• 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.

Overall, we found that speed was good. Books, movies, and TV shows with faster plot progression were liked more than their slower-moving counterparts.

Just as atypical lyrics make songs more interesting to listen to, a faster plot progression makes a story more stimulating. Rather than just plodding along, moving faster between more differentiated topics and ideas is more exciting, which leads audiences to react more favorably.

In addition, we found that within stories, there were times when plots should move faster and times when they should move more slowly. At the beginning of a book or movie, the canvas is blank. An audience doesn’t know who the characters are, what the setting is, or how everything relates. So the beginning of a story sets the stage, building a base or jumping-off point for the rest of the narrative.

Starting slowly is key. It takes time for the audience members to digest the characters, their relationships, and everything else, so a plot that moves too quickly at the outset may confuse them.

... early on, speed was detrimental. Audiences reacted more favorably to stories that moved more slowly initially.

Indeed, as stories advance, the effect of speed reverses. Though audiences liked stories that moved slowly initially, eventually a faster plot progression was preferred, so much so that toward the end of stories, those that moved faster were liked more.

The speed of stories matters, but whether faster or slower is better depends on the point in the narrative. The best plots start slowly, but once everyone is on board, they pick up steam, building excitement and engagement along the way.

It’s natural to think these abstractions will save us time and improve our decision-making, but in many cases they don’t. Reading a summary might be faster than reading a full document, but it misses a lot of details— details that weren’t relevant to the person summarizing the information, but that might be relevant to you. You end up saving time at the cost of missing important information. Skimming inadvertently creates blind spots.

Information is food for the mind. What you put in today shapes your solutions tomorrow. And just as you are responsible for the food that goes into your mouth, you are responsible for the information that goes into your mind. You can't be healthy if you feed yourself junk food every day, and you can't make good decisions if you’re consuming low-quality information. Higher quality inputs lead to higher quality outputs.