The Power of Moments: Why Certain Moments Have Extraordinary Impact

by Chip Heath

central element of Palmer’s approach to planning a course is called “backward-integrated design.” First, you identify your goals. Second, you figure out how you’d assess whether students had hit those goals. Third, you design activities that would prepare students to excel at those assessments.

“self-insight”—a mature understanding of our capabilities and motivations—and it’s correlated with an array of positive outcomes, ranging from good relationships to a sense of purpose in life. Self-insight and psychological well-being go together.

moments of self-insight sparked by “stretching.” To stretch is to place ourselves in situations that expose us to the risk of failure.

Research suggests that reflecting or ruminating on our thoughts and feelings is an ineffective way to achieve true understanding. Studying our own behavior is more fruitful.

Action leads to insight more often than insight leads to action.

Barbara Fredrickson, one of the researchers who pioneered the “peak-end principle,” argued that the reason we over-weight peaks in memory is that they serve as a kind of psychic price tag. They tell us, in essence, this is what it could cost you to endure that experience again.

What great mentors do is add two more elements: direction and support. I have high expectations for you and I know you can meet them. So try this new challenge and if you fail, I’ll help you recover. That’s mentorship in two sentences. It sounds simple, yet it’s powerful enough to transform careers.

Some entrepreneurs win, some entrepreneurs lose. What they share is a willingness to put themselves in a situation where they can fail. It’s always safer to stay put—you can’t stumble when you stand still.

The promise of stretching is not success, it’s learning. It’s self-insight. It’s the promise of gleaning the answers to some of the most important and vexing questions of our lives: What do we want? What can we do? Who can we be? What can we endure?

Moments of elevation lift us above the everyday. Moments of insight spark discoveries about our world and ourselves. And moments of pride capture us at our best—showing courage, earning recognition, conquering challenges.

First, regardless of how skilled we are, it’s usually having our skill noticed by others that sparks the moment of pride.

The common goal to “get in shape” is ambiguous and unmotivating. Pursuing it puts you on a path with no clear destination and no intermediate moments to celebrate. Couch to 5K provides a structure that respects the power of moments.

our lives, we tend to declare goals without intervening levels. We declare that we’re going to “learn to play the guitar.” We take a lesson or two, buy a cheap guitar, futz around with simple chords for a few weeks.

By using Kamb’s level-up strategy, we multiply the number of motivating milestones we encounter en route to a goal. That’s a forward-looking strategy: We’re anticipating moments of pride ahead. But the opposite is also possible: to surface those milestones you’ve already met but might not have noticed.

A numerical goal plus supporting plans. Notice what that combination leaves us with: A destination that is not inherently motivating and that lacks meaningful milestones along the way.

Restore the milestones. Level up: Go one week straight without using the elevator. Pick out 2 microbrews to enjoy on Saturday after a full week without booze. If I jog continuously for three songs on my playlist, that entitles me to download three new ones. And so on.

To identify milestones like these, ask yourself: What’s inherently motivating? (Getting a glowing thank-you.) What would be worth celebrating that might only take a few weeks or months of work? (Solving the number one complaint.) What’s a hidden accomplishment that is worth surfacing and celebrating? (Making it a full week without any 1s.)

Hitting a milestone sparks pride. It should also spark a celebration—a moment of elevation. (Don’t forget that milestones, along with pits and transitions, are three natural defining moments that deserve extra attention.) Milestones deserve peaks.

Cal Newport, an author and computer science professor, spent years studying the habits of successful people. “From my experience, the most common trait you will consistently observe in accomplished people is an obsession with completion. Once a project falls into their horizon, they crave almost compulsively, to finish it.”

What milestones do is compel us to make that push, because (a) they’re within our grasp, and (b) we’ve chosen them precisely because they’re worth reaching for. Milestones define moments that are conquerable and worth conquering.

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

You can’t manufacture “moments of courage.” But in this chapter we’ll see that you can practice courage so that, when the moment demands it, you’ll be ready.

Managing fear—the goal of exposure therapy—is a critical part of courage.

when people make advance mental commitments—if X happens, then I will do Y—they are substantially more likely to act in support of their goals than people who lack those mental plans.

Gollwitzer calls these plans “implementation intentions,” and often the trigger for the plan is as simple as a time and place: When I leave work today, I’m going to drive straight to the gym. The success rate is striking.

people often know what the right thing to do is. The hard part is acting on that judgment.

ethics education should focus not on WHAT is the right thing to do? but rather on HOW can I get the right thing done?

