The Power of Moments: Why Certain Moments Have Extraordinary Impact

by Chip Heath

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Transitions should be marked, milestones commemorated, and pits filled. That’s the essence of thinking in moments.

You can be the architect of moments that matter.

Moments of elevation are experiences that rise above the everyday. Times to be savored. Moments that make us feel engaged, joyful, amazed, motivated. They are peaks.

Fill pits, then build peaks.

To elevate a moment, do three things: First, boost sensory appeal. Second, raise the stakes. Third, break the script.

Boosting sensory appeal is about “turning up the volume” on reality.

Beware the soul-sucking force of “reasonableness.” Otherwise you risk deflating your peaks. Speed bumps are reasonable. Mount Everest is not reasonable.

Look at your own calendar. Do you see Perfect Days ahead? Or could they be hidden and you have to find a way to unlock them?

This is the great trap of life: One day rolls into the next, and a year goes by, and we still haven’t had that conversation we always meant to have. Still haven’t created that peak moment for our students. Still haven’t seen the northern lights. We walk a flatland that could have been a mountain range.

1. Moments of elevation are experiences that rise above the routine. They make us feel engaged, joyful, amazed, motivated. • Examples: Birthday parties, weddings, football games, public speeches, or spontaneous road trips. 2. Some activities have built-in peaks, such as games or recitals or celebrations. But other areas of life can fall depressingly flat. • High school principal: “We run school like it is nonstop practice. You never get a game.” 3. Here’s our three-part recipe to create more moments of elevation: (1) Boost the sensory appeal; (2) Raise the stakes; (3) Break the script. Usually elevated moments have 2 or 3 of those traits. • The Trial of Human Nature has all three parts: (1) Sensory appeal: The costumes, the real courtroom. (2) Raised stakes: One side will win and capture the glory. (3) Break the script: Everything about the Trial defies the normal rhythms of school. 4. The third part—break the script—requires special attention. To break the script is to defy people’s expectations of how an experience will unfold. It’s strategic surprise. • The Ritz staffers broke the script with their playful photo album for a boy’s lost “Joshie” toy.

5. Moments that break the script are critical for organizational change. They provide a demarcation point between the “old way” and the “new way.” • VF Corporation ended its leadership meeting after a few minutes and challenged people to “go outside,” participating in surfing classes or improv comedy. 6. 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. 7. Caution: Even with the simple three-part recipe, moments of elevation can be hard to build. They are no one’s “job” and they are easy to delay or water down. • Beware the soul-sucking force of reasonableness: “Couldn’t we just put the Popsicles in a cooler by the ice machine?” 8. But building peaks is worth the struggle. They provide some of the most memorable moments of our lives. • Eugene O’Kelly, in his dying days, found fulfillment in his “Perfect Moments.”

Kar believes that it’s a mistake to soft-pedal the word using medical terms such as feces, or more kid-friendly terms such as poop or doodoo. When he works in new countries, he makes sure to ask for the crude slang term for shit. He wants the word to shock.

For a fee, Vocation Vacations could arrange for you to spend a few days shadowing people who were living your dream. The jobs available for visit included cattle ranching, managing a bed-and-breakfast, owning a winery, and—there it was!—starting a bakery.I

“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.

Mentors push, mentees stretch. If you mentor someone—a student, an employee, a relative—you might wonder about the best way to give them a productive push. A good starting place is a two-part formula cited in a paper by the psychologist David Scott Yeager and eight colleagues: high standards + assurance.

In organizations, mentorship can take a stronger form. High standards + assurance is a powerful formula, but ultimately it’s just a statement of expectations. What great mentors do is add two more elements: direction and support.

“What did you guys fail at this week?” “If we had nothing to tell him, he’d be disappointed,” Blakely said. “The logic seems counterintuitive, but it worked beautifully. He knew that many people become paralyzed by the fear of failure. They’re constantly afraid of what others will think if they don’t do a great job and, as a result, take no risks. My father wanted us to try everything and feel free to push the envelope. His attitude taught me to define failure as not trying something I want to do instead of not achieving the right outcome.” His question, “What did you guys fail at this week?” was a push to stretch. It was an attempt to normalize failure, to make it part of a casual dinner conversation. Because when you seek out situations where you might fail, failure loses some of its menace. You’ve been inoculated against it.

