The Power of Moments

by Chip Heath

  But this instinct to notice and commemorate achievements is oddly lacking in many areas of life. Take youth sports leagues. There are natural moments of pride scattered throughout the season: points scored, victories won. But what about the kids’ greater skill at basketball?

  Certainly the kids know, in a generic sense, that they’ve improved over the course of a season. But improvements are slow and incremental. Almost invisible. You can’t rewind your memory to six months prior and observe how clearly your dribbling has improved.

  But you can rewind a video. What if every boy on a basketball team received a simple before-and-after video comparing his performance at the beginning and end of the season? The improvements would be so obvious, so visible: Check it out—I could barely dribble with my left hand! Haha—I couldn’t make a free throw to save my life. What a stunning moment of pride that would be. Look how far I’ve come! And yet we have not encountered a single coach who has had the instinct to mint this moment of pride for his players.

  Or think about how couples celebrate their anniversaries: by taking trips, going out for a nice dinner, or exchanging gifts. Those are moments rich with elevation and connection. But what about pride? Shouldn’t couples acknowledge and celebrate what they’ve accomplished together?

  One couple we know kept an anniversary journal for the first decade of their marriage. Every year they would record the things they accomplished: Redecorating the back bedroom, hosting extended family for Thanksgiving dinner, and so on. They’d also record the trips they took, and the friends they saw most frequently, and, amazingly, what they fought about!

  The husband said, “Reliving the big arguments from the previous year is not for the faint of heart, because you tend to want to refight them.” But having the record was useful because it provided concrete evidence of the progress they had made in their relationship. In the first year of marriage, they fought about almost anything. (One actual example: Which spices can stay on the kitchen table?) Over the next three years, the arguments steadily dwindled, and by the fifth year, they could recall only minor bickering. Not even an honest-to-goodness fight. And they laughed at the memory of fighting over spices.

  That’s a laugh that signals a moment of pride. Look at how far we’ve come. And that moment would not have happened, we suspect, were it not for the journal.

  4.

  What’s clear from the preceding is that we are consistently missing opportunities to create moments of pride for ourselves and others. The interesting question is, Why?

  Our theory: We’ve been brainwashed by the goals we see in our work lives. Executives tend to set goals that sound like this: Grow revenues to $20 billion by 2020! (That’s a real example, by the way. Based on our experience with C-suite executives, we think it’s likely that millions of people around the world are working, at this very moment, toward goals that were chosen simply because the numbers had a catchy ring.)

  Similar goals cascade downward. Within the organization with the “$20B by 2020” goal, a particular business unit might have a smaller supporting goal: Increase market share in South America to 23% by 2018. Then, after setting a goal like that, the group would make a bunch of plans to achieve it.

  A numerical goal plus supporting plans. Notice what that combination leaves us with: A destination that is not inherently motivating and that lacks meaningful milestones along the way. As a result, achieving the “20 by 2020” goal will require a massive human effort with much of the pride stripped out.

  To be fair, this combination of goal-setting and planning can move an organization in the right direction. But the value of these tools comes from holding people accountable for their work. They’re not designed to be intrinsically motivating or to improve the experience of the human beings who are being held accountable.

  We should be careful that we don’t let this corporate style of goal-setting infiltrate our personal lives, where we’re in full control. “I’m going to lose 10 pounds in 2 months,” for instance, is a classic corporate goal: arbitrary, numerical, and lacking intermediate milestones. By now, you know what to do: Restore the milestones. Level up: Go one week straight without using the elevator. Pick out 2 microbrews to enjoy on Saturday after a full week without booze. If I jog continuously for three songs on my playlist, that entitles me to download three new ones. And so on.

  Furthermore, the ultimate destination should not be “losing 10 pounds,” it should be something intrinsically motivating, such as “Fitting into my sexy black pants (without gastrointestinal distress).” Suddenly, your weight-loss mission starts looking more like a playful quest, with frequent victories along the way, and less like a daily weigh-in on the bathroom scale

  Is there a way to channel this same spirit inside organizations—to counteract the “command and control” culture of goals and plans? A wise leader can look for milestones en route to a larger goal. Let’s say your group has been tasked with boosting customer satisfaction by 20% by the end of the third quarter. You might have no control over that goal and how it’s framed. But you can still multiply the milestones for your team (note that these need not be sequential):

  Milestone 1: Receive a glowing thank-you from a well-satisfied customer.

  Milestone 2: Make it a full week without any surveys scoring their satisfaction as a 1 out of 7.

  Milestone 3: Solve the number one complaint from the last month of surveys.

  Milestone 4: Get halfway there: Boost satisfaction by 10%.

  And so on . . .

