The Power of Moments

by Chip Heath

  Rabia Ahmad and her husband donated some money to buy basic supplies for an elementary school classroom. This was one of the letters they received:

  “I cried,” she said. “These kids—they’re actually thanking me for giving them pencils.”

  Ahmad had been resistant to the idea of receiving thank-you letters. (The site’s policy is that donors who give $50 or more will automatically receive thank-you notes, unless they opt out, which many do.) “This is something that no child should be thanking for,” she thought. “We expect these supplies for our own children.”

  But after talking with the DonorsChoose staff, she realized that there were powerful benefits for the students, too: “It’s not just getting the things, it’s appreciating them. And realizing that there are people who want them to succeed.”

  Elementary school teacher Mary Jean Pace used DonorsChoose to raise money for recycling bins for her school in Georgia. Many of her students’ relatives chipped in, but the donation that clinched the project came from a woman in Arlington, Virginia. A stranger. Pace told her students, “Boys and girls, Arlington is a long way away and we don’t even know her. And she thought what we are going to do is important.” Her students were blown away. They couldn’t wait to send notes to the woman in Arlington.

  These thank-you letters have been part of the DonorsChoose experience since 2000, the year the organization was founded. In the beginning, the organization was sending hundreds of letters per year. In 2016, DonorsChoose distributed roughly a million! (See some recent samples on the next pages.)

  This effort requires serious logistics, including a team of a dozen employees and 120 volunteers who help review letters. People frequently suggest that the operations could be made more efficient by scanning letters and distributing them via email. (Remember the warning earlier about the soul-sucking force of reasonableness.) “This act of facilitating gratitude goes against every recommendation about how to scale,” said Julia Prieto, a vice president of DonorsChoose who oversees the donor letters. “But this is the one thing that people remember about their experience.”

  In 2014, the team analyzed historical data and discovered that donors who opt to receive thank-you letters will make larger donations the next year. The letters build commitment. But at DonorsChoose, the findings were almost beside the point.

  “We’re not in the marketing department,” said Prieto. “We’re not doing this to raise money. We believe it’s an essential part of our model. We have consistently bet in the direction of gratitude.” DonorsChoose has created a defining moments factory for donors.

  Rabia Ahmad, the donor, reserves a special drawer in her desk for things she wants to hold on to, like her children’s report cards. It’s where she keeps the thank-you letters from DonorsChoose.

  5.

  Expressing gratitude pleases the recipient of the praise, of course, but it can also have a boomerang effect, elevating the spirits of the grateful person. Positive psychologists, who search for scientific ways to make people happier, have discovered the potency of what’s called a “gratitude visit.” Martin Seligman, the godfather of positive psychology, offers the following exercise:

  Close your eyes. Call up the face of someone still alive who years ago did something or said something that changed your life for the better. Someone who you never properly thanked; someone you could meet face-to-face next week. Got a face?

  Your task is to write a letter of gratitude to this individual and deliver it in person. The letter should be concrete and about three hundred words: be specific about what she did for you and how it affected your life. Let her know what you are doing now, and mention how you often remember what she did.

  As an example, consider this letter that University of Montana student Paul Glassman wrote to his mother and subsequently read aloud to her.

  Mom, from when I was born to now, you have been impacting my life every day. . . .

  When I was in high school, you came to every single sporting event that you possibly could, even if that meant you had to leave work early to catch the bus to get there. You were there. It didn’t matter if I was playing down in Maple Valley during the playoffs, you were still there bundled in your blankets. Or if it was pouring rain in the middle of October, you were there in your raincoat. . . .

  You pushed and pushed and pushed me to do well in school because you wanted me to go to college. I remember the day I was accepted to the University of Montana; we were both able to share that wonderful moment together. . . . I know that if it was not for you, I would not have continued my education, and I thank you for that. . . .

  Through the toughest of times and through the best of times, you have been there to support me, and I can’t honestly tell you what that means to me. All I can say is that I love you with all of my heart. You are such an amazing human being and an even better mother. Thank you for all the time and effort and hard work you have taken into making me the man that I am today. I love you with all my heart.

  It’s clear why this visit would be a peak for Glassman’s mother. It encompasses all four elements of a defining moment: ELEVATION, by breaking the script; INSIGHT, from hearing how her son views her; PRIDE in his accomplishments; and CONNECTION, sparked by the deep emotional message. (Both Glassman and his mother teared up during the reading of the letter.)

  But the visit was also a defining moment for Glassman. In fact, he cited it as the third-most memorable experience of his college days, behind only graduation and attending the national championship game in football.

  Researchers have found that if you conduct a gratitude visit, you feel a rush of happiness afterward—in fact, it’s one of the most pronounced spikes that have been found in any positive psychology intervention. Glassman experienced it: “It was such an amazing feeling,” he said. “I felt almost untouchable.”

  Better yet, researchers say, this feeling lasts. Even a month later, people who conducted a gratitude visit were still happier than their peers in a control group.

  This is a stunning finding. There are a lot of pleasures in the world that can spike our happiness for an hour—a warm doughnut comes to mind—but few that can still provide an afterglow a month later.

