The Power of Moments

by Chip Heath

  What are these moments made of, and how do we create more of them? In our research, we have found that defining moments are created from one or more of the following four elements:

  ELEVATION: Defining moments rise above the everyday. They provoke not just transient happiness, like laughing at a friend’s joke, but memorable delight. (You pick up the red phone and someone says, “Popsicle Hotline, we’ll be right out.”) To construct elevated moments, we must boost sensory pleasures—the Popsicles must be delivered poolside on a silver tray, of course—and, if appropriate, add an element of surprise. We’ll see why surprise can warp our perceptions of time, and why most people’s most memorable experiences are clustered in their teens and twenties. Moments of elevation transcend the normal course of events; they are literally extraordinary.

  INSIGHT: Defining moments rewire our understanding of ourselves or the world. In a few seconds or minutes, we realize something that might influence our lives for decades: Now is the time for me to start this business. Or, This is the person I’m going to marry. The psychologist Roy Baumeister studied life changes that were precipitated by a “crystallization of discontent,” moments when people abruptly saw things as they were, such as cult members who suddenly realized the truth about their leader. And although these moments of insight often seem serendipitous, we can engineer them—or at the very least, lay the groundwork. In one unforgettably disgusting story, we’ll see how some relief workers sparked social change by causing a community to “trip over the truth.”

  PRIDE: Defining moments capture us at our best—moments of achievement, moments of courage. To create such moments, we need to understand something about the architecture of pride—how to plan for a series of milestone moments that build on each other en route to a larger goal. We’ll explore why the “Couch to 5K” program was so successful—and so much more effective in sparking exercise than the simple imperative to “jog more.” And we’ll learn some unexpected things about acts of courage and the surprising ripple effects they create.

  CONNECTION: Defining moments are social: weddings, graduations, baptisms, vacations, work triumphs, bar and bat mitzvahs, speeches, sporting events. These moments are strengthened because we share them with others. What triggers moments of connection? We’ll encounter a remarkable laboratory procedure that allows two people to walk into a room as strangers and walk out, 45 minutes later, as close friends. And we’ll analyze what one social scientist believes is a kind of unified theory of what makes relationships stronger, whether the bond is between husband and wife, doctor and patient, or even shopper and retailer.

  Defining moments often spark positive emotion—we’ll use “positive defining moments” and “peaks” interchangeably throughout the book—but there are categories of negative defining moments, too, such as moments of pique: experiences of embarrassment or embitterment that cause people to vow, “I’ll show them!” There’s another category that is all too common: moments of trauma, which leave us heartbroken and grieving. In the pages ahead, we’ll encounter several stories of people dealing with trauma, but we will not explore this category in detail, for the simple reason that our focus is on creating more positive moments. No one wants to experience more moments of loss. In the Appendix, we share some resources that people who have suffered a trauma might find helpful.

  Defining moments possess at least one of the four elements above, but they need not have all four. Many moments of insight, for example, are private—they don’t involve a connection. And a fun moment like calling the Popsicle Hotline doesn’t offer much insight or pride.

  Some powerful defining moments contain all four elements. Think of YES Prep’s Senior Signing Day: the ELEVATION of students having their moment onstage, the INSIGHT of a sixth grader thinking That could be me, the PRIDE of being accepted to college, and the CONNECTION of sharing the day with an arena full of thousands of supportive people. (See the footnote for a mnemonic to remember this framework for defining moments.)I

  Sometimes these elements can be very personal. Somewhere in your home there is a treasure chest, full of things that are precious to you and worthless to anyone else. It might be a scrapbook, or a drawer in a dresser, or a box in the attic. Maybe some of your favorites are stuck on the refrigerator so you can see them every day. Wherever your treasure chest is, its contents are likely to include the four elements we’ve been discussing:

  • ELEVATION: A love letter. A ticket stub. A well-worn T-shirt. Haphazardly colored cards from your kids that make you smile with delight.

  • INSIGHT: Quotes or articles that moved you. Books that changed your view of the world. Diaries that captured your thoughts.

  • PRIDE: Ribbons, report cards, notes of recognition, certificates, thank-yous, awards. (It just hurts, irrationally, to throw away a trophy.)

  • CONNECTION: Wedding photos. Vacation photos. Family photos. Christmas photos of hideous sweaters. Lots of photos. Probably the first thing you’d grab if your house caught on fire.

  All these items you’re safeguarding are, in essence, the relics of your life’s defining moments. How are you feeling now as you reflect on the contents of your treasure chest? What if you could give that same feeling to your kids, your students, your colleagues, your customers?

  Moments matter. And what an opportunity we miss when we leave them to chance! Teachers can inspire, caregivers can comfort, service workers can delight, politicians can unite, and managers can motivate. All it takes is a bit of insight and forethought.

  This is a book about the power of moments and the wisdom of shaping them.

