at Stanford University, had spent about ten years asking why bad ideas sometimes won out in the social marketplace of ideas. How could a false idea displace a true one? And what made some ideas more viral than others?"

"Chip,  along his students, has spent hundreds of hours collecting, coding, and analyzing naturally sticky ideas: urban legends, wartime rumors, proverbs, conspiracy theories, and jokes."

"There's no question that some people are more creative than others. Perhaps they are just born that way. So maybe you'll never be the Michael Jordan of sticky ideas. But the premise of this book is that creating sticky ideas is something that can be learned."

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"Most people, remarkably, can list about as many white things from their refrigerators as white anythings. This result is stunning, because, well, our fridges don't include a particularly large part of the universe. Even people who list more white anythings often feel that the refrigerator test is 'easier.' Why does this happen? Because concreteness is a way of mobilizing and focusing your brain. For another example of this phenomenon consider these two statements: (1) Think of five silly things that people have done in the world in the past ten years. (2) Think about five silly things your child has done in the past ten years."