How do you go about making viewers in College Station, Texas, care about the Michigan vs. Ohio State matchup? A twenty-nine-year-old named Roone Arledge, whose previous responsibilities primarily involved assigning crews to cover baseball, boxing, and football games, wrote a memo suggesting ways to improve the coverage of college football games.

Arledge saw ample room for improvement. Sportscasters typically set up their cameras, focused on the field, and waited for something to happen in front of them. They ignored everything else—the fans, the color, the pageantry. “It was like looking out on the Grand Canyon through a peephole in a door,” Arledge said.

Arledge’s next assignment was to take over a series that was eventually renamed Wide World of Sports. The show introduced Americans to a variety of sports events they may never have seen before: the Tour de France, the Le Mans auto races, rodeo championships, ski races, and soccer matches. In covering these events, Arledge used the same philosophy he’d pioneered for the NCAA: Set the context and give people enough backstory that they start to care about the gaps in their knowledge. Who’s going to falter during the grueling twenty-four-hour Le Mans? Will the teacher turned barrel racer win the championship? What the heck is a yellow card?

Arledge died in 2002. During his career, he became the head of ABC Sports and later ABC News. He founded the Wide World of Sports, Monday Night Football, 20/20, and Nightline. He won thirty-six Emmys. The tool kit he developed for NCAA football stood the test of time. The way to get people to care is to provide context. Today that seems obvious, because these techniques have become ubiquitous. But this avalanche of context started because a twenty-nine-year-old wrote a memo about how to make college football more interesting.

The lesson for the rest of us is that if we want to make people care, we’ve got to tap into the things they care about. When everybody taps into the same thing, an arms race emerges. To avoid it, we’ve either got to shift onto new turf, as Thompson did, or find associations that are distinctive for our ideas.

Each year in the second session of Chip’s “Making Ideas Stick” class at Stanford, the students participate in an exercise, a kind of testable credential to show what kinds of messages stick and don’t stick. The students are given some data from a government source on crime patterns in the United States. Half of them are asked to make a one-minute persuasive speech to convince their peers that nonviolent crime is a serious problem in this country. The other half are asked to take the position that it’s not particularly serious…

In the average one-minute speech, the typical student uses 2.5 statistics. Only one student in ten tells a story. Those are the speaking statistics. The “remembering” statistics, on the other hand, are almost a mirror image: When students are asked to recall the speeches, 63 percent remember the stories. Only 5 percent remember any individual statistic…

The stars of stickiness are the students who made their case by telling stories, or by tapping into emotion, or by stressing a single point rather than ten.

I remembered a story I’d read about Henry Kissinger. A staffer had drafted a memo and left it on Kissinger’s desk for him to read. A while later Kissinger approached him and asked if it was his best work. The staffer said no and rewrote the entire memo. The next day the staffer ran into Kissinger again and asked what he thought. Kissinger asked him again if this was the best he could do. The staffer took the memo and rewrote it yet again. The next morning the same scenario played out, only this time the poor staffer stated that yes indeed it was his best work. Kissinger replied, “Okay, now I’ll read it,