  * * *

  I. It may not have escaped your attention that if you swap the order of Insight and Pride, you get a handy acronym: EPIC. We have mixed feelings about this. An acronym, in a book like this, boosts memorability at the cost of some cheesiness. In the past, we have happily embraced that trade, having used two acronyms in previous books to help people recall the relevant frameworks. In this case, we have decided against it. For one thing, we’re not advising you to pursue “epic” moments. Some of the stories you’ll encounter do fit that description, but many others are small and personal, or painful but transformational. Epic seems too grandiose and too shallow all at once. Also, and this is a personal failing, we can’t read the word epic without imagining it being spoken by a stoned surfer dude. (You see what we mean now, don’t you?) So, bottom line, if the EPIC acronym helps you remember the four elements, please keep it with our compliments. But this is the last time we’ll mention it.

  2

  Thinking in Moments

  1.

  What was your first day like at your current (or most recent) job?

  Is it fair to say that it was not a defining moment?

  Judging from the stories we’ve heard from underwhelmed employees, what follows is a pretty typical description of a first day: You show up. The receptionist didn’t think you were starting until next week. You’re shown to a desk. There’s a monitor and an Ethernet cable on the desk but no computer. There’s also a single binder clip. The chair still bears the imprint of the previous owner, like an ergonomic buttocks fossil.

  Your boss has not arrived yet. You’re given an ethics and compliance manual to review. “Why don’t you read over this and I’ll swing back in a few hours?” says the receptionist. The sexual harassment policy is so long and comprehensive it makes you wonder a bit about your colleagues.

  Eventually, a friendly person from your floor introduces herself and whisks you around the office, interrupting 11 different people to introduce you. As a result, you worry that you have managed to annoy all of your colleagues within the first hour of your employment. You immediately forget all their names. Except Lester, who might just be the reason for the sexual harassment policy?

  Does that sound about right?

  The lack of attention paid to an employee’s first day is mind-boggling. What a wasted opportunity to make a new team member feel included and appreciated. Imagine if you treate
d a first date like a new employee: “I’ve got some meetings stacked up right now, so why don’t you get settled in the passenger seat of the car and I’ll swing back in a few hours?”

  To avoid this kind of oversight, we must understand when special moments are needed. We must learn to think in moments, to spot the occasions that are worthy of investment.

  This “moment-spotting” habit can be unnatural. In organizations, for instance, we are consumed with goals. Time is meaningful only insofar as it clarifies or measures our goals. The goal is the thing.

  But for an individual human being, moments are the thing. Moments are what we remember and what we cherish. Certainly we might celebrate achieving a goal, such as completing a marathon or landing a significant client—but the achievement is embedded in a moment.

  Every culture has its prescribed set of big moments: birthdays and weddings and graduations, of course, but also holiday celebrations and funeral rites and political traditions. They seem “natural” to us. But notice that every last one of them was invented, dreamed up by anonymous authors who wanted to give shape to time. This is what we mean by “thinking in moments”: to recognize where the prose of life needs punctuation.

  We’ll explore three situations that deserve punctuation: transitions, milestones, and pits. Transitions are classic occasions for defining moments. Many cultures have a “coming of age” ritual, like the bar and bat mitzvah or the quinceañera. In the Sateré-Mawé tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, when a boy turns 13, he comes of age by wearing a pair of gloves filled with angry, stinging bullet ants, leaving his hands covered in welts. Because someone apparently asked, “How can we make puberty harder?”

  Coming-of-age rituals are boundary markers, attempts to crisp up an otherwise gradual evolution from adolescence to adulthood. Before this day, I was a child. After this day, I am a man. (A man with very swollen hands.)

  Transitions, like milestones and pits, are natural defining moments. The transition of getting married is a defining moment in life regardless of whether it is celebrated. But if we recognize how important these natural defining moments are, we can shape them—make them more memorable and meaningful.

  That logic shows why the first day of work is an experience worth investing in. For new employees, it’s three big transitions at once: intellectual (new work), social (new people), and environmental (new place). The first day shouldn’t be a set of bureaucratic activities on a checklist. It should be a peak moment.

  Lani Lorenz Fry understood this opportunity. Fry, who worked in global brand strategy and marketing at John Deere, had heard from the company’s leaders in Asia that they were struggling with employee engagement and retention. “John Deere is not a well-known brand there,” Fry said. “It’s not like the Midwest in the U.S., where your grandpa probably had a John Deere tractor.” As a result, employees had less of an emotional tie to the brand.

  Fry and her colleagues on the brand team saw an opportunity to build that connection—and it had to start on the employee’s first day. Collaborating with the customer experience consultant Lewis Carbone, the team designed what it called the First Day Experience. Here’s the way they wanted the day to unfold (you may notice some differences from the first-day story above):

  Shortly after you accept the offer letter from John Deere, you get an email from a John Deere Friend. Let’s call her Anika. She introduces herself and shares some of the basics: where to park, what the dress norms are, and so forth. She also tells you that she’ll be waiting to greet you in the lobby at 9 a.m. on your first day.

  When your first day comes, you park in the right place and make your way to the lobby, and there’s Anika! You recognize her from her photo. She points to the flat-screen monitor in the lobby—it features a giant headline: “Welcome, Arjun!”