  This disjunction—a small investment that yields a large reward—is the defining feature of recognition. A music teacher praises a troubled student’s singing ability. A sales manager gives a pair of headphones as a prize. A boss spontaneously praises an employee for “prepping the backroom.” All were moments of recognition that the recipients remembered and cherished for years afterward.

  If you knew you could make a positive difference in someone’s life—that you could create a memory for them that would last for years—and it would take only a trivial amount of time on your part, would you do it?

  Well, now you know it.

  Will you do it?

  * * *

  I. During the summer camp, the students took a field trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and at one of the places they visited, there was a “recording booth” where you could sing a famous tune and walk away with your track on a cassette tape. On a lark, Sloop and two friends recorded the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and on the bus ride home to camp, they convinced the bus driver to play it. One boy on the bus listened to the song and loved it, and he remembers it was the first time he’d really noticed Kira. His name was Ross Sloop. Five summer camps, nine years, and one remarkable coincidence later, he would ask Kira to marry him.The remarkable coincidence? After college, Kira was working at a store that provided VHS video rentals. A customer returned a video one day—his name was Ed Slocum. Kira went into the store’s customer database to mark the video “returned,” and she happened to notice the name directly below Slocum’s in the directory: Ross Sloop, her old campmate. She wrote down his phone number (thereby violating several confidential/privacy statutes, no doubt). She called him later. And the rest, as they say, is history.

  II. Great Simpsons moment: Homer is the only employee of t
he power plant not to have won the “Worker of the Week Award.” Mr. Burns, the owner of the power plant, has called his employees together to announce the week’s winner: “I can’t believe we’ve overlooked this week’s winner for so very long.” In the audience, Homer smiles and fidgets. Burns continues, “We simply could not function without his tireless efforts. So! A round of applause for: this inanimate carbon rod!” The carbon rod receives a commemorative medal while the crowd cheers (except Homer).

  8

  Multiply Milestones

  1.

  In 1996, when Josh Clark was 25, he had a bad breakup with his girlfriend, and it left him in a slump. So he started jogging. Clark hated jogging; he’d always hated jogging. But he thought this time might be different.

  It wasn’t. It was just as boring and painful as it had always been. But this time he stuck with it, and eventually he had “come out the other side,” he said. The runs had started to feel different: meditative and relaxing. He could barely believe it. He never thought he was the kind of person who could enjoy running.

  He felt “the zeal of the converted,” he said, and he resolved to help other people discover the pleasures of jogging. Was there a way for someone to “get to the other side” without requiring the period of suffering he had endured? He wondered, How do I give people easy victories?

  Clark started scribbling out a plan to ease people into running. People needed a goal, he thought. Something to look forward to. His hunch was that running in a 5K race would make a good goal—the races are public, social, competitive, and fun. (They are peaks.) And, critically, the 5K represented an attainable challenge, since most people in decent health could already walk a 5K.

  So he called his plan “Couch to 5K.” In 9 weeks, with 3 workouts per week, the plan would transform a couch-sitter into a 5K finisher. The first workout was simple: Alternating a 60-second jog with a 90-second walk for a total of 20 minutes. The workouts escalated steadily from there.

  Clark needed a beta tester for his plan, so he called his mom. She was not receptive. “He was trying to convince me that I should get into this [running thing], too. Yeah, right,” she said. But her maternal instincts kicked in, and she gave it a shot. It worked. She found it “kind of surprising that I could do it without a tremendous amount of effort or commitment.”

  Encouraged, Clark posted his plan to a website that he’d built for runners. It was 1997—the early days of the Web. “What surprised me was that people started picking it up and talking about it: ‘I’m on week 3 day 2 and here’s how it’s going,’ ” Clark said.

  Over the years, as interest in Couch to 5K grew, parts of the plan took on almost mythic qualities. For instance, in week 5 comes a moment that has spawned its own acronym: W5D3 (for week 5, day 3). This day requires the new joggers to step up their efforts considerably. While the previous workout featured two 8-minute runs, separated by a walk, W5D3 requires a continuous 20-minute jog, by far the longest stretch the participants have run to that point. It is feared and loathed by new joggers. In a blog post called “The Dreaded W5D3,” one jogger wrote, “I can think of at least 10 times where the old me would have stopped to walk. Instead I shuffled along, sometimes very slowly, until I regained my breath and was able to pick the pace back up. I did it! . . . Woooooo!”

  In 2000, Clark’s website had picked up some advertisers, and he decided to sell it to a company called Cool Runnings. He went on with his life as an expert in software interface design, and meanwhile, over the years, his brainchild has grown exponentially. Millions of people have heard of it (now known as C25K), and hundreds of thousands have participated.

  Clark has received countless emotional thank-yous from people saying Couch to 5K changed their lives. He had meant to introduce people to the joys of running, but in the process, he had unwittingly delivered defining moments.

  Billions of dollars have been spent trying to encourage people to exercise. Most of it has been wasted. Yet here is a program that has convinced thousands of people to train for a 3.1-mile jog. What gives?

