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by
Chip Heath
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January 19 - March 15, 2022
They would come back to visit him, telling stories of gangs, drugs, pregnancies. It crushed him. He knew he had two choices: Quit teaching to spare himself. Or build the school that those students deserved. So in 1998, Barbic founded YES Prep. And Donald Kamentz was one of the first people he hired.
90% of the graduates that year were the first members of their families to go to college.
Defining moments shape our lives, but we don’t have to wait for them to happen. We can be the authors of them. What if a teacher could design a lesson that students were still reflecting on years later? What if a manager knew exactly how to turn an employee’s moment of failure into a moment of growth? What if you had a better sense of how to create lasting memories for your kids?
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.”
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.
Ha ha
The Popsicle Hotline is one of the moments that defines the trip.
For the sake of this book, a defining moment is a short experience that is both memorable and meaningful. (“Short” is relative here—a month might be a short experience in the span of your life, and a minute might be short in the context of a customer support call.) There may be a dozen moments in your life that capture who you are—those are big defining moments. But there are smaller experiences, such as the Popsicle Hotline, that are defining moments in the context of a vacation or a semester abroad or a product development cycle.
ELEVATION: Defining moments rise above the everyday.
To construct elevated moments, we must boost sensory pleasures—the
and, if appropriate, add an element of surprise.
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.
PRIDE: Defining moments capture us at our best—moments of achievement, moments of courage.
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?
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.
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.
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.
We’ll explore three situations that deserve punctuation: transitions, milestones, and pits.
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.)
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?”
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.”
Mercedes-Benz Financial Services, rare among its competitors, sends a condolence letter to the lessee’s family with an offer to forgive the lease obligation.
at Intermountain Healthcare. As reported by Leonard Berry and two colleagues, the patient and his or her family are invited to a meeting within a week of the cancer diagnosis. They stay put in one room and the members of their caregiving team circulate in and out: surgeons, oncologists, dietitians, social workers, and nurses. The patients walk out at the end of the day with a comprehensive plan of care and a set of scheduled appointments.
To maximize customer satisfaction, he said, you don’t want to be perfect. You want to get two things wrong, have the customer bring those mistakes to your attention, and then hustle like mad to fix those problems.
What if the MRI machine weren’t an MRI machine but a spaceship? A submarine?
It had been redesigned to look like a hollowed-out canoe, and the kids were urged to hold still so they wouldn’t tip over the canoe as it floated through the jungle. The kids readily embraced the challenge of not rocking the canoe.
The Trial of Human Nature was created in 1989 by Greg Jouriles, a social studies teacher in his third year, and Susan Bedford, an English teacher with 20 years of experience.
Say you had to choose between two plans. Plan A would magically eliminate all your unhappy customers (the 1s, 2s, and 3s), boosting them up to a 4: And Plan B would instantly vault all your neutral-to-positive customers up to a 7: Which would you choose?
If you Elevate the Positives (Plan B), you’ll earn about 9 times more revenue than if you Eliminate the Negatives (Plan A). (8.8 times, to be precise.) Yet most executives are pursuing Plan
There’s nine times more to gain by elevating positive customers than by eliminating negative ones. And that process of elevation—of moving customers to 7—is not about filling pits or paving potholes. To create fans, you need the remarkable, and that requires peaks. Peaks don’t emerge naturally. They must be built.III
It’s amazing how many times people actually wear different clothes to peak events: graduation robes and wedding dresses and home-team colors. At Hillsdale High, the lawyers wore suits and the witnesses came in costume. A peak means something special is happening; it should look different.
What lessens a moment are the opposite instincts: diminishing the sensory appeal or lowering the stakes. Imagine the things an unenlightened boss might say: • Why yes, serving Popsicles to guests is a delightful idea, but honestly it’s just not practical to staff a “hotline” all day, so why don’t we store them in a self-serve freezer near the ice machine? • Is it really necessary to render a verdict in the Trial of Human Nature? Shouldn’t both sides come out feeling like winners? • Yes, Signing Day is a terrific tradition, but we have so many students! What if we just printed their college
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“I was blessed. I was told I had three months to live.”
The staff at the Ritz broke the script. The term script, used this way, dates back to some research from the 1970s; it refers to our expectations of a stereotypical experience. As
The script of eating at McDonald’s is so familiar that it’s a source of comfort. It’s nice to know that, anywhere in the world, you’ll understand exactly what to expect. But here’s the problem: Familiarity and memorability are often at odds. Who cherishes the memory of the last time they ate at McDonald’s? If you’re looking to create memorable moments for your customers, you’ve got to break the script.
Imagine, for instance, that a coffee shop owner decided to give away free biscotti every Friday. On the first Friday of the giveaway, it would be a delightful surprise. But by the fourth Friday, the free biscotti would be an expectation. If the offer were ever discontinued, it’s easy to imagine customers (ungrateful wretches!) actually complaining about it.
Put the oxygen mask on yourself first, then on your child. If you’re traveling with more than one child, start with the one who has more potential or who is less likely to put you in the home.
Beck, who had top leadership positions in three enormous retail chains—Blockbuster Video, Boston Chicken, and Einstein Bros—said that the secret to growing a business is to “reduce negative variance and increase positive variance.” To reduce negative variance is to prevent stores from operating differently in a way that harms the customer experience.
To increase positive variance is to welcome humanity and spontaneity into the system. And that means giving employees license to break the script.
You may not recognize the company’s name, but it owns a portfolio of famous fashion brands, including Wrangler and Lee Jeans, Vans, Nautica, JanSport, Timberland, and The North Face.
Cantilevered designs allow unwieldy structures to be supported and elevated with elegance. Aha! thought the Wrangler team, we’d like to do that with buttocks! And thus was born Wrangler Booty Up jeans.
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
surprise stretches time. In supporting this insight, Eagleman has embraced some rather extreme research methods. He is famous for an experiment in which he asks volunteers to leap off a 150-foot platform and free-fall into a net. Afterward, they are asked to estimate how long the fall took, and their estimates are, on average, too high by 36%. Their fear and focus make time seem to expand. (So here’s one tip to live a “longer” life: Scare the hell out of yourself, regularly.)
The most memorable periods of our lives are times when we break the script. • Recall the “reminiscence bump,” a period full of novelty: our first kiss, our first job, etc. • Novelty actually seems to slow down time. That’s why we feel like time goes faster as we age.
When the vestry showed up for the meeting, he greeted them with pads of paper and pens and sorted them into groups of two or three. He gave them a challenge: Imagine that you are visiting this church for the first time. Roam the grounds for 15 or 20 minutes. What do you notice? The elders came back with a range of observations: a. We have bilingual services but all our signage is in English! b. There was an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting going on in our building—we had no idea so many people attended it. Are there other ways we can open our facilities to the public? And how can we make sure they
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It wasn’t enough, in other words, for some people to use the latrines or even half. To solve the village’s health problems, it had to become the norm.
“If you ask them, why are you not using that latrine? They would tell you, ‘Are you sure I should put shit in that structure . . . that is even better than my house?’ ” Kar realized that open defecation was not a hardware problem, it was a behavioral problem.
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.
“This a truth which nobody wanted to discuss. We’re always pushing it under the carpet—and then it was brought out in public and into the daylight. . . . Now there’s no way out. The naked truth is out.” They didn’t really “see” the truth until they were made to trip over it.
A Dr Phil moment
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
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