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

  The same logic applies to milestones involving less tangible goals, such as building leadership skills. In most organizations, the only clear “levels” en route to leadership positions are promotions. But what if it takes five years for an employee to earn a promotion, or what if she is not interested in or suited for a promotion? How do you create the intermediate milestones that could provide moments of pride?

  Large organizations often speak in terms of “competencies.” That is, to do a particular job well, you need to develop a set of specific competencies in areas such as vision setting or business acumen or data analysis. (Yes, they tend to sound exactly that boring.)

  But rather than giving vague instructions to employees on how to build their “business acumen,” they could be presented instead with a set of meaningful milestones to accomplish (again, not necessarily sequential):

  • Turn around a product/service line that is struggling

  • Have a direct report promoted to a managerial role

  • Solve a business challenge by collaborating with another function or group

  • Receive a compliment that you run meetings that are actually worthwhile

  • Deliver a major project on time and on budget

  • Contribute an idea that is adopted company-wide

  These items would not be a checklist for advancement (Do these 6 things and you’ll be promoted), since it would be impossible to create a generic list that would apply to all people and situations. Rather, the milestones would simply map out the turf of achievement. Here are the ways it’s possible to build your skills and demonstrate your value to the organization And when you do so, we will salute you for that.

  5.

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

  The Boy Scouts understand this idea well. The Scouts’ Merit Badge program, active for more than 100 years, is a great example of introducing multiple milestones and celebrating each one. The Merit Badges are presented to the Scout at a �
��Court of Honor,” where the Scouts are recognized in front of their peers. That’s a peak. Similarly, karate students who earn belts—from the novice’s white belt to the expert’s black belt—often receive them at public award ceremonies.

  People who develop lifelong passions are often honoring these same concepts, whether consciously or not. In 2013, Scott Ettl, an executive at a research firm and the father of three young kids, read a book about Aaron Burr that a friend had recommended. Burr, the third vice president of the United States and the man who famously killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, was portrayed as an American hero. Then, a few weeks later, Ettl devoured David McCullough’s bestselling biography of John Adams, which cast Burr in a negative light.

  He read a biography of George Washington and, sure enough, it portrayed John Adams differently than had McCullough’s biography. But by the time he had read about the same people and events for the third time (since Washington, Adams, and Burr all overlapped), his perception of history, as he had learned it in school, began to change. The portraits of the historical figures stopped feeling flat and contradictory; rather, they began to acquire three dimensions.

  He was hooked. He’d always been a history buff, but the biographies were bringing a kind of order to his passion. One day, he made a declaration to his family: He was going to read a biography of every American president, in order. “It became more than liking history,” he said. “It became a quest.” A quest with 45 ready-made milestones.

  He blazed through the first 8 or 9 presidential biographies in the first year. The Millard Fillmore book slowed him down, and then his quest was almost derailed by the Rutherford B. Hayes biography—“about the worst book you could possibly imagine,” he said. It took him a year to finish it.

  The quest has evolved over time. Now when Ettl completes a president, he buys the commemorative dollar coin for that president from the U.S. Mint. The coins provide a visual token of his progress, as do the presidential autographs his relatives started to buy for him.

  Remember in the first chapter, we talked about the “treasure chest” of items that we all keep for ourselves, full of old awards and ticket stubs and journals? Ettl’s treasure chest is full of hardcover books, historic coins, and aged autographs—the relics of his march through U.S. history. There’s something appealing about a moment of pride that comes with its own souvenir.

  Think about how good it feels to flip through the stamps on your passport. A mere smudge of ink can provoke a rush of memories. (In keeping with this spirit, shouldn’t boarding passes be designed to be “treasure chest” items? When you visit San Francisco, your stub should have the Golden Gate Bridge on it. Instead, we’re given boarding documents that look like the homework of a dot-matrix printer.)

  Ettl estimates it will take him about 2–3 years to catch up to the current president. “Unless I die, I’ll finish this,” he vowed.

  When he catches up to the present-day president, Ettl said, he plans to start taking his family on vacations to the presidential libraries. In other words, the end of one quest will be the start of another! (Though we wonder whether this idea has been run by the kids.)

  6.

  Look at the graph below, which comes from researcher George Wu at the University of Chicago. It summarizes the completion times of more than nine million runners in marathons from Chicago to Berlin. You can see that most runners finished a marathon in 3.5 to 5 hours.

  But notice how the graph looks spiky. Pay attention to the vertical lines showing the “threshold” times: 4:00:00, 4:30:00, 5:00:00, and so forth. You’ll see that a lot more runners finished just before the lines than just after them. (It’s particularly dramatic at the 4-hour mark.)