  The common goal to “get in shape” is ambiguous and unmotivating. Pursuing it puts you on a path with no clear destination and no intermediate moments to celebrate. Couch to 5K provides a structure that respects the power of moments. First, there’s the commitment to join the program. That’s one milestone—it’s a personal resolution made public. Surviving the formidable W5D3 moment provides a second milestone. (The quote above says it all, “I did it! . . . Woooooo!” That’s what pride sounds like.) And of course finishing the 5K is a peak, with elements of elevation and connection and pride. Three months ago, I couldn’t run 100 yards without heaving, and now I’m the kind of person who can finish a race!

  The C25K program multiplies the milestones that participants meet, and in so doing, it multiplies the pride that they experience. We can apply this same strategy to many aspects of our lives and work. To experience more defining moments, we need to rethink the way we set goals.

  2.

  Steve Kamb was a lifelong video game aficionado. An addict, even. He worried about how much of his life he was losing to the escapist pleasures of gaming. Then it occurred to him that he might be able to hijack his own addiction. If he could understand why he found games so compelling, he could use those same principles to rebuild his life “around adventure rather than escape.”

  In his book, Level Up Your Life: How to Unlock Adventure and Happiness by Becoming the Hero of Your Own Story, he described the structure of pleasurable games. They follow a system of levels: “When you are Level 1 and killing spiders, you know that when you kill enough spiders, you get to level up eventually and get to start attacking rats. Once you advance to a high enough level, you know you get to start slaying FREAKING DRAGONS (which can only be written in all caps).”

  Conquering each level feels good. It feels so good, in fact, that you can love playing a game even if you never finish it. Think of it: Very few people finish Angry Birds or Candy Crush or (for that matter) Donkey Kong, but still they have a great time playing.

  Kamb’s insight was that, in our lives, we tend to declare goals without intervening levels. We declare that we’re going to “learn to play the guitar.” We take a lesson or two, buy a cheap guitar, futz around with simple chords for a few weeks. Then life gets busy, and seven years later, we find the guitar in the attic and think, I should take up the guitar again. There are no levels.

  Kamb had always loved Irish music and had fantasized about learning to play the fiddle. So he co-opted gaming strategy and figured out a way to “level up” toward his goal:

  Level 1: Commit to one violin lesson per week, and practice 15 minutes per day for six months.

  Level 2: Relearn how to read sheet music and complete Celtic Fiddle Tunes by Craig Duncan.

  Level 3: Learn to play “Concerning Hobbits” from The Fellowship of the Ring on the violin.

  Level 4: Sit and play the fiddle for 30 minutes with other musicians.

  Level 5: Learn to play “Promontory” from The Last of the Mohicans on the violin.

  BOSS BATTLE: Sit and play the fiddle for 30 minutes in a pub in Ireland.

  Isn’t that ingenious? He’s taken an ambiguous goal—learning to play the fiddle—and defined an appealing destination: playing in an Irish pub. Better yet, he invented five milestones en route to the destination, each worthy of celebration. Note that, as with a game, if he stopped the quest after Level 3, he’d still have several moments of pride to remember. It would have been a fun ride, like quitting after 30 levels of Candy Crush.

  Could you adapt this strategy for one of your goals? Many Americans aspire to learn another language, for example. But “learning Spanish” is one of those amorphous goals that should give us pause. There’s no destination and no intermediate levels. Using Kamb’s principles, we can make this a more exciting journey. We can level up:

  Level 1: Order a meal in Spanish.

  Level 2: Have a simple conversation in Spanish with a taxi
driver.

  Level 3: Glance at a Spanish newspaper and understand at least one headline.

  Level 4: Follow the action in a Spanish cartoon.

  Level 5: Read a kindergarten-level book in Spanish.

  And so on, leading up to . . .

  Destination: Be able to have full, normal conversations in Spanish with Fernando in accounting (not just “Cómo está usted?”)

  Compare that plan with the typical way we think about pursuing goals:

  Level 1: Try to squeeze in a Spanish study session.

  Level 2: Try to squeeze in a Spanish study session.

  Level 3: Try to squeeze in a Spanish study session.

  Level 4: Try to squeeze in a Spanish study session.

  Level 5: Try to squeeze in a Spanish study session.

  Destination: Someday, eventually: “Know” Spanish.

  Which of those plans sound like more fun? Which are you more likely to return to, if you’re forced to take a break? Which are you more likely to complete?

  3.

  By using Kamb’s level-up strategy, we multiply the number of motivating milestones we encounter en route to a goal. That’s a forward-looking strategy: We’re anticipating moments of pride ahead. But the opposite is also possible: to surface those milestones you’ve already met but might not have noticed. Earlier in the book, we mentioned the way Fitbit celebrates its customers for fitness milestones: The India badge, for instance, celebrates you for walking a total of 1,997 miles, which is the length of India. (Celebrating 2,000 miles walked would have been fitting, too, but somehow the India badge feels more interesting and memorable.) No Fitbit customers would have been aware of this feat had the company not told them.