1. Moments of insight deliver realizations and transformations. 2. They need not be serendipitous. To deliver moments of insight for others, we can lead them to “trip over the truth,” which means sparking a realization that packs an emotional wallop. • Kamal Kar’s CLTS causes communities to trip over the truth of open defecation’s harms. 3. Tripping over the truth involves (1) a clear insight (2) compressed in time and (3) discovered by the audience itself. • In the “Dream Exercise,” professors discover they’re spending no time in class on their most important goals. 4. To produce moments of self-insight, we need to stretch: placing ourselves in new situations that expose us to the risk of failure. • Lea Chadwell took a risk by opening a bakery. Overwhelmed, she closed it, and in the process learned more about her capabilities and her values. 5. Mentors can help us stretch further than we thought we could, and in the process they can spark defining moments. • The psychiatry resident Michael Dinneen had a mentor who pushed him to continue working through the night: “He knew I had it in me to make it through that night when I didn’t know that myself.”

6. The formula for mentorship that leads to self-insight: High standards + assurance + direction + support. • Six Sigma expert Ranjani Sreenivasan was pushed by her mentor to develop skills in company operations. “I learned that I’m capable of more than I thought,” she said. 7. Expecting our mentees to stretch requires us to overcome our natural instinct to protect the people we care about from risk. To insulate them. • Spanx founder Sara Blakely’s dad: “What did you guys fail at this week?” He wanted to make it easier (less scary) for his kids to stretch. 8. The promise of stretching is not success, it’s learning.

Level Up Your Life: How to Unlock Adventure and Happiness by Becoming the Hero of Your Own Story,

Level 1: Order a meal in Spanish. Level 2: Have a simple conversation in Spanish with a taxi driver. Level 3: Glance at a Spanish newspaper and understand at least one headline. Level 4: Follow the action in a Spanish cartoon. Level 5: Read a kindergarten-level book in Spanish. And so on, leading up to . . . Destination: Be able to have full, normal conversations in Spanish with Fernando in accounting (not just “Cómo está usted?”) Compare that plan with the typical way we think about pursuing goals: Level 1: Try to squeeze in a Spanish study session. Level 2: Try to squeeze in a Spanish study session. Level 3: Try to squeeze in a Spanish study session. Level 4: Try to squeeze in a Spanish study session. Level 5: Try to squeeze in a Spanish study session. Destination: Someday, eventually: “Know” Spanish.

Mark Twain said, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.”

1. Moments of pride commemorate people’s achievements. We feel our chest puff out and our chin lift. 2. There are three practical principles we can use to create more moments of pride: (1) Recognize others; (2) Multiply meaningful milestones; (3) Practice courage. The first principle creates defining moments for others; the latter two allow us to create defining moments for ourselves. 3. We dramatically underinvest in recognition. • Researcher Wiley: 80% of supervisors say they frequently express appreciation, while less than 20% of employees agree. 4. Effective recognition is personal, not programmatic. (“Employee of the Month” doesn’t cut it.) • Risinger at Eli Lilly used “tailored rewards” (e.g., Bose headphones) to show his team: I saw what you did and I appreciate it. 5. Recognition is characterized by a disjunction: A small investment of effort yields a huge reward for the recipient. • Kira Sloop, the middle school student, had her life changed by a music teacher who told her that her voice was beautiful.

