Stories can almost single-handedly defeat the Curse of Knowledge. In fact, they naturally embody most of the SUCCESs framework. Stories are almost always Concrete. Most of them have Emotional and Unexpected elements. The hardest part of using stories effectively is making sure that they’re Simple—that they reflect your core message. It’s not enough to tell a great story; the story has to reflect your agenda. You don’t want a general lining up his troops before battle to tell a Connection plot story.

Stories have the amazing dual power to simulate and to inspire. And most of the time we don’t even have to use much creativity to harness these powers—we just need to be ready to spot the good ones that life generates every day.

But when it’s happening to us, it’s hard to get that distance. We’re so caught up in the situation that we can’t think straight. Our emotions run wild and get the best of us. Attention narrows, we ruminate on the negative, and can’t seem to break free.

Indeed, when we analyzed the movies, we found that those which interspersed highly positive moments with strongly negative ones were more successful. Movies that repeatedly traversed from the lowest of emotional lows to the highest of emotional highs, and back again, were liked more.

It turns out that these differences in certainty have an important impact on sustained attention. Looking across thousands of pieces of content, we found that uncertain emotions encouraged engagement…

Uncertainty led readers to stick around to resolve what they didn’t know.

• Highlight the hurdles. As long as we’re already seen as competent, revealing past shortcomings can make people like us more, not less.

• Build a roller coaster. The best stories blend highs and lows. So to increase engagement, know when to go negative. Talking about all the failures along the way makes the successes evermore sweet.

• Mix up moments. The same intuition applies to moments as well. Smooth rides are easy, but not the most engaging, so to hold people’s attention, mix it up a bit.

• Consider the context. When trying to persuade, it’s not just enough to say something positive. Emotional language can help in hedonic domains like movies and vacations, but backfire in more utilitarian domains like job applications or software.

• Connect, then solve. Solving problems requires understanding people. So rather than jumping into solutions, connect with the person first. Starting with warmer, more emotional language helps set things up for the more cognitive, problem-solving discussions that come later.

• Activate uncertainty. The right words can make any topic or presentation more captivating. Evoking uncertain emotions (e.g., surprise) will keep people engaged.