The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact

by Chip Heath

arrive at an overall summary of your day, we could simply average those ratings: 6.5. A pretty good day. Now, let’s say we text you again, a few weeks later, and ask you to rate your overall Disney experience. A reasonable prediction of your answer would be 6.5, since it encompasses all the highs and lows of your day. But psychologists would say that’s way off. They’d predict that, looking back on the day at Disney, your overall rating would be a 9! That’s because research has found that in recalling an experience, we ignore most of what happened and focus instead on a few particular moments. Specifically, two moments will stand out: riding Space Mountain and buying mouse-ear hats. To understand why those two moments matter more than the others, let’s explore some of the

For their third painful experience, the participants were given a choice: Would you rather repeat the first trial or the second? This is an easy question: Both trials featured 60 seconds of identical pain, and the second trial added another 30 seconds of slightly reduced pain. So this is kind of like asking, Would you rather be slapped in the face for 60 seconds or 90? Nevertheless, 69% chose the longer trial. Psychologists have untangled the reasons for this puzzling result. When people assess an experience, they tend to forget or ignore its length—a phenomenon called “duration neglect.” Instead, they seem to rate the experience based on two key moments: (1) the best or worst moment, known as the “peak”; and (2) the ending. Psychologists call it the “peak-end rule.” So in the participants’ memories, the difference between 60 and 90 seconds washed out. That’s duration neglect. And what stood out for them was that the longer trial ended more comfortably than the shorter one. (Both trials, by the way, had a similar peak moment of pain: close to the 60-second mark.) This research explains why, in reflecting on your Disney experience, you’ll remember Space Mountain (the peak) and the mouse ears (the end). Everything else will tend to fade. As a result, your memory of the day is far more favorable than the hour-by-hour ratings you provided.

the month of September! And beginnings and endings can blur—if you change cities for a new job, is that an ending or a beginning or both? That’s why it’s preferable to talk about transitions, which encompass both endings and beginnings. What’s indisputable is that when we assess our experiences, we don’t average our minute-by-minute sensations. Rather, we tend to remember flagship moments: the peaks, the pits, and the transitions.

in service businesses—from restaurants to medical clinics to call centers to spas—where success hinges on the customer experience. Consider the Magic Castle Hotel,4 which as of press time was one of the three top-rated hotels in Los Angeles, out of hundreds. It triumphed over competition like the Four Seasons Hotel at Beverly Hills and the Ritz-Carlton Los Angeles. Magic Castle’s reviews are stunning: Out of more than 2,900 reviews on Trip-Advisor, over 93% of guests rate the hotel as either “excellent” or “very good.” There’s something odd about the hotel’s ranking, though: If you flipped through the photos of the resort online, you would never conclude, “That’s one of the best hotels in L.A.” An interior courtyard features a pool that might qualify as Olympic size, if the Olympics were being held in your backyard. The rooms are dated, the furnishings are spare, and most walls are bare. In fact, even the word hotel seems like a stretch—the Magic Castle is actually a converted two-story apartment complex from the 1950s, painted canary yellow. The point is not that it’s a bad-looking place; it’s fine. It looks like a respectable budget motel. But the Four Seasons it ain’t. Nor is it particularly cheap—the pricing is comparable

Marriott hotels. How could it be one of the top-rated hotels in Los Angeles? Let’s start with the cherry-red phone mounted to a wall near the pool. You pick it up and someone answers, “Hello, Popsicle Hotline.” You place an order, and minutes later, a staffer wearing white gloves delivers your cherry, orange, or grape Popsicles to you at poolside. On a silver tray. For free. Then there’s the Snack Menu, a list of goodies—ranging from Kit-Kats to root beer to Cheetos—that can be ordered up at no cost. There’s also a Board Game Menu and a DVD Menu, with all items loaned for free. Three times a week, magicians perform tricks at breakfast. Did we mention you can drop off unlimited loads of laundry for free washing? Your clothes are returned later in the day, wrapped in butcher paper and tied up with twine and a sprig of lavender. Which is much more pomp and ceremony than the doctor used when handing off your first child. The guest reviews for the Magic Castle Hotel are rapturous. What the Magic Castle has figured out is that, to please customers, you need not obsess over every detail. Customers will forgive small swimming pools and underwhelming room décor, as long as some moments are magical. The surprise about great service experiences is that they are mostly forgettable and occasionally remarkable.