The heart of her strategy is practice. You identify situations where an ethical issue might arise. You anticipate the rationalizations you’ll hear for the behavior. Then you literally script out your possible response or action. And finally you practice that response with peers. Leaders who want to instill an ethical business culture—and not just mouth the words of a toothless “statement of values”—will take inspiration from Gentile and make practice a priority.

A crucial feature of practicing courage, then, is making sure the practice requires courage!

Practice quiets the anxiety that can cloud our mind in a tough moment. When we lack practice, our good intentions often falter.

An act of courage can bolster the resolve of others.

One study found that 85% of workers felt “unable to raise an issue or concern to their bosses even though they felt the issue was important.”

There’s a classic study, conducted by Charlan Nemeth and Cynthia Chiles, demonstrating that one act of courage supports another. Let’s say you are a participant in the study. You are matched with three other people, and a researcher shows your group a series of 20 slides. After each one is presented, the researcher pauses to ask each of you what color the slide is. It’s an easy task: All the slides are blue, and all four of you say “blue” all 20 times you’re asked. Then, that group breaks up and you are put into a new group of four. Same task. This time, though, the first slide is red. Oddly, all three of your group-mates call it “orange.” What will you call it? It certainly looks red, but could you be wrong? This happens 19 more times—your group-mates always call the slides “orange” and, each time, everyone looks at you to hear your answer. If you think you would stay strong in this situation, you might be right, but you’d be in the minority. Most people in the study caved. On average, they called 14 of the 20 red slides “orange,” conforming to the majority’s incorrect view. (The three people in the group who claimed all the red slides were “orange” were, as you might have guessed, confederates of the researchers.)

Another set of participants were ushered through the sequence above but with one crucial difference: This time, the researchers also added a confederate to the first group (the one viewing blue slides). He was instructed to call all the blue sides “green.” Let’s call him the Brave but Wrong Guy. The other three (normal) participants were probably puzzled by his seeming color-blindness, but they easily stuck to their guns, calling all the blue slides “blue.” The striking change came in the second group. The participants were shown the red slides, and as described above, the three confederates continually called them “orange.” This time, though, the participants stayed strong! They defied the majority, labeling 17 out of 20 slides (on average) as red. Note that they were brave even though they hadn’t practiced courage themselves. They’d only witnessed it. Brave but Wrong Guy was willing to speak up for himself—even though he was mistaken about the color. That act of dissent bolstered the other participants’ resolve. As the researchers wrote, “exposure to a dissenting minority view, even when that view is in error, contributes to independence.”

The bad news here is that our natural instinct is to cave to the majority opinion. If everyone says the red card is orange, we think we must be wrong, and we call it orange, too. The good news is that if even one person is brave enough to defy the majority, we are emboldened. We...

You can’t deliver a great patient experience without first delivering a great employee experience.

for groups, defining moments arise when we create shared meaning—highlighting the mission that binds us together and supersedes our differences. We are made to feel united.

three strategies: creating a synchronized moment, inviting shared struggle, and connecting to meaning. We’ll explore all three and how they can be applied

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. I’m part of your group.

Remote contact is perfectly suitable for day-to-day communication and collaboration. But a big moment needs to be shared in person.

The researchers concluded that perceived pain increases “prosociality,” or voluntary behavior to benefit others. They argued that extreme rituals—and specifically the shared experience of pain—can be seen as “social technology to bind in-groups together.”

Imagine the bonding that emerges among people who struggle together at a task that means something: Activists fighting to protect a forest from clear-cutting. Start-up cofounders scrambling to meet the next payroll. Religious missionaries, in a distant part of the world, enduring daily rejection in the service of their faith.

it’s worth observing that people will choose to struggle—not avoid it or resist it—if the right conditions are present. The conditions are: The work means something to them; they have some autonomy in carrying it out; and it’s their choice to participate or not.

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.)

Passion is individualistic. It can energize us but also isolate us, because my passion isn’t yours. By contrast, purpose is something people can share. It can knit groups together.

purpose isn’t discovered, it’s cultivated.

When you understand the ultimate contribution you’re making, it allows you to transcend the task list.

Our relationships are stronger when we perceive that our partners are responsive to us.

When responsiveness is coupled with openness, though, intimacy can develop quickly.

And that’s a critical distinction. Some defining moments are orchestrated. But many other moments we’ve encountered are plunged into: