1-Page Summary

Important and memorable moments—the grand events of your life that make you who you are, like your wedding or the first time you met your grandchild—are naturally meaningful to you. But smaller, everyday experiences—like a day at the beach or a fulfilling conversation with a friend—hold just as much power.

According to authors Chip and Dan Heath, these daily defining moments—short, memorable experiences that are meaningful to you—are happening around you constantly. You can learn to recognize their potential and apply time, effort, and strategic thought to turn them into defining moments that shape memories or change perceptions.

Investing in these smaller moments can enhance your life in myriad ways. A well-engineered defining moment can have a tangible outcome like increased revenue from satisfied clients or improved test scores from motivated students. Other times, you’ll create defining moments with a more personal objective—deeper relationships with your friends and family, a better understanding of yourself and your values and motivations, or mentees who are confident in taking on new challenges.

(Shortform note: Several reviewers of The Power of Moments questioned whether defining moments can ever feel “real” if they’re engineered. This criticism misses a central idea of the Heaths’ argument—defining moments already exist and therefore are genuine. “Engineering” moments doesn’t mean staging a false event—it simply means giving attention and effort to important events that might otherwise go undetected.)

What Makes for a Defining Moment

Before they get into different methods of creating such moments, the Heaths discuss two foundational aspects of defining moments: They’re both meaningful and memorable.

The Four Elements That Create Meaning

To engineer meaning, the Heaths say your moment should incorporate at least one of four emotion-boosting elements:

  1. Elevation: The moment is elevated beyond everyday experience, either through sensory pleasures or the element of surprise.
  2. Insight: The moment helps you discover something new about the world or yourself. Often, these moments have a transformative and influential effect on the course of your life.
  3. Pride: The moment gives you a sense of validation around your achievements or a sense of pride in your actions.
  4. Connection: The moment makes you feel more deeply connected to whoever shares it with you, and strengthens your relationship with them.
Shortform Commentary: Where These Four Elements Come From

The Heaths don’t note the exact research that led them to these four elements, but their ideas align closely with those of psychologist Abraham Maslow. Maslow is well-known for his “hierarchy of needs”, which describes the requirements for a person to become self-actualizing—constantly growing, discovering, and finding meaning in her life. There are five tiers to the hierarchy:

The Heaths’ four elements align with Maslow’s three “higher needs” of self-actualization, esteem, and belonging:

In short, elevation, insight, pride, and connection are the elements that allow humans to live, not simply survive.

What Makes a Moment Memorable?

While the Heaths discuss what makes a moment meaningful, they don’t delve into what makes it memorable, which is the second characteristic of a defining moment. In order to be memorable, most defining moments should have an aspect of novelty or unexpectedness. Unexpectedness is important because when you experience emotions in a moment of surprise, you experience them more intensely than you would in an “everyday” situation.

These high-intensity emotions send a signal to your brain that something important is happening—your brain responds by paying more attention than usual to the event at hand, while blocking out unrelated, external stimuli.

Moments Defined by Elevation

Moments defined by elevation transcend everyday patterns and impart positive feelings like delight, motivation, and engagement. In short, elevated moments are the positive peaks that you look back on fondly.

(Shortform note: In his hierarchy, Maslow lists “peak experiences'' as a component of the highest need, self-actualization. Maslow described peak experiences as small, everyday events that give us a feeling of newness or delight—in other words, as with elevated moments, we transcend everyday dullness.)

There are three ways to use elevation: Increase sensory pleasure, raise the stakes, and go off script with strategic surprise. Successful, memorable moments incorporate at least two of these methods.

Strategy 1: Increase Sensory Pleasure

Increasing sensory pleasure depends on making a moment look, feel, taste, or sound better than what you’re used to. For instance, getting dressed up to go out to a fancy restaurant looks, feels, and tastes different from eating in your sweatpants on the couch.

(Shortform note: The Heaths don’t discuss which sensory appeals work best, but numerous studies have concluded that memory links most strongly to your sense of smell. You can use this information to engineer small, special moments in a variety of contexts. For example, you might wear a certain “date night” perfume or cologne to make outings with your partner feel more special, or bake a certain type of cookie every Friday afternoon with your kids—each time you smell these particular scents, you’ll recall happy memories of your experiences.)

Strategy 2: Heighten the Stakes

The second way to elevate a moment is to raise the stakes. The Heaths explain that adding high stakes to a situation makes an otherwise flat, unengaging experience into a standout, exciting experience—for instance when you look back at your high school career, you’ll more likely remember your debate team championship than your algebra classes.

(Shortform note: One reason that high-stakes experiences stand out in your memory may be that the prospect of a high reward forces your brain to use long-term memory to “help out” your short-term working memory. As a result, your attention is more fully focused on the event—your brain re-engages in order to process all the information you’re taking in.)

Strategy 3: Go Off Script

The last method of elevating a moment is going off script, which the Heaths define as acting in a way that goes against what people expect. Meaningfully going off script doesn’t mean completely upending the scripts of your life. Memorable experiences are not wholly amazing—they’re largely mundane, with one or two exceptional peaks. Your goal, then, is to deliberately punctuate overall familiar and comfortable scripts with one or two strategic surprises.

(Shortform note: These strategic surprises are surprises that break behavioral patterns (or scripts) in a way that challenges assumptions about what comes next and draws the audience in.)

Example: The Difference Between Easy Surprises and Strategic Surprises

You want to make your weekly HR meeting more engaging. There are two ways you might go about it:

Moments Defined by Insight

The second element you can use to create defining moments is insight. Moments defined by insight inspire realizations or transformations that affect your future choices and actions. The Heaths suggest three ways you can spark meaningful, memorable insight: forcing others to confront an uncomfortable truth, putting yourself in situations where you must confront self-truths, and mentoring others.

1) Force Someone to Confront a Truth

The Heaths first explore how you can spark insight in others by setting up a moment in which they will be forced to confront an uncomfortable truth. They note three essential factors to making the moment defining:

  1. Have a clear conclusion: Know exactly what conclusion you want your audience to come to. This is often the easiest part of the process—you usually know exactly what truth needs revealing.
  2. Operate on a short time frame: Create a situation that will guide your audience to their discovery over a matter of minutes or hours, or even more immediately.
  3. Allow audience discovery: Let the audience discover the conclusion themselves, instead of telling them what to do.

These factors result in an “aha! moment,” or what psychologist Roy Baumeister dubbed the crystallization of discontent: a sudden moment in which any vague negativity or discomfort you’re feeling suddenly crystallizes in a pattern—you discover links between seemingly unrelated issues and the core problem becomes startlingly clear.

Why These Three Factors?

These three factors are crucial to creating insight because together, they replicate the conditions of a spontaneous crystallization of discontent. In her book Radical Acceptance, author Tara Brach discusses the Alcoholics Anonymous program, which notes that an addict begins changing when they hit rock bottom, an experience that echoes the Heaths’ three factors:

Example: Get Your Boss to See a Problem

Imagine that you work on the website design of a major retailer. You know the site isn’t user-friendly, but you’re not able to get your higher-ups to approve funding to do a UX overhaul. You arrange a one-hour meeting with them, where you pull up a retail website and ask everyone to accomplish a simple task, such as making a purchase or leaving a review.

It quickly becomes obvious that the site is an unusable mess and your higher-ups become frustrated. You agree with their frustrations and then make your big reveal: except for the products, the website and its functions are an exact copy of your company’s website. This is how clients feel when they are interacting with your site. Your higher-ups have their aha! moment and approve funding for your project.

2) Set Up a Situation for Self-Insight

The Heaths explain that using insight to create defining moments for yourself depends on pushing your boundaries—you must put yourself in situations that expose you to the possibility of failure. This is because the process of stepping outside of your comfort zone and risking failure leads to what psychologists call “self-insight”: an understanding of your values, abilities, goals, and motivations.

When you put yourself in risky situations, either you will succeed or you will fail. While success is certainly a reason to celebrate, keep in mind that failures—and the valuable learning opportunities they offer—should be celebrated as well.

How Failure Helps Us Learn About Ourselves

Barbara Frederickson and Daniel Kahneman (author of Thinking, Fast and Slow) found that the brain uses the emotional climaxes of experiences as “price tags” or reference points when recalling an experience. We use these reference points to determine whether repeating the experience is worth the “cost.” The negative emotions of failure create a reference point that acts as a type of warning: “If you continue on this route, it will cost you—you’ll feel these negative emotions again.”

Shortform Commentary: Why You May Need a Mentor

Self-insight is a great reward for taking on new challenges, but actually pushing yourself into situations that come with a risk of failure can be very difficult, especially in the current global trend of people holding themselves to impossibly high standards of perfection. To break out of this mindset, it’s helpful to seek out a mentor who can support you through the process of leaving your comfort zone and exposing yourself to the possibility of failure.

(Note: Read our guide to Ryan Holiday’s Ego Is the Enemy to learn how to choose an appropriate mentor, ask them for their help, and develop a mutually beneficial relationship.)

The following section is geared toward mentors trying to push mentees into defining moments of self-insight. However, it can also help you, as a mentee, understand what makes for a great mentor and the benefits of seeking one out.

3) Push Others Into Self-Insight as a Mentor

As a mentor, your job is to push your mentee into situations that will spark her self-insight, providing the type of productive pressure that helps coax out her best self. The Heaths note that great mentors do four key things: Set high expectations, express confidence in the mentee, provide direction, and assure support. This formula sends the message, “I have high expectations, but I know you can reach them. I will present new challenges to you, and I will have your back if you fail.”

How the Mentorship Formula Cultivates a Growth Mindset

Your mentee can experience more instances of self-insight if you help her change the way she thinks about risk and failure. In Mindset, Carol S. Dweck explains that people typically have one of two mindsets:

As a mentor, you want to help your mentee cultivate a growth mindset. The Heaths’ four-part formula helps touch on several aspects of guiding someone into this mindset:

Moments Defined by Pride

The third element you can use to create a defining moment is pride. Moments defined by pride surface and celebrate your best self—the “you” who earns recognition for your efforts, crushes ambitious goals, and acts with courage in situations that call for it. The Heaths suggest three strategies for multiplying instances of achievement and recognition:

  1. Build small, personally motivating “wins” into the journey toward a big goal.
  2. Recognize others’ efforts and make their progress visible.
  3. Prepare yourself to act with courage when necessary.

Strategy 1: Create and Celebrate Small Wins

The Heaths explain that everyone approaches goals differently: Some people might feel that accomplishing the goal is the only thing to be proud of, and others might think the journey to the goal is just as important as the goal itself. The Heaths suggest enhancing the instances of pride you feel while working toward a goal by adding small, personally motivating wins into the journey.

(Shortform note: Recall the fixed mindset and growth mindset discussion from Carol S. Dweck’s Mindset: Those with a fixed mindset often only care about the achievement of the goal, and those with a growth mindset can more easily see the value of the journey. The Heaths’ suggested strategy of celebrating small wins is helpful because it caters to both these mindsets. The frequent achievements cater to those with a fixed mindset, and the value placed on the pursuit of a goal caters to those with a growth mindset.)

Goals are often too large and ambiguous, and it’s all too easy to get lost along the way between Here and There or become discouraged or demotivated. Building small, achievable, and fun wins into the journey toward your goal serves several important purposes:

(Shortform note: Studies have also shown that continuously celebrating small achievements is a fairly easy way to boost your overall happiness—it’s much easier to continue pursuing a goal when it feels good, or even fun, rather than like a chore.)

For example, if you want to lose weight, it’s best to abandon the old, vague roadmap of “eat healthy and exercise.” Think of small goals that feel like causes for celebration to you such as using the stairs instead of the elevator, cutting out soda for 30 days, going for a drink with friends when you hit 10,000 steps for the day, and logging 50 Zumba classes.

Strategy 2: Recognize Efforts and Progress

The Heaths note that there’s a common misconception that people who work hard are likely to feel proud of their work. It’s not so simple: Pride doesn’t come from hard work alone—it comes from the results of your hard work being noticed.

(Shortform note: Research shows that the strongest indicator of productivity is how a team member feels—if she feels positively toward her organization and herself and is motivated by her work, her productive performance will naturally increase. Team leaders, therefore, should focus their efforts on their team members’ feelings. The research determined that the most effective way to lift a team member’s mood is to make sure that she has a consistent sense that she’s making progress in meaningful work—what the researchers dubbed the progress principle.)

Recognition is the easiest way to use the progress principle to create pride for others. Pride that comes from recognition is especially memorable—largely because it’s so rarely practiced. When practicing recognition, your focus should be on the frequency of your praise, not the grandeur. People feel most satisfied when their efforts are being recognized consistently, not just when they accomplish a big goal.

(Shortform note: The progress principle specifies that team members who have a consistent sense of their progress experience heightened mood and productivity. Frequent recognition meets this need as well as reminding the team member that their work has meaning.)

Strategy 3: Prepare Yourself Mentally for Courage

The Heaths say that the third way to create pride is to act with courage—standing up for someone else, calling out injustice, or fighting for something we believe in.

(Shortform note: In Dare to Lead, Brené Brown—an expert on shame and vulnerability—explains “practicing courage” as developing unwavering integrity: A commitment to acting in alignment with what you understand, personally, to be the right thing to do—even in situations that make you feel vulnerable or exposed to the risk of failure.)

The Heaths note that while you might not have any control over when opportunities to act with courage appear, you do have control over how you react to these opportunities.

Usually, when you see something wrong or unjust, you don’t react right away, or at all—most people don’t naturally know how to immediately react to these situations. Without a specific planned response, we end up spending too much time deliberating what we should or could say or do, and miss the moment.

(Shortform note: In their book Switch, the Heaths put a name to this phenomenon of clamming up when faced with the task of making a choice—decision paralysis. When presented with numerous options or ambiguity, we’re predisposed to conserving our mental energy by defaulting to whatever decision feels easiest or most familiar, or not doing anything at all.)

To avoid decision paralysis, plan out exactly how you’d respond to an opportunity to act with courage—what the Heaths call “preloaded responses.” Preloaded responses are reactions that you’ve drilled into your memory so that they’re immediately ready in a situation that calls for it.

While thinking of your preloaded responses, ask, “How can I get the right thing done?” This question asserts that you know what’s right and now must make it happen. It’s not a matter of what you should do, but what you will do.

Shortform Commentary: Support Preloaded Responses With Precommitments

Asserting that you know the right thing to do and planning out how to make it happen can apply to smaller, very personal moments of courage as well. Doing the right thing and acting with integrity matters, even if you’re doing it just for yourself. To help you with this, you might support your preloaded response with a precommitment—a pact you make with yourself about the way you’ll act in a certain situation.

In his book Indistractable, Nir Eyal outlines several ways you can use precommitments to push yourself into doing the right thing:

Moments Defined by Connection

The fourth element you can use to create a defining moment is connection. Moments defined by connection are experiences that can strengthen your group relationships or deepen your individual relationships.

Part 1: Use Connection to Strengthen Group Relationships

Defining moments for groups happen in experiences that create a shared meaning for everyone present—experiences that underscore the mission everyone is working toward together. These experiences are essential for reminding the group members that they’re united in something important and larger than themselves. The Heaths identify three steps to create moments of connection for groups: 1) Create a shared moment, 2) Allow for voluntary struggle, and 3) Reconnect members with their work’s meaning.

Why These Three Strategies Strengthen Groups

In his book The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle reveals three crucial psychological elements that solidify one’s place within a culture and contribute to the success of a group: safety, vulnerability, and purpose. Each of the Heaths’ three steps helps establish these elements:

1) Create a shared moment: The social reality of being together with a group of people working toward the same cause is essential to understanding the magnitude of the group’s impact.

(Shortform note: Researchers find that remote work contributes strongly to lower employee job satisfaction and motivation. Many employees attribute this to a lack of social contact (or shared moments): Without the opportunity to meaningfully collaborate and chat with colleagues or see the impact of their work on clients, the work experience becomes endless, disengaging flatness.)

2) Allow for voluntary struggle: People naturally create strong bonds when they are struggling together, but they need to have chosen to be part of it. People who are forced to take on extra work become resentful and disengaged, whereas those who choose to struggle will have a genuine connection to the work and to others who do the extra work for the same reasons.

(Shortform note: Shared struggle is a powerful bonding tool—the Heaths discuss how it might bring together people who are already part of the same group, but studies have shown that pain or struggle enhances bonding in groups of people without any shared identity. Part of the reason for this is that struggle naturally forces group members to ask for help and show vulnerability, which is a foundational element of relationship-building.)

3) Reconnect with work’s meaning: Group members need to know that their work is much larger than themselves—you have to cultivate a group’s sense of purpose by showing them the impact of their work. Purpose is what allows people to see beyond their mundane or difficult individual tasks and feel a significant connection to the larger mission.

(Shortform note: Many organizations try to cultivate their employees’ passion instead of their purpose, but passion is a poor motivator that has caused a recent decline in workplace satisfaction: Studies cited in Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You show that only 45% of Americans report being happy with their jobs, likely because they feel that they should be doing something that aligns with their passions.)

Part 2: Use Connection to Deepen Individual Relationships

The Heaths explain that, contrary to what you might think, relationships do not naturally deepen or grow stronger over time. Without regular maintenance, relationships easily plateau—they won’t develop any further without a bit of engineering. A properly maintained relationship has positive peaks that serve as the defining moments that deepen the relationship.

In relationships, these positive peaks happen in instances of responsiveness—engagement with someone else that makes it clear that you’re listening to and care about them. Responsiveness conveys three essential messages:

Responsiveness in Personal Relationships

In personal relationships, responsiveness is part of a formula: vulnerability + responsiveness = intimacy. In practice, this formula looks fairly simple: You share something (vulnerability) and then wait to see if the other person shares something in return (responsiveness). By choosing to respond, they express respect, understanding, and support.

The Heaths stress that intimacy doesn’t come from either responsiveness or vulnerability alone—it’s crucial that there’s an exchange between the two. When completed, this simple exchange allows the relationship to progress and deepen instead of plateauing. Keep in mind that this exchange doesn’t happen naturally—someone needs to take the first step to start the cycle of vulnerability. If you want richer, deeper connections, you must either be willing to be open with others or recognize when others are opening up to you.

The Importance of Aligning Expression and Reception

The Heaths’ approach to responsiveness is somewhat one-size-fits-all: Someone expresses vulnerability, and by expressing vulnerability in exchange, you reveal that you see them, care about them, and understand them. A crucially important point that this approach misses is that not everyone gives and receives support, understanding, and respect the same way.

Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages is well-known for its lessons in determining what actions make you and those in your life feel seen and understood. The book focuses on the way we express love through five “languages'': acts of service, physical touch, words of affirmation, gifts, and quality time. Knowing someone’s love language means that when they open up to you, you can respond to their vulnerability in a way that aligns with the way they view understanding and care—thereby deepening your relationship.

For example, your friend reveals to you that she’s behind on a project at work and is worried she’ll be fired if she doesn’t get it done.

Conclusion: What Defining Moments Give Us

Looking for moments that you can enhance with elevation, pride, connection, or insight can multiply the rich experiences that make your life meaningful. Focusing on meaningful moments is a way to reconnect with what’s important to a well-lived life. Investment in these moments offers you the opportunity to re-engage with your life and fight against the everyday flatness that causes days, months, and years to speed by.

Shortform Introduction

In The Power of Moments, brothers Chip and Dan Heath examine what makes certain moments more special or memorable than others. They propose four elements—elevation, insight, pride, and connection—you can engineer into small, everyday moments to make them exceptional. These lessons are applicable in all areas of life: Make richer memories with your children, increase employee loyalty, and give clients an experience they’ll never forget.

About the Authors

Chip and Dan Heath are brothers and co-authors. Chip is a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Additionally, he’s worked with 530 startups, helping them refine their business strategies and missions. Dan is a senior fellow at the Duke University CASE center, where he works with social entrepreneurs, helping them broaden their impact and fight for social good.

Together, they’ve written four bestselling books: Made to Stick, Switch, Decisive, and The Power of Moments. Their writing is often compared to that of Malcolm Gladwell, writer of popular psychology books like Outliers and Blink: Like Gladwell, they bring the concepts they discuss to life with entertaining anecdotes. This accessible style has helped many readers connect with tricky ideas around business strategy and human behavior, garnering their books rave reviews around the world.

Connect with Chip and Dan:

The Book’s Publication

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Published in 2017, The Power of Moments is the Heath brothers’ fourth book. Due to the international success of their three previous books, The Power of Moments was highly anticipated and became an instant New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller.

The Book’s Context

The Heaths’ focus on making the most of present moments dovetails with an increasing interest in personal fulfillment and happiness, partly in reaction to our society’s obsession with busyness and the pressure to always be “on.” Tired of being buried in work and social media upkeep as life’s richest moments pass them by, people are increasingly working on turning their focus to engaging more fully with the present (or living mindfully) and accumulating experiences rather than material things.

While the book may appeal on a personal level to a preoccupation with living in the now, it also appeals on a professional level to organizations by suggesting ways that they can use memorable moments to retain both employees and clients:

When employees and clients have unlimited choice, organizations must step up and continually create special, memorable experiences that boost satisfaction and loyalty.

The Book’s Strengths and Weaknesses

Critical Reception

Reviews for The Power of Moments are generally positive. Many agree that the concepts of the book are accessible, eye-opening, and strikes a good balance in speaking to both the professional and personal experience.

Positive reviewers also commend the book for approaching the self-help genre from a new angle—instead of handing out tired clichés or directing readers to make major changes to their lives, the Heaths push readers to reflect on and recognize the life-enriching opportunities they already have. Finally, reviewers like that the Heaths don’t exclusively examine success and why things work—they take care to explore failures and explain why things don’t work.

On the other hand, Publishers Weekly and other negative reviews bring up several points of criticism. First, they suggest that the book’s principles and suggested actions skew too much toward corporations and the ways organizations might use memorable moments to increase client or employee satisfaction and loyalty, rather than discussing ways that individuals or families can apply the principles to their personal lives.

Second, the Heaths seem to gloss over a glaring question: When you’re engineering special, meaningful moments, can they ever truly feel genuine? To some, the Heaths’ process of analyzing data and pinpointing patterns seems far too rational for real, lived moments.

Commentary on the Book’s Approach

As mentioned, the Heaths express their ideas in an approachable way, weaving together research and suggested applications of their ideas with entertaining case studies and anecdotes.

For the most part, they discuss both successful and unsuccessful types of moments in an attempt to convey why the actions they discuss are critical. Additionally, they attempt to strike a balance between professional and personal examples and applications of their ideas (but, as reviewers suggest, the book seems to skew more toward professionals.)

Commentary on the Book’s Organization

The Heaths start with a discussion of memory, exploring some of the psychological phenomena behind why we remember the things that we do. From there, they build into a discussion of “defining moments”: Memorable and meaningful moments that can be engineered by adding positive, memorable events to experiences such as transitions, milestones, and negative situations. Throughout the rest of the book, they discuss four elements that you can add to these experiences in order to make them defining:

(Note: The Heaths flip-flop between calling elevation, insight, pride, and connection “elements” of defining moments and “types” of defining moments. We’ve chosen to use “elements” throughout—both for consistency and to underscore the Heaths’ point that everyday, forgettable moments become memorable when enhanced with certain elements.)

Our Approach in This Guide

We’ve extended the authors’ ideas to fill the gaps that reviewers’ two main criticisms highlight—that the book caters too much to a corporate audience and doesn’t explain how engineered moments can be genuine.

To address the first critique, we’ve introduced more examples that better demonstrate how the Heaths’ principles work in both professional and personal settings.

To address the second critique, we’ve reorganized some of the book’s content and added commentary to better explain the psychology behind memorable moments and clarify how the impact of defining moments can be genuine, even if the moment itself is staged.

A weakness in the Heaths’ organization is that they only discuss the power of novelty or surprise in moments that use the element of elevation. However, novelty or surprise is an essential addition to all four elements because unexpectedness is what makes certain moments stand out in your memory. Consequently, we’ve moved the discussion of novelty and unexpectedness to the first chapter on the psychology of memory, in order to include it in our core understanding of what makes a moment both meaningful and memorable.

Finally, the Heaths occasionally focus on the successes of their selected case studies without fully discussing the underlying circumstances or psychological phenomena that contributed to the moment’s success. In these instances, we’ve added commentary to fully explore reasons for the success of the Heaths’ chosen case studies.

Chapter 1: The Psychology Behind Memory

Large, important moments of your life—such as your wedding or the birth of your first child—naturally stand out in your memory. What’s less obvious is that with a bit of thought and effort, you can engineer small, everyday moments to stand out in your memory just as much as these big moments.

These small, memorable experiences are called defining moments because they have the potential to change the way you think, shape your perceptions of an experience, or establish new connections.

Two Psychological Phenomena That Form Defining Moments

Before trying to engineer memorable moments, it’s important to understand how memory works. There are two psychological phenomena that determine which experiences tend to stand out in your memory.

1) The Peak-End Rule

It’s obvious why some events—like marriage, or having kids—would stand out on the timeline of your life. But what about smaller, simpler moments such as a particular family vacation or an outing with a friend?

Typically, the way you recall special memories is shaped by the “peak-end rule,” proposed by psychologists Barbara Frederickson and Daniel Kahneman (author of Thinking, Fast and Slow). The peak-end rule states that when people reflect on an experience, they tend to ignore the duration of the experience. Instead, they focus on two key parts:

  1. The emotional peaks—the moments of strongest positive or negative emotion
  2. The end of the experience.

Imagine you spend a day at the beach with your kids. The drive is long, and it’s cloudy when you arrive. As you set up your umbrella and blanket, the sun finally peeks out. Around lunchtime, your kids are delighted to see a pod of dolphins playing just offshore. By the end of the day, everyone is exhausted, sunburned, and a little cranky. You pack up just before dark and spot an ice cream truck on the walk to the car, so everyone ends the day snacking on their favorite ice cream.

If you were asked about your day right after finishing your ice cream, you’d reflect on all the events of the day and chalk it up to a fairly average experience. However, if you were approached several weeks later and asked to reflect on the day, you’d likely give it a rave review. This is because, according to the peak-end rule, the parts of the day that will stand out in your memory are seeing dolphins (the peak) and eating your favorite ice cream with your kids (the end). All the other parts of the day—the cloudy sky, the sunburn, the long drive—fade into the background of these two positive experiences.

Our Terminology in This Guide

Throughout the book, the Heaths use “peak” to mean positive defining moments. In contrast, Kahneman uses “peak” to mean an experience’s most intense emotions—positive or negative.

To avoid confusion between these multiple meanings—while preserving the Heaths’ useful visual of “peaks” and “pits” against the “flatness” of everyday life—we’ll use the following terminology:

Longer Timelines Warp the Peak-End Rule

Kahneman’s research shows that the peak-end rule holds when an experience is relatively short and has a definite beginning and end—a day at the beach or a week of camping, for example. However, the Heaths explain that when it comes to recalling long-term experiences, the peak-end rule changes.

Peak: Peaks retain their importance—that is, one or two exceptional moments can make a mundane experience stand out in your memory as wholly amazing.

End: On the other hand, endings tend to lose their importance and blur with beginnings. When you left college and headed into your first job, it was both an ending and a beginning. When it comes to long-term experiences, it makes more sense to think in terms of transitions rather than beginnings and endings.

This builds to the Heaths’ main point: When you think back on your life, you won’t recall every moment, nor will you consider your life’s “average” happiness. Your memory will naturally highlight positive peaks and transitional experiences.

Your Experiencing Self Versus Your Remembering Self

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman underscores the benefits of focusing on the creation of exceptional moments in the present. His research reveals that we have two “selves”:

You tend to naturally give more weight to your remembering self because you make most of your decisions based on your memory of an event. Kahneman, however, suggests that you can have more pleasure by consciously giving more weight to your experiencing self, spending more time creating moment-to-moment happiness. The Heaths’ creation of defining moments that increase our day-to-day happiness and engagement aligns with this argument.

2) Novelty or Unexpectedness

A second reason defining moments stand out is that your brain responds more actively to novelty than it does to routine. Imagine you were watching identical images of a dolphin flash across a screen, every image appearing for exactly two seconds. Suddenly, in the middle of all these dolphins, a photo of a red backpack flashes across the screen for exactly two seconds. A psychological study has found that, if you were to report afterward how long each image stayed on the screen, you would claim that the red backpack was on the screen for significantly more time than the identical dolphins, even though every image was shown for two seconds.

This happens because after seeing the same image multiple times, your brain doesn’t need to process any more information about it and “checks out.” When the new image suddenly appears, your brain re-engages. It processes a lot of new information in the same amount of time it was previously processing no new information—this tricks you into thinking you were seeing the image for a longer period of time.

The Reminiscence Bump

The way the brain responds to novelty reveals a key idea about memory and the importance of creating defining moments. If you were to reflect on your life and name the most memorable events, it’s likely that most of the named events occurred in your late adolescence and early adulthood. This is called the “reminiscence bump,” and it happens because you experienced many “firsts” between the ages of 15 and 30, such as your first kiss, your first job, or your first apartment. Because of the inherent novelty of these firsts, they stand out in your memory. However, after about age 30, your “firsts” naturally reduce and there are fewer opportunities to experience novelty—the flat routine of everyday life takes over and your brain, seeing the same “image” again and again, disengages. This is why time seems to speed up as you get older.

By creating experiences of novelty or unexpectedness, you create “red backpacks” that stand out against the monotonous “dolphins” of your life. They re-engage your brain and force you to process new information—not only does this allow you to more fully experience and enjoy moments and create richer memories, but it also makes you feel that time is passing more slowly.

(Shortform note: Our brains are hardwired to respond to novelty because this trait had a large part in our evolution and survival. The survival of biological species depends on being able to detect novel, and possibly threatening, additions to their environment. Following Darwin’s survival of the fittest theory, humans whose brains had a strong response to novel stimuli were able to respond more quickly to attacks or natural disasters and therefore survive, whereas those with a weak response to novelty were more likely to be caught off guard and die off.)

What Does This Mean for Defining Moments?

So far, the Heaths have explained that increasing the number of defining moments in your life means that you have more positive memories to look back on and a more present, slowed-down engagement with your life.

Before they get into different methods of creating such moments, the Heaths discuss two foundational aspects of defining moments: they’re both meaningful and memorable.

What Makes a Moment Meaningful?

To engineer meaning, the Heaths say your moment should incorporate at least one of four emotion-boosting elements:

  1. Elevation: The moment is elevated beyond everyday experience, either through sensory pleasures or the element of surprise.
  2. Insight: The moment helps you discover something new about the world or yourself. Often, these moments have a transformative and influential effect on the course of your life.
  3. Pride: The moment gives you a sense of validation around your achievements or a sense of pride in your actions.
  4. Connection: The moment makes you feel more deeply connected to whomever shares it with you, and strengthens your relationship with them.

The Heaths emphasize that a defining moment doesn’t need to use all four of these emotion-boosters—just one or two will do.

Shortform Commentary: Where These Four Elements Come From

The Heaths don’t note the exact research that led them to these four elements, but their ideas align closely with those of psychologist Abraham Maslow. Maslow is well-known for his “hierarchy of needs”:

powerofmoments_maslow.png

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs describes the requirements for a person to become self-actualizing—constantly growing, discovering, and finding meaning in her life. The Heaths’ four elements align with Maslow’s three “higher needs” of self-actualization, esteem, and belonging:

In short, elevation, insight, pride, and connection are the elements that allow humans to live, not simply survive.

What Makes a Moment Memorable?

While the Heaths discuss what makes a moment meaningful, they don’t delve into what makes it memorable, which is the second characteristic of a defining moment. In order to be memorable, most defining moments should have an aspect of novelty or unexpectedness.

Novelty, as we’ve discussed, makes moments stand out against the generally predictable landscape of life. Unexpectedness is important because when you experience emotions experienced in a moment of surprise, you experience them more intensely than you would in an “everyday” situation.

These high-intensity emotions send a signal to your brain that something important is happening—your brain responds by paying more attention than usual to the event at hand, while blocking out unrelated, external stimuli.

In the following chapter, we’ll explore how to pinpoint which moments could be made more meaningful and memorable.

Exercise: Reexamine Your Defining Moments

Defining moments are small, everyday events that are meaningful and memorable. Looking back at your own experiences is a good way to understand how small moments can stand out in your memory.

Chapter 2: How to See the Potential for Defining Moments

There’s a common misconception that defining moments are large milestone events—such as the birth of your child—or simply happen as a matter of pure serendipity—such as going to a café and bumping into the woman you’ll marry. However, the Heaths emphasize that most defining moments happen in small, everyday events, and what makes them stand out is how you shape them by investing your time, effort, and strategic thought.

(Shortform note: As we noted in our introduction, the publication of the Heaths’ book coincided with a growing trend of people trying to engage more mindfully with their lives. Their central argument that defining moments happen in small, special instances likely strikes a chord with people living mindfully because focusing on the significance of small moments is a central practice of mindfulness.)

Investing in these moments allows you to build a richer life for yourself and others. By seizing on the potential of small experiences, you can create deeper connections with the people around you, increase brand loyalty among satisfied clients, have a memorable influence on your students or employees, and multiply the fulfilling experiences of your life.

In this chapter, we’ll look at three situations where opportunities to create defining moments often come up naturally.

Three Common Situations for Defining Moments

What we know about the psychology of memory suggests three naturally occurring situations with defining moment potential: transitions, milestones, and negative pits.

Situation 1: Transitions

Many large transitions, like your bar mitzvah or college graduation, are natural defining moments: They clearly mark a shift from one stage of your life to another in a memorable and meaningful way. However, many people don’t realize how many small transitions happen around us every day—many of which can be made just as memorable and meaningful as the large, obvious ones.

When everyday transitions aren’t marked off by a clear moment, they blend into the flat “sameness” of life, becoming forgettable and meaningless. In some cases, these unmarked transitions—and the lack of clear division between the way things were and the way things are—can cause anxiety. Transitions have the potential to become memorable and meaningful when you engineer a clear moment that carries you from one stage to the next.

Example: Moving On After a Pet’s Passing

After losing your beloved dog Rocky, you struggle to find a new dog to adopt. Eventually, you realize you’re still deeply attached to Rocky and are looking for an exact replacement for him so it feels like he never left.

To help you let go of this attachment, your partner sets up a small ceremony at Rocky’s favorite dog park. You set up a toy box filled with his old toys. Then, you affix a small plaque commemorating Rocky to the bench you two always shared—it helps you have a place where you can continue to feel close to him. After the ceremony, you start the paperwork to adopt a dog you visited a few weeks ago. The ceremony helped you mark the transition from your life with Rocky to your life with a new dog.

What Types of Transitions Need “Shape”?

Transitions often fall under four categories—expected, unexpected, unrealized, and gradual—and they can be large, emotional events or small, personal events. Added shape can be useful for any of these transition types.

Expected: These types of transitions are planned out and relatively predictable—often, they’re experiences that most people can relate to. For example, a personal, expected transition may happen when you change jobs and need to transition from an old way of thinking to a new way.

Unexpected: These types of transitions happen at unpredictable times and often aren’t aligned with the experiences of those around you. For example, an emotional, unexpected transition may happen when you receive a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness.

Unrealized: “Unrealized” transitions are those that we expect will happen, but ultimately don’t come to pass. An unrealized transition might look like expecting to graduate college and then dropping out, or expecting to get married but never doing so.

Gradual: The gradual transition refers to progress that happens slowly over time—the person going through a gradual transition often isn’t aware it’s happening. This can look like developing a friendship or learning a new skill. (We’ll explore ways to add shape to progress in Chapters 7-9.)

Situation 2: Milestones

Milestones are life events that are acknowledged and feel significant, but are largely arbitrary—for example, turning 30 doesn’t change your life in any significant way, but it feels like an important event all the same. Like transitions, bigger milestones—such as your 21st birthday, retirement, or the purchase of your first home—are more celebrated and therefore more memorable. However, you can easily make small, often-unnoticed milestones into memorable positive spikes with a bit of attention and effort.

How “Adulting” Helps Create Milestones

In The Defining Decade, Meg Jay urges young adults to seek out and celebrate milestones to develop their confidence and pride in themselves—factors that positively affect the way the rest of their lives play out.

One way we can see young adults, especially millennials, seeking out milestones to celebrate is in the way they’ve latched onto celebrating instances of “adulting,” or acting in an adult manner—for example, buying a car, doing their own taxes for the first time, or going shopping for a new couch.

Some people scoff at this practice of celebrating mundane, obligatory activities and label it another way for millennials to make themselves feel “special.” However, the Heaths’ ideas support young adults’ efforts to find meaning in these novel—though mundane—activities and see them as small milestones along their path to adulthood.

Example: Celebrating an Employee’s 100th Day

As an example of how to highlight an often-unnoticed milestone, imagine you’ve started a new job. After about three months of working there, you walk into your office to find your cubicle decorated with a banner that reads, “Happy 100 Days!” and a bowl of your favorite candy sitting on your desk. You check your work calendar and see that you have two hours blocked off for a “special lunch event,” during which the organization’s president takes you out for a nice lunch, and you spend a few hours getting to know each other. In the afternoon, your boss stops by to drop off a company “swag bag” that includes a nice jacket, water bottle, and mug branded with the company logo.

An employee’s 100th day working for a company has great potential to be a defining moment, but most organizations don’t think to invest in it and let the day pass by just like any other. If you spot the event’s potential and invest time and effort into making it special for the employee, you’ll create a defining moment that will stand out when they look back on their career with you and will increase their satisfaction and loyalty.

Situation 3: Negative Pits

Recall that negative pits are the emotional lows of an experience—without any intervention, these are the moments someone will remember about an experience when they reflect on it. The Heaths observe that most people react to a negative pit by trying to find a way to fix it and lessen the negative emotions of it. For example, clients hate being on hold, so many companies will play music or trivia to fill the wait time. By fixing the negative pit of being on hold with an entertaining distraction, these companies help ensure that the long wait time isn’t what the client recalls most vividly about her experience.

The Heaths explain that hard moments can actually become positive defining moments when you go beyond simply repairing them—and instead, find a way to turn them into positive peaks to look back on fondly. There are two ways you might do this:

1) Create an unexpected positive experience in response to the pit. Take the pet supply company Chewy as an example: If you inform them that your pet has passed away, they cancel your food delivery subscription immediately. This is the response you expect of them. However, they then go above and beyond expectation to fill in your negative pit with something positive—they send you flowers and a handwritten sympathy card signed by the Chewy team. In this way, they create a positive defining moment that will stand out in your memory when you recall your experience with their brand.

2) Put together a plan of action in response to the negative pit. The Heaths attest that the most memorable—but most uncommon—way to fix a negative pit is to make a perceptible effort to fix it. In many cases, acknowledging a problem, coming up with a plan, and demonstrating a willingness to make things right can make people think of the experience as overall positive.

In their book, the Heaths largely focus on turning negative pits into positive peaks within the context of customer service or team member satisfaction, but this idea can apply to personal experiences with negative pits as well—such as receiving a daunting diagnosis or experiencing failure.

Turning negative pits into positive peaks in these personal experiences often isn’t obvious or doesn’t look “fun” as it does in customer service or employee loyalty contexts. Rather, it shows up in personal transformations, a deepening understanding of yourself and your values, and a newfound appreciation of your strength or abilities.

We examine this point further and explore ways to make negative pits into meaningful, memorable experiences in our discussion of self-insight in Chapters 5-6.

Remember That Investment-Worthy Opportunities Are Everywhere

The Heaths urge you to remember that, while many opportunities for defining moments naturally crop up during transitions, milestones, and negative pits, not all opportunities for defining moments fall neatly into these three categories. Look at all experiences as potential defining moments, because any moment can be made more meaningful and memorable with attention, forethought, and effort.

In other words, not many moments are “engineered” from the very beginning. Most important moments in your life unfold naturally and spontaneously—and these small moments are happening all around you, every day. It’s not engineering experiences from the beginning that’s important. What’s important is your ability to see the extraordinary potential of small, spontaneous moments and your willingness to put in the effort to build them into defining, meaningful moments that matter.

(Shortform note: Several negative reviews of The Power of Moments questioned whether defining moments can ever feel “real” if they’re so carefully engineered. This criticism misses a central idea of the Heaths’ argument—defining moments already exist and therefore are genuine. “Engineering” moments doesn’t mean staging a false event—it simply means giving attention and effort to important events that might otherwise go undetected.)

Exercise: Find Opportunities for Defining Moments

Practice recognizing the importance of adding shape to small transitions and celebrating unseen milestones.

Chapters 3-4: Create Defining Moments With Elevation

Over the next four chapters, we’ll examine different ways to use the elements of elevation, insight, pride, and connection to turn everyday moments into unexpected, emotionally charged experiences that stand out against the flat background of life.

The first element we’ll discuss is elevation. Moments defined by elevation transcend everyday patterns and impart positive feelings like delight, motivation, and engagement. In short, elevated moments are the positive peaks that you look back on fondly.

(Shortform note: In his hierarchy, Maslow lists “peak experiences'' as a component of the highest need, self-actualization. Maslow described peak experiences as small, everyday events that give us a feeling of newness or delight—in other words, as with elevated moments, we transcend everyday dullness.)

Some of these positive peaks are naturally occurring in social moments like weddings and graduations, performance moments like playing in a big game or giving a talk in your field of expertise, and spontaneous moments like an unexpected upgrade on your flight. However, most experiences don’t have natural positive peaks—but you can add positive peaks to them by choosing one or two moments to elevate thoughtfully.

While elevating certain moments will take a bit of extra effort, they’re worth the trouble—their absence, an endless routine lacking “peakiness,” leads to boredom and disengagement.

Using elevation to produce novel, memorable events is key to creating experiences that foster positive feelings and increase engagement. The Heaths’ identify three ways to use elevation: increase sensory pleasure, raise the stakes, and go off script with strategic surprise. Successful, memorable moments incorporate at least two of these methods.

Method 1: Increase Sensory Pleasure

The first way the Heaths suggest elevating a moment is with increased sensory pleasure—that is, making a moment look, feel, taste, or sound better than what you’re used to.

Sensory differences make memories stick. This is because a sensory upgrade is a type of novelty—it forces the brain to re-engage, process more information, and make the experience richer and more memorable.

The authors note that upping the sensory appeal of a moment doesn’t need to be expensive or extravagant—it can be as simple as a team leader conducting her employees’ year-end meetings in a park instead of in her office, or a rabbi delivering the Torah to a synagogue member’s home during the COVID-19 pandemic so that his bar mitzvah would physically feel special, even if it needed to be done by video.

Which Senses Should You Elevate?

The Heaths don’t discuss which sensory appeals work best, but numerous studies have concluded that memory links most strongly to your sense of smell. You can use this information to engineer small, special moments in a variety of contexts. For example:

Method 2: Heighten the Stakes

The second way to elevate a moment is to raise the stakes. The Heaths explain that adding high stakes to a situation makes an otherwise flat, unengaging experience into a standout, exciting experience—for instance when you look back at your high school career, you’ll more likely remember your debate team championship than your algebra classes.

(Shortform note: One reason that high-stakes experiences stand out in your memory may be that the prospect of a high reward forces your brain to use long-term memory to “help out” your short-term working memory. As a result, your attention is more fully focused on the event—your brain re-engages in order to process all the information you’re taking in.)

Raising the Stakes Effectively

Raising the stakes can seem like the same thing as increasing stress, but this line of thinking is a mistake. Stress not only has a strong negative impact on memory recall, but it’s also usually not particularly meaningful. High-stakes situations that aren’t enjoyable or rewarding in any way cause stress.

To raise the stakes effectively, focus on increasing productive pressure: Pressure that’s interesting or fun in some way. Most experiences during students’ academic careers are focused on grades—productive pressure shifts the focus in a novel direction, toward fun. Rather than blending into the everyday stress of school, a fun experience stands out in students’ memories for years to come.

Method 3: Go Off Script

The last method of elevating a moment is going off script, which the Heaths define as acting in a way that goes against what people expect. Of the three methods of elevation, going off script takes the most effort but is usually the most worthwhile: Recall our discussion of the “reminiscence bump”—the most memorable times of your life are due to going off script, encountering something unexpected and new as a result.

The idea that going off script takes extra effort may be confusing at first glance. It doesn’t seem so hard to come up with the occasional novel experience or fun surprise every now and then. The problem with this thinking is the assumption that you can meaningfully elevate an experience with cheap, easy surprises.

Going off script in a way that’s meaningful and memorable requires strategic surprises.

(Shortform note: Cheap, easy surprises are almost-predictable events—having a snack at a meeting is overall, an unremarkable event. In contrast, strategic surprises are surprises that break behavioral patterns in a way that challenges assumptions about what comes next and draws the audience in.)

How to Create Strategic Surprise

The Heaths say that there are two steps to creating strategic surprise:

  1. Identify scripts, or patterns, in your life, such as how your team meetings are run or how you spend time with your spouse after work.
  2. Determine how you can go off these scripts in a meaningful way.

For example, you examine your weekly HR meeting’s script and decide to add a strategic surprise: Assigning each of your team members a “new hire” role and sending them out to interview their “new teams” with questions about advice for new team members and maintaining work/life balance. At the end of the hour, your team members meet up and discuss your new insights. By going off your regular meeting script, you’ve elevated the experience and created a defining moment for your team members.

Meaningfully going off script doesn’t mean completely upending the scripts of your life. Remember, memorable experiences are not wholly amazing—they’re largely mundane, with one or two exceptional peaks. Your goal, then, is to deliberately punctuate overall familiar and comfortable scripts with one or two delightful surprises. There are usually two types of scripts that you’ll deal with.

Script 1: One-Off Experiences

The Heaths say it’s relatively easy to elevate experiences in places that people visit only occasionally—a hotel, for example.

Imagine a hotel near an airport that caters to people coming in and out of the city for meetings. It’s not very interesting: The décor is bland, there aren’t any nearby attractions, and there isn’t even a pool. However, this one hotel consistently gets rave reviews from guests, because they leverage the power of delight.

When you check in, the receptionist asks you what your favorite drink is. You go to your room and soon get a visit from a smartly-dressed staff member, there to deliver your chosen drink—on the house. On top of the charming unexpectedness of the free drink, the moment certainly appeals to the senses: The staff member’s clothing makes the moment feel a bit fancy, and nothing compares to the first sip of a cool drink after a long day of meetings. This small moment becomes the positive peak that stands out against your mundane business trip and the underwhelming hotel—the moment that you remember as you write your review and tell others about your trip.

In one-off scripts, your goal is to go against what someone expects. The hotel’s free drink delivery stands out as a defining moment because it disrupts the client’s expectation—that the hotel staff will simply check them into their room with no special treatment.

(Shortform note: You can think of the one-off script like a fun fact that you use to make a good first impression when meeting someone new. It retains its delightful quality because they don’t hear you say it every day—you only use it once for the one-off experience of meeting.)

Script 2: Repetitive, Everyday Experiences

In contrast, creating moments of delight is a little more difficult in places that people visit regularly, like a café. Even delightful surprises lose their charm if you experience them every day. In cases like this, it’s critical to remember the “strategic” part of the surprise: You want to go off script, but be careful not to create a new script in the meantime.

(Shortform note: In these cases, your strategy should rely on variable reward: that is, rewards that happen at random times, rather than in a predictable pattern—so they always feel like a surprise. In their book Hooked, Nir Eyal and Ryan Hoover explain that variable, surprising rewards trigger a much stronger dopamine response in your brain than rewards that happen on a fixed schedule. This is why activities such as gambling or checking your email are so addictive—you can’t predict which pull of the lever or refresh of the inbox will reward you with a jackpot or an interesting email, so the action never loses its appeal.)

To maintain delight and surprise in “everyday scripts,” engineer moments that feel random, so they never become a flat, predictable pattern.

Retain Subscriber Loyalty With Variable Reward

Subscription services, which are increasingly popular, can use variable rewards to differentiate themselves and retain client loyalty.

The “subscription economy” gives consumers a new type of power: Without contracts and commitments tying them down, consumers can easily take their money elsewhere if they decide they don’t like a service or aren’t getting enough value out of it. This means that subscription service providers must continuously create value and keep things interesting in order to keep their clients.

Tapping into the appeal of variable reward and engineering small—but memorable—positive peaks into the otherwise flat experience of a business-client relationship is a relatively simple way for a subscription service to stand out against the rest.

Why You Avoid Novel Experiences—And Why You Should Lean Into Them

As much as going off script can benefit you, it’s human nature to gravitate toward the comfort of familiar scripts. It’s harder to start taking the family rock climbing every Saturday than it is to sleep in and watch cartoons.

We avoid novelty because of the familiarity bias—familiar situations feel less threatening than new ones. Numerous psychologists have looked into this phenomenon:

Despite our preference for familiarity, novelty is often the better choice because it multiplies your memorable experiences, helps you develop new perspectives, and expands your problem-solving skills. Furthermore, it helps you learn risk tolerance—which is vital to meaningful moments defined by insight, as we’ll see in the following chapter.

If you find yourself resisting novel experiences, think of it this way: Of all ways you could learn about confronting risk, moments of delight are the most enjoyable ways to do so.

Going Off Script Is Critical to Making Organizational Changes Stick

The small-scale benefits of going off script are evident, such as creating rich childhood memories for your kids or creating a positive experience for your clients to recall. However, going off script can have a much further-reaching impact: It’s often a critical aspect to making transitions—such as major organizational changes—stick.

If you are shifting your organization into a new way of doing things, going off script and building a positive peak into the transition can create a clear moment that separates the old from the new. Without this clear shift, you risk having employees stuck in a confusing mix of what they’re used to doing and what you want them to do.

For example, the book cites how VF Corporation (owner of apparel brands like JanSport, Vans, and The North Face) went off script to foster interbrand communication. Instead of a tired 100-slide PowerPoint about the value of communicating between brands, they created a highly interactive, out-of-the-box conference that mixed up different teams and sent them across LA to participate in a range of creative learning experiences such as surfing lessons and beauty science workshops. After the event, brands were more collaborative and came up with more innovative ideas together.

VF Corporation shaped this transition by going off script—simply telling their employees to collaborate more would have followed (and blended into) their old script. They demonstrated the shift to a new script by giving their employees a new, creative experience.

Logically Connect the Surprise to the Message

In their book Made to Stick, the Heaths explore how going off script and giving people unexpected experiences helps messages “stick” in people’s minds. They specify that “sticky” messages, or those that we remember and implement, rely on strategic surprise to send a message that not only gets attention but also maintains it.

The key to sending a “sticky” message is ensuring that the person who receives your message can quickly make the logical connection between the surprise and the idea you’re trying to convey.

If VF Corporation had simply handed out surprise cupcakes while asking brands to collaborate more, their suggested transition would have fallen flat—there’s no logical connection between having a cupcake and changing the way you work. On the other hand, staging an event that has mixed teams go through creative experiences together logically connects to their request for team members to collaborate more.

Why Elevation Is Especially Hard to Pull Off

The Heaths note that many people balk at the idea of creating moments defined by elevation because they require thoughtful effort—no one wants to take on the extra work they require. People often talk themselves out of making the effort for two reasons:

1) The Moment Isn’t Urgent

Because elevation is fun and doesn’t feel especially urgent, it’s easy to let tasks that feel more urgent or important—such as meetings or grading a pile of unmarked essays—take precedence over the work of creating a defining moment.

In First Things First, author Stephen R. Covey advocates prioritizing non-urgent tasks if they’re important. He notes that you can categorize the things you spend time on into four quadrants:

Moments of delight fall into Quadrant 2: When given the time and attention they deserve, they make up some of your most meaningful memories and re-engage you with your life. They’re important, but don’t have an overt sense of urgency to them. Most of your time should be spent in Quadrant 2.

However, like most people, you may be addicted to urgency and convinced that you don’t have any time to free up for non-urgent matters. To solve this, Covey suggests an honest assessment of how you spend your time: Are you doing things that feel truly important to you? Or are you mostly reactive to situations of urgency? Making a conscious effort to spend your time on important, non-urgent work naturally frees up the time you need for creating positive peaks in your life and the lives of others.

2) The Moment Seems Too Complicated

Practicality has the power to bring a great idea’s “peak potential” down to a very unremarkable bump. Elevated moments are often more logistically complicated than business as usual, so it’s all too easy to wave them off as unreasonable and offer up an easier (but less delightful) experience in their place.

The Heaths suggest ignoring practicality in favor of putting effort into delightful ideas. Otherwise, the experience you imagine will be replaced by the least logistically complicated option.

We can all think of places in our lives where we have let practicality win. You and your friend have been thinking about a road trip for ages, but it just seems like too much work. You have to plan the route, rent a car, take time off work, plan your budget...you decide it would be more practical to meet for coffee every weekend like you always do. By reaching for the least logistically complicated option, you miss out on the trip of a lifetime, rich with defining moments.

Cultivate an Anti-Practicality Environment

David Schwartz, author of The Magic of Thinking Big, emphasizes that when you have big ideas, it’s important to surround yourself with the right kind of people. He outlines several tips for making sure your environment isn’t getting in the way of your elevation:

Exercise: Change Up Your Script

Thinking about and understanding the scripts in your everyday life is key to breaking routine and having more meaningful experiences.

Chapters 5-6: Create Defining Moments With Insight

The second element you can use to create defining moments is insight. Moments defined by insight inspire realizations or transformations that affect your future choices and actions. Some of these are small, personal moments that hold special meaning for you—for example, finding your new signature drink after trying a new cocktail and realizing how delicious it is. However, this chapter will focus on the larger moments of discovery, those that deliver a shock that may change your way of thinking or even the course of your life. Moments of insight or discovery often come with strong emotions, both positive and negative.

What Insight Promises

Pushing our boundaries, risking failure, confronting uncomfortable truths—the Heaths admit that moments defined by insight aren’t always positive. Often they’re difficult or painful, and they’re certainly not meant to be seen as a promise of success. They are, however, always a promise of a learning opportunity.

The more moments you can define with insight, the better you can help others arrive at much-needed realizations and subscribe to the work of necessary transformations (which we’ll explore in Strategy 1), understand your motivations and values and gain confidence in your abilities (which we’ll explore in Strategy 2), or push mentees to their full potential (which we’ll explore in Strategy 3).

In this chapter, we’ll explore the three ways the Heaths suggest that you can spark meaningful, memorable insight:

Strategy 1: Force Someone to Confront a Truth

The Heaths first explore how you can spark insight in others by setting up a moment in which they will be forced to confront an uncomfortable truth. They note three essential factors to making the moment defining:

  1. Have a clear conclusion: Know exactly what conclusion you want your audience to come to. This is often the easiest part of the process—you usually know exactly what truth needs revealing.
  2. Operate on a short time frame: Create a situation that will guide your audience to their discovery over a matter of minutes or hours, or even more immediately.
  3. Allow audience discovery: Let the audience discover the conclusion themselves, instead of telling them what to do.

These factors result in an “aha! moment,” or what psychologist Roy Baumeister dubbed the crystallization of discontent: a sudden moment in which any vague negativity or discomfort you’re feeling suddenly crystallizes in a pattern—you discover links between seemingly unrelated issues and the core problem becomes startlingly clear. The crystallization of discontent often provides a crucial burst of motivation to make a major change, such as someone leaving her abusive spouse, cult members leaving their organization, or alcoholics deciding to start recovery.

Why These Three Factors?

These three factors are crucial to creating insight because together, they replicate the conditions of a spontaneous crystallization of discontent. In her book Radical Acceptance, author Tara Brach discusses the Alcoholics Anonymous program, which notes that an addict begins changing when they hit rock bottom, an experience that echoes the Heaths’ three factors:

(Shortform note: While the clear conclusion and short timeframe are more “logistical necessities'' of creating a crystallization of discontent, the third factor—audience discovery—can be better understood as a “key action.” We’ll further explore its importance, and discuss how to pull it off, in the following section.)

Key Action: Let Your Audience Discover the Conclusion Themselves

You’ll likely be tempted to start your discussion of an issue by presenting the solutions you’ve come up with, but this is just a way to tell your audience what conclusion they’re supposed to come to. In order to guide your audience toward the conclusion without telling them what to do or what to think, you must start by discussing the problems.

As you walk them through the problems, don’t focus on sharing what you know—this is just another way of telling them what to think. Instead, guide them in such a way that they encounter the same problems you did and therefore discover the same conclusion you did.

This is crucial: If you instead approach your audience’s problem by telling them exactly what’s wrong and how it can be fixed, they’ll likely become defensive or argumentative. No one likes being told that they’re doing things wrong or how they should act, and no one changes unless they want to change.

Why We’re So Resistant to Being Told What to Do

Most people go about telling one another hard-to-hear truths in the wrong way—by saying the truth outright. In their book Difficult Conversations, authors Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen explain two reasons why this approach most often leads to defensiveness and a breakdown of communication:

When you let someone discover a hard truth themselves, these blame games don’t come to pass. There’s no “other side” to fight against or blame for your hurt, which means you can approach the problem from the same side and focus on solutions rather than being right.

Once the audience sees the problem clearly enough to start thinking about solutions, you’re in a position to start explaining the solutions you’ve thought of. Unburdened by hurt or blame, and with a “homegrown” appreciation for the problem at hand, your audience is primed to listen to what you have to say.

(Shortform note: In their book, the Heaths focus their discussion of audience discovery on its benefit of minimizing pushback. However, audience discovery also has the benefit of being especially motivating. The experience of putting together a pattern creates a pleasant, exciting rush of adrenaline, even if the discovery itself isn’t pleasant or exciting. This rush makes the discovery more engaging, therefore making the audience’s desire to act stronger. On the other hand, if you were to announce what the discovery should be, the audience doesn’t experience an exciting and motivating moment. You might think of it as the difference between finally completing a complex jigsaw puzzle yourself and simply viewing a jigsaw puzzle someone else completed.)

Example: Community-Led Total Sanitation

The Heaths provide a powerful example that shows how building a situation that gives people sudden insight into problems can lead to impressive transformations.

Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) is a sanitary organization that works to build public-use latrines in rural villages across the world and teach about the dangers of open defecation practices. In one village in Bangladesh, CLTS found that people were not using their latrines, preferring to stick with the open-defecation status quo. Telling the villagers to use the latrines was useless—in response, they became defensive about their practices.

CLTS sent a representative to the village, who asked the villagers to draw a map of the village in the dirt, marking their homes and other places of importance. He then asked them to mark all the open-defecation areas in the village with yellow chalk dust. Then, he asked them to mark the places that people would defecate in the case of a rainstorm or an emergency. The yellow chalk surrounded the houses. Lastly, he asked them to mark places where they’d found feces outside of the designated areas. At this point, the map was covered in yellow chalk and there was a palpable discomfort among the crowd.

The representative then pulled a hair from his head, dipped it in a nearby pile of feces, and dropped it into a glass of water. He asked, “Would you drink this?” The villagers shook their heads in disgust.

The representative asked the villagers to think of his hair like a fly’s leg, then explain that with so many open defecation areas, flies likely often landed on feces before landing on the villagers’ food. The villagers had their aha! moment and cried out in disgust as they realized what they were eating.

The CLTS method has sparked transformations in thousands of villages worldwide that are now open-defecation free. The method utilizes all three aha! moment factors:

Insight Sparks Transformation Only for Those Who Can Use It

In this example, the Heaths attribute the success of the CLTS method to their engineered aha! moment. However, the CLTS method relies heavily on underlying circumstances as well: CLTS notes on their website that this program is most effective in places that are close-knit, small, remote, and have strong leadership. There are numerous ways that these factors may contribute to the program’s effectiveness:

This brings up an important aspect of these aha! moments that the Heaths don’t explore: Aha! moments are meaningful and effective only if your audience can do something about the problem. The insights you engineer should align with transformations that your audience can reasonably accomplish.

Strategy 2: Set Up a Situation for Self-Insight

The Heaths explain that using insight to create defining moments for yourself depends on pushing your boundaries—you must put yourself in situations that expose you to the possibility of failure. This is because the process of stepping outside of your comfort zone and risking failure leads to what psychologists call “self-insight”: an understanding of your values, abilities, goals, and motivations.

How Risking Failure Translates Into Valuable Self-Insight

Exposing yourself to the risk of failure can only go one of two ways: either you succeed, or you fail. While these outcomes may not seem equally valuable, the Heaths assert that both should be celebrated as valuable learning opportunities.

It’s obvious why exposing yourself to the risk of failure and then succeeding would be a cause for celebration. It stirs up positive emotions, bolsters your confidence in your abilities, and at times can prompt positive changes in your life.

(Shortform note: This type of discovery—realizing how you want your future to be, and therefore making positive changes in the interest of working toward a goal rather than pushing away from past behavioral patterns—can be understood as a crystallization of desire, an inverse of the crystallization of discontent.)

It’s much less obvious why risking failure—and then actually failing—is also something to celebrate (or at least, not dread). Failure certainly doesn’t stir up the same sort of positive emotions as success. However, the Heaths emphasize that negative emotions are especially helpful in creating meaningful moments defined by insight.

The Price Tag of Failure

Barbara Frederickson and Daniel Kahneman (author of Thinking, Fast and Slow), when developing the peak-end rule, found that the brain uses the emotional peaks of experiences as “price tags” or reference points when recalling an experience and making decisions based on it. We use these reference points to determine whether repeating the experience is worth the “cost.”

The negative emotions of failure create a reference point that acts as a type of warning: “If you do this again or if you continue on this route, it will cost you—you’ll feel these negative emotions again.”

For example, many addicts, when deciding to start treatment, recall going through the thought process of realizing that they could no longer tolerate the emotional “cost” of repeating the same behaviors.

The Heaths go on to discuss the two possible conclusions that this “warning” prompts:

Conclusion A: The cost is worth it. You realize that you are strong enough to endure the cost of the experience and are willing to do it again, even if you risk feeling negative emotions again.

Conclusion B: The cost is too high. You realize that the cost of the experience is too high, and you don’t want to risk feeling these emotions again. You experience your crystallization of discontent.

How to Make Failure Meaningful

While the Heaths explain how failure can provide a valuable examination of your motivations and values, they don’t explore a crucial part of failure that ensures that it becomes a meaningful experience rather than a forgettable mistake: your response to it. There are numerous healthy, meaningful ways you can respond to failure in a way that serves to create a defining moment:

Ask the right questions: Studies have found that responding to failure by asking “what” rather than “why” leads to more positive outcomes. This is because questions starting with “why” usually invite rationalization or denial. On the other hand, questions starting with “what” jumpstart the process of learning from your situation and finding solutions based on gathered information. For example:

Practice self-compassion: Many people respond to failure with self-criticism, but this doesn’t help you recover from failure—rather, it forces you to ruminate on the experience and develop feelings of shame about it. Instead, respond with self-compassion, the process of forgiving yourself for past mistakes as Tara Brach discusses in her book Radical Acceptance. Reacting with self-compassion allows you to think about the mistake clearly and glean important lessons from it.

Focus on growth: Consciously respond to failure with positive messages that focus on learning and growth. In her book Grit, Angela Duckworth gives several examples of how you might accomplish this:

Shortform Commentary: Why You May Need a Mentor

The Heaths note that not all self-insight requires large risks—it may come from small, everyday risks like trying a new drink or taking a new class. These experiences are easy to do on your own, as the cost of failure is generally low.

However, you’ll likely have a much harder time pushing yourself into the most valuable experiences—those that come with a much higher cost of failure, such as taking on more responsibility at work, moving to a new city, or changing your career. You’re not alone. There’s a global upward trend in perfectionism: People are holding themselves to increasingly high standards and opting to forego growth in favor of avoiding the possibility of failure. To break out of this mindset, it’s helpful to seek out a mentor who can support you through the process of leaving your comfort zone and exposing yourself to the possibility of failure.

Mentors can take many forms. They’re not only found in your career field. A mentor can be anyone you admire and respect, whose advice is trustworthy and in your best interest. A parent, a teacher, a colleague, a boss, or an accomplished friend can all be mentors.

(Note: Read our guide to Ryan Holiday’s Ego Is the Enemy to learn how to choose an appropriate mentor, ask them for their help, and develop a mutually beneficial relationship.)

The following section is geared toward mentors trying to push mentees into defining moments of self-insight. However, it can also help you, as a mentee, understand what makes for a great mentor and the benefits of seeking one out.

Strategy 3: Push Others Into Their Self-Insight as a Mentor

As a mentor, your job is to push your mentee into situations that will spark her self-insight, providing the type of productive pressure that helps coax out her best self. The Heaths note that great mentors usually issue challenges to their mentees with a four-part formula: high expectations + confidence + direction + support. Each part of this formula is important: High expectations alone can make people feel defensive or intimidated, but expressing confidence in them can attach a sense of empowerment to the message. Adding the elements of direction and support elevates the message of the mentor even further: “I have high expectations but I know you are capable of reaching them. Here’s a challenge that I think you should take on. If you need any help, let me know and I will have your back.”

How the Mentorship Formula Cultivates a Growth Mindset

You can help your mentee experience more instances of self-insight by helping her change the way she thinks about risk and failure. In Mindset, Carol S. Dweck explains that people develop two different mindsets over the course of their lives—a fixed mindset or a growth mindset.

As a mentor, you want to help your mentee cultivate a growth mindset. The Heaths’ four-part formula helps touch on several aspects of guiding someone into this mindset:

The Heaths concede that using all four aspects of the mentorship formula will require a good deal of effort—you’ll need to scope out appropriate challenges for your mentee, and you must be ready to lend support when it’s needed. This extra work is worth it: Under the guidance of a mentor who applies productive pressure and will help them recover from failure, mentees are more confident in taking on the types of challenges that expose them to risk, therefore multiplying their opportunities for moments of self-insight.

Example: Encouraging Improvement as a Coach

Imagine two scenarios in which you’re a coach, trying to get a sprinter on your team to improve her time in the 400m race:

Scenario A: You say, “My fastest sprinters are running the 400m race 15 seconds faster than you. Work harder and keep up!”

Scenario B: You say, “I want you to improve your 400m time by at least 15 seconds. I know you can do it—I can see you have the potential to be one of my best sprinters. I know a group of your top teammates practice together on Saturdays, and I’d suggest asking if you can train with them. I’m here to get you on—or even past—their level, so don’t be afraid to ask for my help.”

Helpful Guidelines for Choosing Appropriate Challenges

As a mentor, you may work with a mentee who isn’t on the exact path you chose—as a result, you might find it difficult to determine which challenges are “right” for her. Two guidelines to work within are those of your mentee’s ambitions and the limits of her ability.

1) Consider her ambition: Talk to your mentee about what her ambitions are, and shape your challenges accordingly. Kim Scott in Radical Candor discusses two types of team members who are well-positioned to handle new challenges but have very different ambitions: superstars and rockstars.

2) Give “Goldilocks” challenges: This concept, from Daniel Pink’s Drive, means directing your mentee toward projects that are challenging enough to stay interesting, but not so challenging that they become overwhelming. Choose a challenge that pushes the upper limit of her abilities but doesn’t go beyond it.

Let Failures Happen

The Heaths stress that “support” doesn’t mean shielding your mentee from all risk. It’s critical that your mentee be exposed to the risk of failure in order to achieve self-insight. This is difficult, as it goes against all instinct. Naturally, we want to protect those we’re helping.

As a mentor, your goal shouldn’t be to protect your mentee from failure, or the results of their failure. Instead, your goal should be to normalize failure—don’t shame your mentee for it but talk to them about ways they might recover from it. In turn, your mentee will stretch for novel experiences that will continue to reward them with defining moments of self-insight.

How to Talk About Failure

The Heaths encourage you to normalize failure instead of shielding your mentee from it but don’t fully cover how you might do this. As Carol S. Dweck explores in Mindset, the way you respond to your mentee’s failure is key in determining whether or not she will grow from the experience.

For example, imagine she auditioned for a role but didn’t make the callback. You’ll likely be tempted to respond in one of the following fixed-mindset ways that serve to shield her from her failure:

Instead, choose to respond in a way that acknowledges her failure rather than sugar-coating it. This helps her learn from the experience and, more importantly, encourages her to continue trying: “You tried your best, but the other actors at the audition had more musical theater experience. Keep practicing with your weekly group and you’ll move up into their ranks.”

Exercise: Engineer an Aha! Moment

Telling someone what they need to do is not nearly as effective as letting them realize on their own what they need to do. Think of someone you know who needs to confront an uncomfortable truth and how you might guide this person to make the realization themselves.

Exercise: Explore Positive Outcomes of Risk

Exposing yourself to the risk of failure is frightening, but it’s a valuable learning opportunity.

Chapters 7-9: Create Defining Moments With Pride

The third element you can use to create a defining moment is pride. Moments defined by pride surface and celebrate your best self—the “you” who earns recognition for their efforts, crushes ambitious goals, and acts with courage in situations that call for it.

The Heaths describe these moments as those that spark powerful feelings of accomplishment and motivation and serve to remind you of the value of your hard work. They caution against the misconception that hard work itself creates these defining moments—rather, instances of achievement (which we’ll discuss in Strategy 1), recognition (which we’ll discuss in Strategy 2), and acting as your best self (which we’ll discuss in Strategy 3) create pride, which enhances hard work in a meaningful and memorable way.

In this chapter, we’ll explore three strategies for multiplying instances of achievement and recognition:

  1. Build small, personally motivating “wins” into the journey toward a big goal.
  2. Recognize others’ efforts and make their progress visible.
  3. Prepare yourself to act with courage when necessary.

Strategy 1: Create and Celebrate Small Wins

The Heaths debunk a common misconception that everyone feels the same amount of pride in their work—that is, people working toward the same goal and putting in the same amount of effort to achieve it will experience the same amount of pride in their efforts. They explain that it’s not so simple, because everyone approaches goals differently: Some people might feel that accomplishing the goal is the only thing to be proud of, and others might think the journey to the goal is just as important as the goal itself. The Heaths suggest enhancing the instances of pride you feel while working toward a goal by adding small, personally motivating wins into the journey.

(Shortform note: Recall the fixed mindset and growth mindset discussion from Carol S. Dweck’s Mindset: Those with a fixed mindset often only care about the achievement of the goal, and those with a growth mindset can more easily see the value of the journey. The Heaths’ suggested strategy of celebrating small wins is helpful because it caters to both these mindsets. The frequent achievements cater to those with a fixed mindset, and the value placed on the pursuit of a goal caters to those with a growth mindset.)

Build Small Wins Into the Path to Your Goal

Big goals often come with big flaws. First, there is usually no clear route between Here and There, making it all too easy to get lost or demotivated along the way. Second, big goals are often far too ambiguous to actually be achievable, such as, “I want to learn Spanish,” or, “I want to lose weight.”

Defeating a challenge makes for a big moment of pride and all the positive emotions that come with accomplishment. However, that big moment of success often never comes to pass without a plan for smaller occasions for pride that will keep you motivated. In pursuit of a goal, you should build in small reasons to celebrate—or small wins—along the way to your destination. Going about your goal this way serves several purposes:

(Shortform note: Studies have also shown that continuously celebrating small achievements is a fairly easy way to boost your overall happiness—it’s much easier to continue pursuing a goal when it feels good, or even fun, rather than like a chore.)

Example: Losing Weight With Small Wins

To learn what built-in milestones might look like for you, let’s take the “I want to lose weight” example. You can decide between two different approaches:

Approach A

  1. Exercise and eat healthy
  2. Exercise and eat healthy
  3. Exercise and eat healthy
  4. Buy a too-small pair of “motivation” jeans?
  5. Exercise and eat healthy

Result: Someday, maybe, you’ll lose the weight.

Approach B

  1. Start taking the stairs instead of the elevator
  2. Go 30 straight days without soda (then, can you do 30 more?)
  3. Test healthy recipes, find five that even the kids will eat
  4. Get a group at work together for a daily lunchtime walk, go out for a drink whenever you all hit 10,000 steps for the day
  5. Log 50 Zumba classes

Result: You get to start wearing your favorite jeans again.

Of these two approaches, which one would be more fun? Which one gives you more occasions to celebrate? Which one gives you tangible achievements that naturally build toward your greater goal? Most importantly—which one would you be more likely to stick with?

How to Set Up Your Small Wins

The Heaths stress that your small wins should be tailored to your journey and your particular motivations. There are three steps you can take to plan out a journey that makes sense to you and keeps you moving in the right direction.

1) Think about what’s meaningful to you. In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor suggests that when setting a goal, you think about incremental achievements that will consistently remind you of the meaning and importance of the journey. This will help shift your focus away from the stress of achieving planned results. A helpful question to help you come up with these achievements is, “What types of small wins will increase my confidence and knowledge?”

2) Decide where to begin. In their book Switch, the Heaths talk about the power of “shortening the distance” to your goal—in other words, you can list as one of your small wins something you’ve already accomplished, so you have something to celebrate right away. The knowledge that you’ve already achieved a milestone makes the goal seem closer and more achievable.

3) Make sure your wins are small. In Essentialism, Greg McKeown explains that the most effective way to stay motivated on the way to a goal is to space your small wins close enough together that you feel that you are making progress nearly constantly—moving forward feels almost effortless. To design a system that feels almost effortless, make sure that each of your wins is only a very small indicator of progress and investment of time above the previous small win.

Create Meaningful Milestones for Your Organization

The Heaths suggest using the strategy of small wins for organizational goals as well. Often, organizations tend to get lost in their big-picture goals—achievements that matter to the organization, but perhaps not to the people who need to take the steps to make those achievements happen.

While these may be worthy and important goals, they don’t really matter on a more personal level, which can easily make team members feel lost or disengaged. They’re just one person among many. What could they possibly do, personally, that would help make that goal happen?

The Heaths say that you should view a disconnect between the motivations of your team and the motivations of your organization as an opportunity to build in small wins that are motivating on your team’s level. To achieve this, you need to ask yourself three questions:

  1. What inherently motivates my team? In a setting with clients, this might look like: Receive a 5-star review from a satisfied customer.
  2. What deserves celebration and doesn’t take too long to accomplish (a few days, weeks, months)? In an ad sales setting, you could set a goal such as: Secure one luxury goods brand and one luxury travel brand for the December issue.
  3. What are uncelebrated milestones we can bring attention to and celebrate? In a customer service setting, this may look like: Go one week without any customers scoring below 5 on the satisfaction survey.

(Shortform note: Psychologists back up the power of breaking down large, ambiguous issues—studies show that reframing major social issues as a series of small, solvable problems strengthens individuals' motivations to take action. When an issue feels like an overwhelming beast, no one feels up to the task of tackling it. When it feels like a series of small puzzles, however, people feel more confident in their problem-solving abilities.)

Example: Making a Vague Goal Personal and Meaningful

Imagine a school presents a goal for the academic year: Increase our school’s 4th grade state test scores by 2% this year. Ms. Smith, a 4th grade teacher, breaks this big, ambiguous goal down into smaller goals her students can accomplish:

Level 1: Earn a spot in “Ms. Smith’s Homework Stars of the Week.”

Level 2: Read for an extra 30 minutes every night and write down two new vocabulary words each week, earn a lollipop at Friday lunch.

Level 3: Earn 100% on your morning multiplication drill and be the line leader for recess.

Level 4: Write a story using five new reading vocabulary words to earn three extra points on your next vocabulary test.

Level 5: Earn above 90% on two math quizzes to earn a No Homework Pass for one night.

Destination: Students who are working harder in math and reading, subsequently making the necessary improvements to perform well in state testing.

This approach works for her students—they can understand the smaller goals and easily achieve them with a bit of effort. Furthermore, the goals are fun enough to matter to 10-year-olds, and her students have many occasions to feel pride on their journey to math and reading improvement. In contrast, imagine how this might have played out differently if she’d simply said, “Okay, we need to improve in math and reading this year. Get to it!”

Strategy 2: Recognize Efforts and Notice Progress

The Heaths note that there’s a common misconception that people who work hard are likely to feel proud of their work. It’s not so simple: Pride doesn’t come from hard work alone—it comes from the results of your hard work being noticed.