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 Deer...

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?

craved something for their students, and as they talked, they came to a disturbing realization: Even though high school students log more time in the classroom than anywhere else, their most memorable experiences rarely take place there. Instead, they remember prom, football games, musical productions, student body elections, swim meets, talent shows.

respondents were prompted to think about the life of a baby who had just been born and to predict what would be “the most important events that are likely to take place in this infant’s life.” The ten most commonly cited events were as follows (shown in order). See if you notice any patterns: 1. Having children 2. Marriage 3. Begin school 4. College 5. Fall in love 6. Others’ death 7. Retirement 8. Leave home 9. Parents’ death 10. First job

It’s striking that 6 out of the 10 most important events all happen during a relatively narrow window of time: roughly age 15 to 30. (This 6 out of 10 calculation presumes that marriage and kids happen within that window, which of course isn’t true of everyone but is true for most people.)

Similarly, if you ask older people about their most vivid memories, research shows, they tend to be drawn disproportionately from this same period, roughly ages 15 to 30. Psychologists call this phenomenon the “reminiscence bump.” Why does a 15-year period in our li...

“The key to the reminiscence bump is novelty,” said Claudia Hammond in her book Time Warped. “The reason we remember our youth so well is that it is a … time for firsts—first sexual relationships, first jobs, first travel without parents, first experience of living away fr...

Acting on this insight, he developed a methodology called Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), which has since been used in more than 60 countries around the world.4 But don’t let the boring acronym fool you: This is a shocking process. Here’s a stylized description of a typical intervention: A CLTS facilitator arrives in a village and introduces himself.5 “I’m studying the sanitation profiles of different villages in the area,” he says. “Mind if I look around and ask some questions?” Once he has hung around long enough to attract a small crowd, he conducts a “transect walk,” leading the crowd from one side of the village to the other. “Where do people shit?” he asks, and the villagers direct him to the common areas of defecation. They are embarrassed, eager to move on, but he lingers. He points: “Whose shit is this?” He asks them, “Did anyone shit here today?” A few hands go up. The stench is overpowering. People are covering their noses with their

The facilitator looks puzzled. He asks, “How many legs does a fly have?” Six. “Right, and they’re all serrated. Do you think flies pick up more or less shit than my hair?” More. “Do you ever see flies on your food?” Yes. “Then do you throw out the food?” No. “Then what are you eating?” The tension is unbearable now. This is what Kamal Kar calls the “ignition moment.” The truth is inescapable: They have been eating each other’s shit. For years.

The psychologist Roy Baumeister has studied these kinds of sudden realizations: people who joined and then left a cult, alcoholics who became sober, intellectuals who embraced communism and then recanted. Baumeister said that such situations were often characterized by a “crystallization of discontent,” a dramatic moment when an array of isolated misgivings and complaints became linked in a global pattern. Imagine a husband who has a ferocious outburst of temper, and in that moment, his wife realizes that his outbursts aren’t just “bad days,” as she’s always written them off, but a defining character trait. And a trait that she can no longer abide. That’s the crystallization of discontent. Ex–cult members tend to recall a specific moment when their bubble burst, when they could no longer sustain an elevated view of their cult’s leader. Baumeister said that their stories

The crystallization moments studied by Baumeister are serendipitous. There’s no predicting when (or if) if they will happen. Notice, though, that the realization sparked by CLTS is very similar in character. Because of the facilitators’ questions, people in the villages are made to “see” what had been in front of their eyes the whole time. And that’s not a serendipitous “aha!” moment, it’s an engineered moment. How do we engineer powerful insights in more ordinary organizational situations? Consider the way Scott Guthrie handled a situation at Microsoft in 2011. He’d been tapped by Steve Ballmer to lead the company’s fast-growing cloud computing service, called Azure. Guthrie visited Azure customers, and their feedback about their experience with the service was clear: Azure’s underlying technology was good, but it was hard to use. Guthrie knew Azure would never meet its growth expectations until it was much more customer-friendly. But how could he get his colleagues to understand, viscerally, how far off track they were?