  Anika shows you to your cubicle. There’s a six-foot-tall banner set up next to it—it rises above the cubes to alert people that there’s a new hire. People stop by over the course of the day to say hello to you.

  As you get settled, you notice the background image on your monitor: It’s a gorgeous shot of John Deere equipment on a farm at sunset, and the copy says, “Welcome to the most important work you’ll ever do.”

  You notice you’ve already received your first email. It’s from Sam Allen, the CEO of John Deere. In a short video, he talks a little bit about the company’s mission: “to provide the food, shelter, and infrastructure that will be needed by the world’s growing population.” He closes by saying, “Enjoy the rest of your first day, and I hope you’ll enjoy a long, successful, fulfilling career as part of the John Deere team.”

  Now you notice there’s a gift on your desk. It’s a stainless steel replica of John Deere’s original “self-polishing plow,” created in 1837. An accompanying card explains why farmers loved it.

  At midday, Anika collects you for a lunch off-site with a small group. They ask about your background and tell you about some of the projects they’re working on. Later in the day, the department manager (your boss’s boss) comes over and makes plans to have lunch with you the next week.

  You leave the office that day thinking, I belong here. The work we’re doing matters. And I matter to them.

  After the John Deere brand team completed its plan for the First Day Experience, some offices across Asia began to roll it out. In the Beijing office, it was such a hit that employees who’d been hired earlier were joking, “Can I quit and rejoin?” In India, the program has helped to differentiate John Deere in the highly competitive labor market.

  Shouldn’t every organization in the world have a version of this First Day Experience?

  2.

  John Deere’s First Day Experience is a peak moment delivered at a time of transition. When a life transition lacks a “moment,” though, it can become formless. We often feel anxious because we don’t know how to act or what rules to apply. Consider a story shared by Kenneth Doka, a licensed mental health counselor who is also an expert on grief.

  A woman came to him who had lost her husband to Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS). They’d had a happy marriage, she said. He was a good father and a good husband. But ALS is a cruel, degenerative disease, and as her husband’s illness advanced, he required more and more care. It was tough for both of them. He was a proud man—the owner of a small construction firm—and “didn’t do sick well,” as she said. They fought more than they ever had.

  But they were devout Catholics, and they had tremendous faith in their marriage. She said that every night, after a tough day, they’d put their hands together in bed so that their rings touched, and they’d repeat their wedding vows to each other.

  When she came to see Doka, it had been six years since her husband passed, and she told him that she thought she was ready to start dating again. “But I can’t take my wedding ring off,” she said. “I can’t date with my wedding ring, and I can’t take it off.” She believed that marriages were for life, but she also knew that she had honored her commitment. She was confused and stuck.

  Doka has written extensively about the power of “therapeutic rituals” to help people who are grieving. He suggested that she needed a “ritual of transition” to take off the ring, and she liked the idea. So, with her permission, he worked with her priest to create a small ceremony.

  It happened one Sunday afternoon, after Mass, in the church where she was married. The priest had called together a group of her close friends and family members, many of whom had attended her wedding.

  The priest called them up around the altar. Then he began to ask her some questions.

  “Were you faithful in good times and bad?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “In sickness and health?”

  “Yes.”

  The priest led her through her wedding vows—but in the past tense. She affirmed, in the presence of the witnesses, that she had been faithful, that she had loved and honored her husband.

  Then the priest said, “May
I have the ring, please?” She took it off her finger and handed it to him. She would tell Doka later that “it came off as if by magic.”

  The priest accepted her ring. He and Doka had arranged for her ring to be interlocked with her husband’s ring and then affixed to the front of their wedding photo.

  The ceremony allowed her to attest, to herself and the people she loved, that she had fulfilled her vows. It signaled to everyone present that her identity was about to change. It was a moment that allowed her a fresh start.

  At the heart of the “reverse wedding” story is a powerful insight. At the point the widow went to see Doka, she was ready to begin dating again. And it’s clear that, even if she hadn’t met Doka, she would have started dating eventually on her own. Maybe it would have taken a month, maybe a year, maybe five years. And throughout that uncertain time, she would have felt anxious: Am I ready? Is it “okay” for me to be ready? What the widow in Doka’s story needed was a landmark moment to capture the transition she was making. After that Sunday afternoon ceremony, I was ready.

  We have a natural hunger for these landmarks in time. Take the prevalence of New Year’s resolutions. The Wharton professor Katherine Milkman said she found it striking that “at the start of a new year, we feel like we have a clean slate. It’s the ‘fresh start effect’ . . . all of my past failures are from last year and I can think, ‘Those are not me. That’s old me. That’s not new me. New me isn’t going to make these mistakes.’ ”

  In other words, New Year’s resolutions are not really about the resolutions. After all, for most people, the resolutions haven’t changed. Most people wanted to lose weight and save money on December 31, too. What we’re doing on New Year’s Day is more like a mental accounting trick. Our past failures are left on the ledger of Old Me. New Me starts today.