The Progress Principle

Research shows that the strongest indicator of productivity is how a team member feels—if she feels positively toward her organization and herself and is motivated by her work, her productive performance will naturally increase. Team leaders, therefore, should focus their efforts on their team members’ feelings.

The research determined that the most effective way to lift a team member’s mood is to make sure that she has a consistent sense that she’s making progress in meaningful work—what the researchers dubbed the progress principle.

The Heaths’ strategy of celebrating small wins uses the progress principle for creating personal pride. For promoting others’ pride using the progress principle, they suggest two methods: recognizing their efforts and making their progress visible.

1) Give Frequent, Personal Recognition

Recognition is the easiest way to give others an opportunity to feel pride in their progress, and there is a huge return on a very small investment of your time and effort. Pride that comes from recognition is especially memorable—largely because it’s so rarely practiced. Most employers report that they give out a good amount of praise to employees for their accomplishments and work...but most employees report feeling that they’re not getting nearly enough recognition.

The discrepancy is largely due to the occasions that employers use to hand out praise; usually, acknowledgment comes on the heels of a large success. These large accomplishments are hard to miss, and they are an easy target for praise. To the employers, piling on the recognition in these moments feels like enough. On the other hand, employees feel underappreciated. People thrive on regular recognition of their continued efforts, not just for the big, easy-to-spot achievements.

(Shortform note: Recall the progress principle—boosted mood and productivity are seen in team members who have a consistent sense of their progress. Consistent recognition meets this need as well as reminding the team member that their work has meaning.)

Recognition is not handed out nearly as frequently as it should be. If you are congratulated once every five years, when you do something really extraordinary, you don’t have a regular source of pride in your work.

The solution to dissatisfying, sporadic recognition is simple: Focus on the frequency of your praise, not the grandeur. Handing out regular praise and multiplying the occasions for pride is a one-way ticket to having people who take pride in their work and feel satisfied with the return on their efforts.

(Shortform note: Eliminating the discrepancy between the perceived expression of praise and the perceived reception of praise is important to ensure high team member retention. In How Will You Measure Your Life, Clay Christensen says employees ask themselves, “Do I have the opportunity to do meaningful work? Am I being recognized for my contributions?” Employees who say “no” to these types of questions will soon start thinking about moving on to another workplace where their boss expresses regular appreciation.)

What Makes Recognition Truly Memorable?

Not all frequent praise is created equal, however—a pat on the back or a congratulatory email will give the recipient a small glimmer of pride, but it will be a forgettable moment. The Heaths explain that truly meaningful and effective recognition—the type that creates a moment defined by pride—is personal. Personalized recognition is your opportunity to tell someone, “I see the effort you’re putting in, and more importantly, I see you.”

They give the example of Keith Risinger, who works in leadership development at pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. Risinger regularly hands out awards to his employees for their small victories and improvements, personalizing each award to the accomplishment. For example, for an employee who has gotten better at listening to clients’ needs, he awarded a pair of Bose headphones. For another employee who came up with a customized approach to a client’s problem, he gifted a single-serve Keurig machine. His awards are somewhat silly, but their creativity and thoughtfulness create powerful moments of pride for his employees.

(Shortform note: The Heaths attribute the memorableness of Risinger’s awards to their being personal. However, another reason these awards are so memorable and meaningful is their silliness. In many work environments, award systems lack novelty—predictable, professional “Employee of the Month'' emails easily blend into the general flatness of the workday. On the other hand, silly and unexpected awards like Risinger’s engage his employees’ brains with the appeal of variable reward and therefore stand out in their memories.)

2) Make Progress Visible

The Heaths point out that progress is often incredibly difficult to measure or recall.

(Shortform note: In many work settings, employees do have clear indicators of progress, such as KPIs. This section focuses on cases where there aren’t clear metrics of growth or improvement, such as learning a new skill like baking or skateboarding.)

To bring out someone’s pride in their “invisible” progress, the Heaths encourage you to dig up and recognize milestones that were achieved in the past but may not have been noticed or celebrated at the time. As you know from the section on “thinking in moments,” the celebration of largely-unseen milestones—not the big, obvious ones—is especially memorable and meaningful.

(Shortform note: Celebrating unseen progress is especially important for those for whom “seen” progress doesn’t come easy. Studies show that schools are increasingly focusing on grades as a measure of progress, while ignoring academic progress that doesn’t visibly “move students up the ladder”—asking for help, expressing creativity, or collaborating with others, for example. As a result, students who show progress in these “invisible” areas instead of the “important” areas lose their motivation to improve. It’s important to remember that both seen and unseen progress are all part of the same path forward.)

If you have the foresight to document progress as it happens, you can highlight the uncelebrated milestones and uncharted progress that deserves recognition, creating defining moments of pride for someone who may not realize just how far she’s come.

Example: Show Progress With a “Year In Review” Video

Imagine your daughter has been practicing ballet for several years. She’s achieved evident milestones and experienced natural occasions of pride: her first recital, getting the part she wanted in her company’s production of The Nutcracker, being invited to make an appearance in her company’s promo video. She knows she’s making progress, but she can’t recall specific improvements.

Each year, you give her a video that documents her practice over the course of the year, so that she’s regularly able to compare her current self side-by-side with her past self. She thinks, “At the beginning of the year, I couldn’t do pointe for more than 5 minutes without a break...now I don’t need a break at all!” In bringing up her past progress, you’ve given her a memorable way to recognize and feel pride in the results of her hard work.

Strategy 3: Prepare Yourself Mentally for Courage

Lastly, the Heaths discuss the way that pride in your courageous actions can create defining moments. We feel a great deal of pride when we act with courage—when we stand up for someone else, call out injustice, or fight for something we believe in. These moments are meaningful because they show us what we’re made of.

The problem with these moments is that it’s very difficult to engineer situations that call on us to be courageous—they almost always happen spontaneously. However, you can practice and prepare yourself mentally to act courageously when it’s necessary.

What Is “Courage”?

In Dare to Lead, Brené Brown—expert on shame and vulnerability—offers a four-part formula to courage:

Based on these four parts, we can understand practicing courage as developing unwavering integrity: A commitment to acting in alignment with what you understand, personally, to be the right thing to do—even in situations that make you feel vulnerable or exposed to the risk of failure.

Act Courageously With Preloaded Responses

The Heaths note that while you might not have any control over when opportunities to act with courage appear, you do have control over how you react to these opportunities.

Usually, when you see something wrong or unjust, you don’t react right away, or at all—most people don’t naturally know how to immediately react to these situations. Without a specific planned response, we end up spending too much time deliberating what we should or could say or do, and miss the moment.

(Shortform note: In their book Switch, the Heaths put a name to this phenomenon of clamming up when faced with the task of making a choice—decision paralysis. When presented with numerous options or ambiguity, humans are predisposed to conserving their mental energy by defaulting to whatever decision feels easiest or most familiar, or not doing anything at all.)

To avoid decision paralysis, plan out exactly how you’d respond to an opportunity to act with courage—what the Heaths call “preloaded responses.” Preloaded responses are reactions that you’ve drilled into your memory so that they’re immediately ready in a situation that calls for it.

While thinking of your preloaded responses, it’s helpful to reframe your thoughts away from, “What is the right thing to do?” This question forces you to deliberate between all the different “right” responses you could have. Instead, ask, “How can I get the right thing done?” This question asserts that you know what’s right and now must make it happen. It’s not a matter of what you should do, but what you will do.

Example: Speaking Up About Inappropriate Remarks

Imagine that your colleague makes a racially insensitive remark to another colleague. Without any practice, you’d likely be so caught off-guard that you’d do nothing at all in response. However, what if you’d had a preloaded response at the ready? “I know that Mary makes insensitive jokes to her friends about Julie. That’s not right and it won’t stop unless I bring it to HR. The next time I hear her make a remark like that, I’ll say ‘Mary, that’s a really inappropriate and disrespectful thing to say, and as it goes against our company values, I’ll be reporting you to HR.’” Chances are if you’d had this preloaded response prepared, you would have been primed to speak up the first time you heard your colleague making these types of remarks.

Preloaded Responses for Personal Moments of Courage

Asserting that you know the right thing to do and planning out how to make it happen can apply to smaller, very personal moments of courage as well. Doing the right thing and acting with integrity matters, even if you’re doing it just for yourself.

Perhaps you’re trying to cut down on drinking. The journey toward sobriety is full of situations that will call on your ability to do the right thing, and you can cut out the hesitation and temptation of these situations by creating preloaded responses.

First, remember to reframe your thoughts. You already know what the right thing to do is: avoiding situations that will tempt you to drink. Then, determine how you can do that. You identify your triggering scenarios and practice your actions: “When the waiter asks me what I would like to drink, I will say seltzer.” “When I am walking home after work, I will take the long way around the block to avoid walking in front of the bar.”

In practicing these small moments of courage so that you may put them into action, you can bring out your best self and multiply your opportunities for meaningful moments of personal pride.

Try Creating Precommitments

Preloaded responses are a type of precommitment—a pact you make with yourself about the way you’ll act in a certain situation. At times, rehearsing your preloaded response may not be a strong enough pact to prompt you to follow through. You can try raising the stakes by putting more tangible precommitments in place.

In his book Indistractable, Nir Eyal outlines several ways you can use precommitments to push yourself into doing the right thing:

Practicing Courage Brings out the Best in Others

Why should you put in the hard work to practice courage and use it when necessary? The Heaths say that in doing so, you just might inspire someone else to do the same.

It’s human nature to be wary of going against the status quo; we want to blend in with what everyone else is doing, no matter if it's right or wrong. However, people are much more likely to have confidence in their own beliefs—even if they are unpopular—if they see someone else lending support to those same beliefs. Likewise, people are much more likely to do the right thing after they have observed someone else doing so; justice suddenly becomes much more important than blending in.

(Shortform note: Being able to “spread” feelings or actions in this way is a result of the mirror neuron system, which directs the brain to mirror others’ actions. This system comes from early in our evolution when humans depended on being part of a group for survival. Mimicry—especially of positive, or prosocial, behaviors—helped humans assimilate into groups by creating a sense of similarity and bonding. Due to your mirror neuron system, observing others’ actions prompts your brain to rehearse the action as if you were doing it yourself. In other words, by acting with courage, you subconsciously help another person to practice their moment of courage.)

Courage is contagious. When you create a defining moment of pride for yourself with courage, you also create a defining moment for someone else who is shaped by the experience of seeing someone else stand up for what’s right and inspire them to do the same.

Exercise: Give Recognition and Break Down Goals

Moments of pride are a high return on a relatively small investment of your time and effort. Reflect on situations where you can put in that effort to create moments of pride for others through recognition, and for yourself through small wins.

Chapters 10-12: Create Defining Moments With Connection

The fourth element you can use to create a defining moment is connection. Moments defined by connection are experiences that strengthen your relationships with other people. They stir up a host of positive emotions—validation, intimacy, empathy—that make you feel closer to and seen by the people around you.

In this chapter, we’ll first look into what types of experiences can strengthen group relationships, and then we’ll examine how you can deepen your personal relationships.

Part 1: Use Connection to Strengthen Group Relationships

Defining moments for groups happen in experiences that create a shared meaning for everyone present—experiences that underscore the mission everyone is working toward together. These experiences are essential for reminding the group members that they’re united in something important and larger than themselves.

There are three steps to create moments of connection for groups: 1) Create a shared moment, 2) Allow for voluntary struggle, and 3) Reconnect members with their work’s meaning.

Why These Three Strategies Strengthen Groups

In his book The Culture Code, which explores what makes for strong, connected cultures, Daniel Coyle reveals three crucial psychological elements that solidify one’s place within a culture and contribute to the success of a group: safety, vulnerability, and purpose. Each of the Heaths’ three steps helps establish these elements:

Step #1: Create a Shared Moment

It’s human nature to constantly tune into the responses and emotions of a group and compare them to our own, synchronizing our reactions to the group’s.

Many of our natural defining moments—weddings, graduations, bar mitzvahs—have a built-in social aspect because they’re reasons to gather. The Heaths stress that engineered defining moments, if they are to be as meaningful as these natural moments, need a similar built-in social aspect that allows group members to bounce their emotions off one another.

Why Organizations Need Shared Moments

The Heaths note that this step is especially important—and novel—for large organizations, who rarely put forth the effort to gather all their members together in one place.

Creating a shared moment is your organization’s opportunity to build a meaningful, memorable peak into the general flatness of your members’ everyday tasks. Gathered together, they’re met with the social reality of their impact and are surrounded by like-minded people that make them feel excited, supported, and connected to the cause. It’s just not possible to capture this energy and convey the magnitude of an organization or movement via email.

The Motivational Cost of Remote Work

Organizations across the world are increasingly turning to remote work as an option for their employees, but this presents a serious motivational challenge due to the lack of shared moments.