Michael Palmer, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Virginia and also the associate director of the university’s Teaching Resource Center. In 2009, he started a weeklong program called the Course Design Institute (CDI).9 He created the CDI to help professors design the courses they’d be teaching. On Monday morning, the professors bring in their draft syllabi, and by Friday afternoon, they’ve overhauled them and created an improved game plan for their courses. “The dirty secret of higher education is that faculty aren’t taught how to teach,” said Palmer. Over the course of the week at Palmer’s CDI, the professors learn the science of teaching: how to motivate students, how to reach different types of learners, and how to ensure that students retain the most important

trip over the truth. And that starts with a focus on the problem, not the solution. On the afternoon of the first day of the Course Design Institute, Palmer introduces an activity called the “Dream Exercise,” inspired by an idea in L. Dee Fink’s book Creating Significant Learning Experiences.

to his audience of 25 to 30 professors: “Imagine that you have a group of dream students. They are engaged, they are perfectly behaved, and they have perfect memories …. Fill in this sentence: 3–5 years from now, my students still know _______________. Or they still are able to do _____________. Or they still find value in ________________.” The professors brainstorm privately for about 10 minutes, and then they share their answers. At the CDI in July 2015, a professor who taught an animal behavior course said, “I want them to know the scientific process. If they see some animal doing something interesting, they can come up with a way to work through the scientific process to study it.” A health sciences professor said, “I want them to be connecting and collaborating with colleagues. They will feel confident reviewing new research and being part of ‘journal club’ meetings.” A math professor said, “I want them to think of math as fun and interesting in its own right, not just practical …. When they see a link to a math story, I want them to click

How much of your current syllabus will advance your students toward the dreams you have for them?

often striking. (To see an example of a complete syllabus before and after the CDI, visit http://www.heathbrothers.com/CDIsyllabi.) One physics syllabus, which began as a perfunctory overview of the topics and subtopics in the course, transformed into something inspiring.

is not the ending we crave. We want likable entrepreneurs to succeed. We want daydreams to come true. Did Lea Chadwell fail? In some ways, yes. But it’s not quite that simple. Chadwell doesn’t regret starting her bakery, and she doesn’t regret closing it. What she gained was the insight that comes from experience. She came to accept, she said, some qualities that made her the wrong person to run her own business. “I’m unorganized. Impractical. Fickle …. While these traits make me a great candidate for a Wacky Friend, they are just awful to try to form a business around. I suspect if I hadn’t quit, I’d have failed, and it actually really sucks to admit it. But, there’s the painful lesson I’ve learned. I’m great when I’m working for others; they rely on me. Working for myself? I’m a terrible boss.”

Psychologists call this “self-insight”—a mature understanding of our capabilities and motivations—and it’s correlated with

women experienced moments of self-insight sparked by “stretching.”2 To stretch is to place ourselves in situations that expose us to the risk of failure. What may be counterintuitive is that self-insight rarely comes from staying in our heads. Research suggests that reflecting or ruminating on our thoughts and feelings is an ineffective way to

understanding.4 Studying our own behavior is more fruitful. “Wouldn’t I make a fabulous bakery owner?” “Could I hack it in Italy?” These are important questions but impossible to answer in one’s head. Better to take a risk, try something, and distill the answer from experience rather than from navel-gazing. Action leads to insight more often than insight leads to action.5 Learning who we are,

expectations and I know you can reach them.” (High standards + assurance.) After the papers were returned, the students had the option to revise and resubmit their paper in the hopes of earning a better grade. About 40% of the students who got the generic note chose to revise their papers. But almost 80% of the wise criticism students revised their papers, and in editing their papers, they made more than twice as many corrections as the other students. What makes the second note so powerful is that it rewires the way students process criticism. When they get their paper back, full of corrections and suggestions, their natural reaction might be defensiveness or even mistrust. The teacher has never liked me. But the wise criticism note carries a different message. It says, I know you’re capable of great things if you’ll just put in the work. The marked-up essay is not a personal judgment. It’s a push to stretch.