  That’s the milestone effect. That’s an exhausted runner who turns on her afterburners with one mile to go because she cannot bear to let the numbers on the stopwatch cross 4 hours. The milestones are completely arbitrary, of course: There is no defensible performance difference between 3:59:59 and 4:00:00. But of course, you understand the difference, and so do we. (One of your authors will sometimes walk laps around his bedroom at night in order to clinch 10,000 steps for the day. Absurd but true.)

  We all love milestones.

  This brings us to one last point: The desire to hit milestones elicits a concerted final push of effort. To finish the marathon under 4 hours, you sprint the final quarter mile. To hit your 10,000 steps for the day, you obsessively pace the bedroom.

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

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

  A Boy Scout spends one more day practicing with his bow and arrow, so he can nail the test and earn his archery badge. Scott Ettl suffers through Millard Fillmore’s biography because he knows Lincoln’s is coming. They push to the finish line.

  But here’s the best part: We’re not stuck with just one finish line. By multiplying milestones, we transform a long, amorphous race into one with many intermediate “finish lines.” As we push through each one, we experience a burst of pride as well as a jolt of energy to charge toward the next one.

  9

  Practice Courage

  1.

  On February 13, 1960, a group of black students led by John Lewis, Angela Butler, and Diane Nash filed into several stores in downtown Nashville and took seats at the whites-only lunch counters. It was the start of Nashville’s first sit-in to protest segregation.

  “The students were dressed like they were on the way to church,” said John Lewis, now a longtime congressman from Georgia, in an interview featured in Eyes on the Prize, the excellent PBS series on the civil rights movement, from which this account was drawn. “We stayed there at the lunch counter studying and preparing our homework because we were denied service. The manager ordered that the lunch counters be closed, that the restaurants be closed.”

  “The first sit-in we had was really funny because the waitresses were nervous and they must have dropped $2,000 worth of dishes that day,” said Diane Nash. “I mean, literally it was almost a cartoon . . . she was so nervous, she picked up dishes and she dropped one and she’d pick up another one and she’d drop it.”

  The students were uniformly peaceful and polite, and the sit-in concluded without incident, as did the second sit-in the following week. But at the third sit-in, on February 27, the threat escalated. The students were harassed and heckled by young whites who had gathered in the stores. Several of the demonstrators were pulled from their seats and assaulted. When the police arrived to respond to the violence, 77 black students were arrested for loitering and disorderly conduct. None of the hostile whites were arrested.

  The students were convicted of disorderly conduct. John Lewis, among other students, refused to pay the $50 fine and chose instead to spend a month in jail.

  Meanwhile, the parents of the students, horrified that their children had been jailed, rallied the black community around a new idea: a boycott of the segregated downtown stores. “Let’s stop supporting the system we’re trying to change,” said student activist Leo Lillard. “We figured if [the store owners] would feel the pinch of not having shoppers buy in the stores in downtown Nashville, then that will put pressure on the mayor, on the political fabric of town, of Nashville, to change the rules, the regulations.”

  Then, in the early morning of April 19, a bomb was thrown into the home of Z. Alexander Looby, the lawyer for the black students. The blast was devastating—powerful enough to shatter 147 windows in a college dormitory across the street. Miraculously, Looby and his wife, sl
eeping in a back bedroom, were unhurt.

  The assassination attempt outraged the community. Black leaders organized a march to City Hall. “People began to gather, and we began to march and students came out from the lunchrooms and they came out from being on the campus grounds,” said Rev. C. T. Vivian. “We filled Jefferson Avenue . . . we walked by a place where there were workers out for the noon hour, white workers and they had never seen anything like this. And here was all the 4,000 people marching down the street, and all you could hear was their feet as we silently moved. And [the white workers] didn’t know what to do and they moved back up against the wall and they simply stood against the wall, just looking. There was a fear there, there was an awe, and they did not know what to do. But they knew that this was not to be stopped, this was not to be played with or to be joked with.”

  On the steps of City Hall, Rev. Vivian and Diane Nash confronted the mayor, Ben West, in front of the large and growing crowd. Nash said, “Mayor West, do you feel that it’s wrong to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of his race or color?” West agreed it was wrong.

  Then, Nash continued, shouldn’t lunch counters be desegregated?

  “Yes,” Mayor West admitted.

  Many in the white community were inflamed by the mayor’s response. Nevertheless, three weeks later, the lunch counters reversed their discriminatory policies, and for the first time, black customers were served alongside whites. The desegregation of the lunch counters in Nashville was one of the first big successes of the civil rights movement.

  It was a victory built on courage—the courage of a group of students who were willing to face humiliation, injury, and incarceration to protest immoral treatment. For the students involved, taking a seat at those lunch counters was a defining moment in their lives. And their efforts grew into a defining moment for the nation.

  What’s less well known about this story is that the demonstrators didn’t just show courage. They practiced it. They rehearsed it. And this brings us to the story of a remarkable figure in the civil rights movement: James Lawson.