Researchers find that most employees don’t find this setup appealing—in fact, they found a significant decline in job satisfaction and employee motivation among remote workers. Many employees attribute this to a lack of social contact: Without the opportunity to meaningfully collaborate and chat with colleagues or see the impact of their work on clients, the work experience becomes endless, disengaging flatness.

Though you may not be able to create an in-person shared moment for your remote employees, the following tips can help you work on creating a sense of belonging similar to that fostered by shared moments:

Once you’ve created a shared moment that lends social reality to your members’ efforts, you can build on it by offering up an opportunity for voluntary struggle.

Step #2: Allow for Voluntary Struggle

The Heaths explain that groups bond quickly when they face adversity together. You can see examples of this everywhere: Your chemistry study group becomes close friends after many all-nighters at the library. Fraternity hazing is a month of hell in exchange for brotherly bonds among your pledge class.

(Shortform note: Shared struggle is a powerful bonding tool—the Heaths discuss how it might bring together people who are already part of the same group, but studies have shown that pain or struggle enhances bonding in groups of people without any shared identity. Part of the reason for this is that struggle naturally forces group members to ask for help and show vulnerability, which is a foundational element of relationship-building.)

The Heaths caution that you can’t give your organization members just any struggle with the expectation that they’ll feel motivated and connected to your cause as a result. They suggest inviting group members to the voluntary struggle. Your invitation should include three elements:

  1. Participation as a choice: There’s no sense of obligation to join—members join solely because they want to, and there is no punishment for deciding not to participate.
  2. Autonomy: Participants can make their own decisions regarding their work.
  3. Meaningful mission: The members’ struggle is connected to a larger sense of meaning.

This last point merits deeper exploration, as creating connections to the work itself, rather than just between the people involved, is the third step to strengthening group connections.

Strategy #3: Reconnect Members With Their Work’s Meaning

No matter how excited you are about the cause you’re working for, it’s all too easy to forget your work’s meaningful big picture among the flatness of your day-to-day tasks. The Heaths urge you to strengthen a group’s connection to the meaning of their work by focusing on cultivating their sense of purpose rather than trying to channel their passion.

Your passion, your enthusiasm and excitement for the work at hand, is certainly not a bad thing. It is, however, very individualistic: Your enthusiasm depends largely on who you are as a person and how much you enjoy the type of work you’re doing. Because it’s experienced alone and depends on the enjoyment of the work, passion can easily burn out when the work gets boring or the cause is meeting too many obstacles.

Purpose, on the other hand, is a strong motivator—especially in a group setting. Purpose is rooted in the feeling that your efforts (even if you don’t particularly enjoy them) have an impact or some sort of meaning in something much larger than yourself. Cultivating a feeling of purpose in a group by showing members the impact of their work ties them together in a sense of connection to something meaningful, and allows them to power through dull tasks or endless obstacles.

The Negative Effect of Chasing Passion

In addition to being a poor motivator, there’s no evidence that passion is a route to happiness. Most people believe that the only way to find a job you truly enjoy is to find your passion and follow it. This advice has been mainstream for years, and acts as the starting point for many career books such as Richard Bolles’s What Color Is Your Parachute?

However, others argue it’s not good advice. The “passion hypothesis” has caused a decline in workplace satisfaction over the years: Studies cited in Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You show that only 45% of Americans report being happy with their jobs, likely because they feel that they should be doing something that aligns with their passions.

Example: GreenSpace Volunteer Rally

To better understand how shared moments, voluntary struggle, and a meaningful mission can come together in a successful moment of connection, let’s look at the example of GreenSpace.

GreenSpace (GS) is an organization that builds and maintains parks, playgrounds, and community gardens for underserved neighborhoods and schools in Detroit. They rely heavily on the work of volunteers for myriad tasks. When volunteers started putting in half the hours they used to, GS decided to create a defining moment that would reconnect volunteers with their mission.

Step 1: Create a Shared Moment

The GS founder went all out pulling together a volunteer rally. He rented out the Detroit Institute of Art; he filled the temporary exhibition gallery with photographs of people enjoying GS parks; he bussed in volunteers from all corners of the city; he hired caterers to make appetizers with vegetables from GS community gardens.

Step 2: Reconnect Volunteers with the GS Mission

The founder gave a speech about the triumphs of GS so far, current struggles, and goals moving forward. Then, an 18-year-old woman spoke about her experience growing up in Detroit and spending time in the safe space of a GS park and then revealed that she’ll be studying urban planning at university. The energy of the volunteers was palpable—being in a crowd of excited, like-minded people reignited volunteers’ passion for the work.

Step 3: Allow for Voluntary Struggle

To help with his goals, the founder presented the idea of a new Community Task Force. If interested, volunteers could sign up to run community events to advertise GS’s work and mission, recruit new volunteers, and regularly survey community members for feedback and new ideas. At the end of the rally, there were 200 volunteers signed up for the Community Task Force.

Part 2: Use Connection to Deepen Individual Relationships

While the “shared moment + voluntary struggle + connection to meaning” formula works for creating connections that deepen group relationships, creating defining moments by strengthening individual relationships requires a different route.

The Heaths explain that, contrary to what you might think, relationships do not naturally deepen or grow stronger over time. Without regular maintenance, relationships easily plateau—they won’t develop any further without a bit of engineering. A properly maintained relationship has positive peaks that serve as the defining moments that deepen the relationship.

The Heaths clarify that in the context of relationships, these positive peaks happen in instances of responsiveness—moments of engagement with someone else that make it clear that you’re listening to and care about them. Responsiveness conveys three essential messages:

These three messages together accomplish the goal of responsiveness—to make someone feel special and seen. These positive feelings bolster emotional wellness and self-esteem and establish feelings of security in the relationship. Without responsiveness, relationships struggle and stagnate.

How Does Responsiveness Contribute to Defining Moments?

Part of the reason that instances of connection and responsiveness can be so memorable is that they’re novel experiences in our current world.

In Lost Connections, journalist Johann Hari writes that people are spending less time than ever participating in meaningful, in-person social activities where they might establish connections with others—such as dinner parties or group outings. The problem is that our world is becoming increasingly connected online—which means our interactions are focused on superficial communication rather than a true, supportive connection.

As we become more and more accustomed to communicating with messages, tags, and likes, the experience of true connection that comes from opening up to another person and receiving respect, support, and understanding in return stands out as a pleasant surprise.

Responsiveness in Personal Relationships

In personal relationships, responsiveness is part of a formula: vulnerability + responsiveness = intimacy. In practice, this formula looks fairly simple: You share something (vulnerability) and then wait to see if the other person shares something in return (responsiveness). By choosing to respond, they express respect, understanding, and support.

The Heaths stress that intimacy doesn’t come from either responsiveness or vulnerability alone—it’s crucial that there’s an exchange between the two. When completed, this simple exchange opens up the possibility to continue sharing and learning about one another, to build intimacy and trust. In other words, it allows the relationship to progress instead of plateauing. It’s important to keep in mind that this exchange doesn’t happen naturally—someone needs to take the first step of vulnerability in order to start the cycle. If you want richer, deeper connections in your life, you must either be willing to be open with others or recognize when others are making the step to be open with you.

For example, you meet a girl on your first day of sleepaway camp. You reach out with vulnerability: “I’m nervous being so far from home for the first time.” Your relationship can develop in one of two ways:

The Importance of Aligning Expression and Reception

The Heaths’ approach to responsiveness is somewhat one-size-fits-all: Someone expresses vulnerability, and by expressing vulnerability in exchange, you reveal that you see them, care about them, and understand them. A crucially important point that this approach misses is that not everyone gives and receives support, understanding, and respect the same way.

Many missed opportunities for connection and responsiveness come about because one person’s expression of care and understanding is misaligned with the other person’s reception of care and understanding. Once you know what makes someone feel seen, it becomes much easier to respond meaningfully to their attempts to connect with you.

Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages is well-known for its lessons in determining what actions make you and those in your life feel seen and understood. The book focuses on the way we express love through five “languages'': acts of service, physical touch, words of affirmation, gifts, and quality time. Knowing someone’s love language means that when they open up to you, you can respond to their vulnerability in a way that aligns with the way they view understanding and care—thereby deepening your relationship.

For example, your friend reveals to you that she’s behind on a project at work and is worried she’ll be fired if she doesn’t get it done.

Shortform Commentary: How Responsiveness Makes for Better Teams

Most people wouldn’t think of their workplace as an appropriate setting for being vulnerable with others or practicing responsiveness. This thinking leads to long-term relationships that never deepen.

Learning to spot vulnerability and reciprocate it in the workplace is crucial to building strong, innovative teams. Shame and vulnerability expert Brené Brown discusses the importance of workplace vulnerability in Dare to Lead. According to Brown, when team members are encouraged to express and engage with their vulnerability, it creates a sense of psychological safety—the understanding that you can express yourself freely, without fear of mockery or harsh repercussions. She goes on to describe the benefits of psychological safety: Team members are more likely to push against the status quo, trust and rely on one another, and come up with creative and innovative ideas.

In Radical Candor, Kim Scott—former team leader at Google and CEO coach at Dropbox and Twitter—provides guidelines for starting the process of building vulnerable, trusting connections at work. She notes that the best place to start is by asking your team members questions about themselves, and then engaging with their responses. It’s important not to delve into deeply personal questions straight away—trust is built up through small, repeated exchanges of vulnerability and responsiveness.

How Organizations Can Use Responsiveness In Client Relationships

It’s easy to understand how responsiveness supports personal relationships such as with your partner, your friends, or your colleagues. However, the Heaths point out that you might not realize how important it is to support your professional relationships with responsiveness. Doing so can help you better connect with the clients you interact with on a regular basis.

The Heaths reveal that treating your clients with responsiveness shows them that you understand and validate their feelings and makes for a satisfying experience that boosts their loyalty to your organization. On the other hand, canned responses—all too common in client services—create an unsatisfying, invalidating experience for clients.

Example: What Client Responsiveness Looks Like

Imagine that one of your customers is having a problem with her new smartphone. She’s called your troubleshooting service five times in an attempt to figure it out. Each call starts the same way: “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” “Are you running the most recent software?” You can understand how your customer might find repeatedly answering the same questions infuriating. Your lack of responsiveness makes her feel that she’s seen as another number in the system, rather than as an individual.

This problem is easy to turn around with responsiveness. The next time she calls, you start with: “Hi Mrs. Brown, I understand you’re having an ongoing issue with your smartphone. Can you tell me what you’ve tried already? Don’t want to make you needlessly repeat steps.” This new type of interaction, which acknowledges her past experiences and builds from them, shows her that you see her and care about her. The connection of this moment has the potential to reshape her negative perception of your company—though she approached you with a problem, she’ll likely leave with an overall positive impression.

Can Technology and Client Responsiveness Coexist?

Many of the experiences of client responsiveness that the Heaths discuss happen between people. However, most people are increasingly interacting with organizations by distant, digital means. Is it possible to practice responsiveness and create meaningful, memorable connections with clients in digital settings?

Organizations looking to strengthen loyalty among clients that they don’t interact with in person can do so by focusing on the individual relationships they build with clients just as much as they focus on their product and costs.

Perhaps counterintuitively, “deepening relationships” in this sense depends on machine learning rather than making connections between people. By collecting data on the way clients use your service, your algorithm can determine the experience each client wants and refine your service’s relationship with them. The client, as a result, thinks of your service as valuable and unique.

Here are a few examples of what this could look like:

Both of these organizations’ gestures make the client feel, in a small way, that she’s seen and understood—despite the fact that she’s interacting with an algorithm rather than a person. The connection makes her start to think of the organization as a “friend,” increasing her loyalty to them.

Conclusion: What Defining Moments Give Us

The Heaths’ book demonstrates that there are many positives to creating more defining moments in your life. Some of these moments can produce tangible outcomes like more revenue from satisfied clients, better work from loyal employees, or higher test scores from motivated students. Other moments will grant you more personal positives, like more confident children, deeper relationships with your friends and family, and a better understanding of your capabilities, motivations, and values.

Above all, however, looking for moments that you can enhance with elevation, pride, connection, or insight can multiply the rich experiences that make your life meaningful. Focusing on meaningful moments is a way to reconnect with what’s important to a well-lived life. Investment in these moments offers you the opportunity to re-engage with your life and fight against the everyday flatness that causes days, months, and years to speed by.

Exercise: Recognize Opportunities for Responsiveness

Opportunities to deepen our relationships with others are all around us, but we often miss them. Practice recognizing these opportunities and others’ attempts to connect with you. Use the three elements of responsiveness—understanding, respect, and support—as your guide.

Exercise: Practice Responsiveness and Vulnerability

A key to strengthening your ties with the people around you is to practice responsiveness and be willing to show vulnerability. This exercise will help you think about how you can practice both of these elements in your personal relationships.