“Favorite Things.” Twelve years later, Forbes named Blakely the youngest self-made female billionaire in history. In Getting There: A Book of Mentors, Blakely wrote, “I can’t tell you how many women come up to me and say something like ‘I’ve been cutting the feet out of my pantyhose for years. Why didn’t I end up being the Spanx girl?’ The reason is that a good idea is just a starting point.”

few police escorts out of buildings. It wasn’t long before I grew immune to the word ‘no’ and even found my situation amusing.” That’s a powerful moment of insight. She realizes: I don’t fear failure anymore. It’s no longer an obstacle to me. Blakely had been selling fax machines for seven years when she attended the party in her white pants and had her Spanx epiphany. Her relentlessness in building Spanx came from enduring seven years’ worth

to “trip over the truth,”

So Hughes suggested an option to Dr. Singh: Why not offer Zojenz to your patients during the summer, when instant results wouldn’t be necessary? Hughes also suggested Zojenz for adult ADHD patients who might not be comfortable taking a stimulant.

always loved Irish music and had fantasized about learning to play the fiddle. So he co-opted gaming strategy and figured out a way to “level up” toward his goal: LEVEL 1: Commit to one violin lesson per week, and practice 15 minutes per day for six months. LEVEL 2: Relearn how to read sheet music and complete Celtic Fiddle Tunes by Craig Duncan. LEVEL 3: Learn to play “Concerning Hobbits” from The Fellowship of the Ring on the violin. LEVEL 4: Sit and play the fiddle for 30 minutes with other musicians. LEVEL 5: Learn to play “Promontory” from The Last of the Mohicans on the violin. BOSS BATTLE: Sit and play the

Look at the graph below, which comes from researcher George Wu at the University of Chicago. It summarizes the completion times of more than nine million runners in marathons from Chicago to Berlin.5 You can see that most runners finished a marathon in 3.5 to 5 hours. But notice how the graph looks spiky. Pay attention to the vertical lines showing the “threshold” times: 4:00:00, 4:30:00, 5:00:00, and so forth. You’ll see that a lot more runners finished just before the lines than just after them. (It’s particularly dramatic at the 4-hour mark.)

That’s the milestone effect.

do we laugh? Provine found that laughter was 30 times more common in social settings than private ones. It’s a social reaction. “Laughter is more about relationships than humor,” Provine concluded. We laugh to tie the group together. Our laughter says, I’m with you.

findings, he discovered 17% of the employees “completely agreed” with this statement: “What I do at work makes a strong contribution to society, beyond making money.” These people with a strong sense of meaning tended to have the highest performance rankings by their bosses. In his research,

a shocking finding: People who were passionate about their jobs—who expressed high levels of excitement about their work—were still poor performers if they lacked a sense of purpose. And here’s the final piece of the puzzle:

The outcome is clear. Purpose trumps passion. Graduation speakers take note: The best advice is not “Pursue your passion!” It’s “Pursue your purpose!” (Even better, try to combine both.)

do you find purpose? Yale professor Amy Wrzesniewski, who studies how people make meaning of their work, said that many people believe they need to find their calling, as though it were a “magical entity that exists in the world waiting to be discovered.”6 She believes purpose isn’t discovered, it’s cultivated.

course. Sometimes it’s useful to keep asking, “Why?” Why do you do what you do? It might take several “Whys” to reach the meaning. For instance, consider a hospital janitor:9 Why do you clean hospital rooms? “Because that’s what my boss tells me to do.”

Why? “Because it keeps the rooms from getting dirty.” Why does that matter? “Because it makes the rooms more sanitary and more pleasant.” Why does that matter? “Because it keeps the patients healthy and happy.”

you’ve finished The Power of Moments and are hungry for more, visit our website: http://www.thepowerofmoments.com. When you sign up for our newsletter, you get instant access to free materials like these:

Overview. A printable overview of the Elevation-Insight-Pride-Connection framework, perfect for tacking up next to your desk. The Book Club Guide. If you’re reading The Power of Moments as part of a book club, this guide offers suggested questions and topics to guide your discussion. Recommended Reading List. All of our sources are available to you in the endnotes in this book, of course. But in this list we share the eight books and articles that we found most fascinating or useful. The Power of Moments for Friends and Family. An inspiring and wide-ranging set of examples showing how to share more special moments with the people closest to you. It includes: birthday and anniversary ideas, more Art Aron–style questions, actual examples of the “Saturday Surprise” (see Chapter 4), traditions from other cultures that we should embrace, and more. The Power of Moments podcasts.

Year’s resolutions/“fresh start” theory. The Katherine Milkman quote is from an interview with Stephen Dubner on the Freakonomics pod-cast, http://freakonomics.com/2015/03/13/when-willpower-isnt-enough-full-transcript/