6. To create moments of pride for ourselves, we should multiply meaningful milestones—reframing a long journey so that it features many “finish lines.” • The author Kamb planned ways to “level up”—for instance “Learn how to play ‘Concerning Hobbits’ from The Fellowship of the Ring”—toward his long-term goal of mastering the fiddle. 7. We can also surface milestones that would have gone unnoticed. • What if every member of a youth sports team got a “before-and-after” video of their progress? • Number-heavy organizational goals are fine as tools of accountability, but smart leaders surface more motivational milestones en route to the target. 8. Moments when we display courage make us proud. We never know when courage will be demanded, but we can practice to ensure we’re ready. • The protesters involved in the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins didn’t just show courage, they rehearsed it. 9. Practicing courage lets us “preload” our responses. • Gentile’s approach to ethics says we usually know WHAT is right but don’t know HOW to act. 10. Courage is contagious; our moments of action can be a defining moment for others.

We are accustomed to thinking about relationships in terms of time: The longer the relationship endures, the closer it must grow. But relationships don’t proceed in steady, predictable increments. There’s no guarantee that they will deepen with time.

When you find yourself infuriated by poor service, for instance, chances are it’s because of a lack of responsiveness. You are seated at a restaurant table and no one acknowledges you for 10 minutes. You are asked at the car rental counter whether you want to buy extra insurance, even though you never have. You wait on hold for a long time and, when a representative finally answers, you are challenged to prove your identity. Here’s your authors’ pet peeve: We book a lot of flights, and we always sort the results by duration. (We want the shortest.) For almost twenty years, we’ve been sorting by duration. Yet not once has any travel website stored our preference. Meanwhile, Chip accidentally clicked on a Hello Kitty link months ago, and he is still being stalked around the Internet by ads for cute-kitten luggage. Why does the Internet have a photographic memory for ad clicks and amnesia about what we actually care about? What links these annoyances, of course, is the lack of understanding, validation, and caring. We hate being treated impersonally: You are not special. You’re a number.

If we want more moments of connection, we need to be more responsive to others.

Relationships don’t deepen naturally. In the absence of action, they will stall.

1. Moments of connection bond us with others. We feel warmth, unity, empathy, validation. 2. To spark moments of connection for groups, we must create shared meaning. That can be accomplished by three strategies: (1) creating a synchronized moment; (2) inviting shared struggle; and (3) connecting to meaning. • Sharp’s recommitment to the customer experience had all three elements: (1) the All-Staff Assembly; (2) the voluntary “Action Teams”; and (3) a call for dramatic improvements in the way customers were cared for. 3. Groups bond when they struggle together. People will welcome a struggle when it’s their choice to participate, when they’re given autonomy to work, and when the mission is meaningful. • Xygalatas’s study of religious devotees concludes that the shared experience of pain can be seen as “social technology to bind in-groups together.” 4. “Connecting to meaning” reconnects people with the purpose of their efforts. That’s motivating and encourages “above and beyond” work.

• Hansen’s research: When it comes to performance, strong purpose trumps strong passion. 5. In individual relationships, we believe that relationships grow closer with time. But that’s not the whole story. Sometimes long relationships reach plateaus. And with the right moment, relationships can deepen quickly. • Fisherow and her team turned around the troubled Stanton Elementary School by relying, in part, on short parent-teacher home visits before the start of school. 6. According to the psychologist Harry Reis, what deepens individual relationships is “responsiveness”: mutual understanding, validation, and caring. • Stanton’s teachers showed responsiveness by listening to parents’ hopes for their kids. • In health care, caregivers are switching from the question “What’s the matter?” to “What matters to you?” • “Baggage-handling” customer service reps validate customers’ past experiences. 7. Responsiveness coupled with openness leads to intimacy. It happens via “turn-taking.” • Art Aron’s 36 Questions experiment leads total strangers to become intimate—in 45 minutes!

Once you realize how important moments can be, it’s easy to spot opportunities to shape them.

In the short term, we prioritize fixing problems over making moments, and that choice usually feels like a smart trade-off. But over time, it backfires.

“What would you do if you knew you would not live until 40?”

They were not receiving a moment, they were seizing it.

Stay alert to the promise that moments hold.

We can be the designers of moments that deliver elevation and insight and pride and connection. These extraordinary minutes and hours and days—they are what make life meaningful. And they are ours to create.