The artist formerly known as Prince once held a party after Saturday Night Live. There was a DJ and a buffet with macaroni and cheese.
Because, of course there was.
The comedian Fred Armisen walked up to him and said, “I just wanted to tell you. I think that you are the greatest.”
Prince was sitting by himself. He looked up.
“You know what I think the greatest is?”
“What?”
“This macaroni and cheese.”
Not a real image. Made with ChatGPT. (If it was real, he’d be eating pancakes and playing basketball. “Game, blouses.”)
I used that story in my next book to illustrate a simple point: no matter how successful you become, you’re still going to sometimes find yourself eating mac and cheese like a degenerate on the couch. So you may as well enjoy it.
But here’s what matters for you as a writer:
I could have just said “appreciate small pleasures” and moved on. Maybe backed it up with research. Instead, that Prince story makes the concept unforgettable.
That’s the difference between bland advice and ideas that stick.
The tired story problem
Unless you’re writing about emerging technology, the foundational principles in your book have been said before.
Your book’s success depends on how well you say it. And the best way to make ideas stick? Stories that readers haven’t heard a thousand times.
Yet most business books recycle the same Bezos quotes, the same Buffett wisdom, the same startup origin stories. Health books quote the same Blue Zones studies. Self-help books tell the same Oprah anecdotes. Your audience has read those stories in ten other books already.
You need fresh ammunition.
The three types of stories
According to Ryan Levesque, these are the three types of stories every book should include:
1st-Person Stories: “It Happened to Me”
Your lived experience. Carries your unique voice, perspective and vulnerability. Deep authenticity gives them authority.
2nd-Person Stories: “It Happened to Someone I Know”
People you know or have worked with. They’re compelling but add distance.
3rd-Person Stories: “It Happened Out There”
Famous people, historical examples, compelling case studies, or powerful ideas. Adds legitimacy to the idea.
The third category is where most authors get lazy. They Google “Jeff Bezos quote” and grab the first result. We’re going to do better.
Two rules for stories that pop
Rule 1: Famous person, new story or new angle
If you’re using someone like Bezos, it better be a story I haven’t read before or a counterintuitive insight into a familiar story.
Rule 2: New person, recognizable title
If it’s someone I don’t know, they need a title I immediately understand. Army general. NASA engineer. Girl Guides founder.
The Prince story follows Rule 1. Famous person, story you’ve never heard.
Does it make your beer taste better?
Here’s another example that shows how powerful Rule 1 can be from my last book, The Obvious Choice.
In a 2008 talk for Y Combinator, Jeff Bezos described touring a 300-year-old Belgium brewery. According to Bezos, electricity began helping beer makers about a hundred years ago. At that time, there was no power grid. The only way to get power was to set up their own generator and become experts in electric power generation.
“The important thing to notice here is that the fact that they generated their own electric power did not make their beer taste better,” said Bezos.
I used that story to illustrate how we often obsess over things that don’t improve our core product. Now whenever someone asks me whether they should obsess over their logo or buy the best microphone, I ask:
“Is that gonna make your beer taste better?”
The story makes the concept stick. Without it, I’m just another person saying “don’t be a dumb dumb” and to “take the road less stupid and focus on what matters.”
Go where the geeks are to find your stories
Don’t use AI for this. AI finds the most common things. You want the opposite.
Instead, find the obsessive geeks and go down the rabbit hole:
- Start with your concept
- Google it
- Skim the first 2-3 pages of blog articles
- Find the best 1-2 posts (usually personal blogs, not corporate content)
- Reverse search those posts on Twitter/X and Reddit
- Read the comments obsessively
- Follow every interesting link people share in comments
- Keep going until you strike gold
How to find great stories for a non-fiction book: An example
I wanted to write about how becoming elite is a result of the remarkably dull principle of doing good things repeatedly and having a long-enough time horizon for it to make a damn difference.
Googling led me to Steph Smith’s blog post How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably. Good stuff, but not enough.
I searched that link on X. Read comments. Someone had linked an article about a world champion body painter. I grabbed that link and reverse-searched it. Down down down the rabbit hole.
Deep in the comments of a Reddit thread, I found a 1989 sociological paper called The Mundanity of Excellence about three-time Olympic gold medalist Mary Meagher.
That study became the foundation for an entire chapter in The Obvious Choice. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever read.
The payoff
This process takes work. But it transforms your book from another collection of recycled wisdom into something that makes readers think “I’ve never heard that before.”
Your audience of successful professionals has read dozens of books from your field. They can smell recycled content from a mile away. Everybody will accept vanilla soft-serve if there’s an ice cream truck on a hot day but we’d all prefer something better, like a nice creamy mint chocolate chip.
Fresh stories signal that you’ve done the work. That you care enough to dig deeper.
They make your ideas stick.
When you’re the first person to tell a fresh story to illustrate an old idea, you give it new life. Help people understand it in a new way. Perhaps even finally apply it. And, as a result, you now own that idea in their mind.
Fresh stories separate the books that get recommended from the ones that get forgotten.
-Jonathan Goodman
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P.S. I created a Stunningly helpful document with the best performing prompts and processes I discovered using AI as a late-stage development editor. If you’d like a free copy, please click here.
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