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Barbic was struck by the emotion of the “signing” moment: “It hits home—the sacrifices that everybody had to make for their kids to get there. No one did it alone. There were lots of people involved.” By the end of the ceremony, there were few dry eyes in the room.
We all have defining moments in our lives—meaningful experiences that stand out in our memory. Many of them owe a great deal to chance: A lucky encounter with someone who becomes the love of your life. A new teacher who spots a talent you didn’t know you had. A sudden loss that upends the certainties of your life. A realization that you don’t want to spend one more day in your job. These moments seem to be the product of fate or luck or maybe a higher power’s interventions. We can’t control them. But is that true? Must our defining moments just happen to us?
Senior Signing Day didn’t just happen. Chris Barbic and Donald Kamentz set out to create a defining moment for their students. When Mayra Valle and hundreds of other YES Prep graduates walked onto that stage, they stepped into a carefully crafted defining moment that was no less special for having been planned. It’s a moment they’ll never forget.
Defining moments shape our lives, but we don’t have to wait for them to happen. We ca...
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research has found that in recalling an experience, we ignore most of what happened and focus instead on a few particular moments.
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.”
we tend to remember flagship moments: the peaks, the pits, and the transitions.
The point here is simple: Some moments are vastly more meaningful than others.
For the sake of this book, a defining moment is a short experience that is both memorable and meaningful.
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.
Moments of elevation transcend the normal course of events; they are literally extraordinary.
INSIGHT: Defining moments rewire our understanding of ourselves or the world.
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.
Defining moments possess at least one of the four elements above, but they need not have all four.
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.
we must understand when special moments are needed. We must learn to think in moments, to spot the occasions that are worthy of investment.
Coming-of-age rituals are boundary markers, attempts to crisp up an otherwise gradual evolution from adolescence to adulthood.
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.
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.’ ”
If you’re struggling to make a transition, create a defining moment that draws a dividing line between Old You and New You.
To think in moments is to be attuned to transitions and milestones as well as to a third type of experience: pits. Pits are the opposite of peaks. They are negative defining moments—moments of hardship or pain or anxiety. Pits need to be filled.
Every great service company is a master of service recovery.
For most of the types of moments in this book—moments of elevation and connection and pride—almost any time is a good time. The more you can multiply them, the better. The point we’re emphasizing here is that certain circumstances demand attention. And particularly in organizations, these circumstances tend to go unnoticed, as with the neglected first-day experience.
Could banks learn to “think in moments”? What moments could a retail bank create?
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.
The absence or neglect of peaks is particularly glaring in organizations—from churches to schools to businesses—where relentless routines tend to grind them down from peaks to bumps.
Think of it as the first stage of a successful customer experience. First, you fill the pits. That, in turn, frees you up to focus on the second stage: creating the moments that will make the experience “occasionally remarkable.” Fill pits, then build peaks.
business leaders never pivot to that second stage. Instead, having filled the pits in their service, they scramble to pave the potholes—the minor problems and annoyances. It’s as though the leaders aspire to create a complaint-free service rather than an extraordinary one.
“Studies have consistently shown that reliability, dependability, and competence meet customer expectations,” said service expert Leonard Berry, a professor at Texas A&M University. “To exceed customer expectations and create a memorable experience, you need the behavioral and interpersonal parts of the service. You need the element of pleasant surprise. And that comes when human beings interact.” Here’s the surprise, though: Most service executives are ignoring the research about meeting versus exceeding expectations.
the happiest people in any industry tend to spend more, so moving a 4 to a 7 generates more additional spending than moving a 1 to a 4. Furthermore, there are dramatically more people in the “feeling positive” 4–6 zone than in the “feeling negative” 1–3 zone. So, with Plan B, you’re creating more financial value per person and reaching more people at the same time.
create fans, you need the remarkable, and that requires peaks. Peaks don’t emerge naturally. They must be built.
How do you build peaks? You create a positive moment with elements of elevation, insight, pride, and/or connection.
To elevate a moment, do three things: First, boost sensory appeal. Second, raise the stakes. Third, break the script. (Breaking the script means to violate expectations about an experience—the next chapter is devoted to the concept.) Moments of elevation need not have all three elements but most have at least two.
Boosting sensory appeal is about “turning up the volume” on reality. Things look better or taste better or sound better or feel better than they usually do.
To raise the stakes is to add an element of productive pressure: a competition, a game, a performance, a deadline, a public commitment.
Beware the soul-sucking force of “reasonableness.” Otherwise you risk deflating your peaks.
In the last chapter, we saw that creating moments of elevation involves boosting sensory pleasures and raising the stakes. Breaking the script—defying people’s expectations of how an experience will unfold—is the third method.
Familiarity and memorability are often at odds.
Executives who are leading change should be deliberate about creating peaks that demarcate the shift from the “old way” to the “new way.” The
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 lives—which is not even 20% of a typical life span—dominate our memories?
“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 from home, the first time we get much real choice over the way we spend our days.” Novelty even changes our perception of time.
This is the intuitive explanation for the common perception that time seems to accelerate as we get older. Our lives become more routine and less novel. We’re seeing more and more brown shoes and fewer alarm clocks.
As the authors of the book Surprise put it, “We feel most comfortable when things are certain, but we feel most alive when they’re not.”
Tripping over the truth is an insight that packs an emotional wallop. When you have a sudden realization, one that you didn’t see coming, and one that you know viscerally is right, you’ve tripped over the truth. It’s a defining moment that in an instant can change the way you see the world.
This three-part recipe—a (1) clear insight (2) compressed in time and (3) discovered by the audience itself—provides a blueprint for us when we want people to confront uncomfortable truths.
To trip over the truth is to catch one’s brain on something and struggle.
You can’t appreciate the solution until you appreciate the problem. So when we talk about “tripping over the truth,” we mean the truth about a problem or harm. That’s what sparks sudden insight.
