by Chip Heath
• Warren Talbot and his wife, Betsy—both 37—were having dinner with friends in a Seattle restaurant. Someone asked, “What would you do if you knew you would not live until 40?” Warren and his wife turned to each other, and without having discussed it, said, “We’d travel the world.” The question was not idle chatter for them—the Talbots had a close friend who was in the hospital after suffering a brain aneurysm. They were aware how short life can be. The next morning, they set a date two years into the future—October 1, 2010—to begin their world travel. During those two years, they planned and saved, sold everything they owned, and then left Seattle on exactly the date they had set. Their first stop: a rammed-earth house in northern Ecuador. “We travelled full time for 3+ years,” the Talbots wrote us, “and now own a home in the hills of southern Spain which we use as a base and continue to explore. We’re both 45 now and there is not a moment we’ve regretted the choice we made that night 8 years ago.”
• Nancy Schaufele was in her late 20s, a housewife with two young children. Her husband had just been diagnosed with cancer. One morning she was sitting on her porch, sipping coffee, preparing for the day ahead. “And then it hit me,” she wrote. “I was possibly going to have to raise two children alone. Really alone. No skills, no education and no husband. It was an OMG moment. A lightning bolt from the sky.” She resolved to go back to school, to learn the skills she’d need to launch a career. But when she went to register, she said, “my legs were like rubber.” She was anxious, intimidated. She made it to the administration building, burst into tears, turned around, and went home. “When I got home and walked in the door, the first thing I saw was my 2 year old daughter playing with her dad. I remember asking myself that hard question: ‘How I could ever encourage my daughter to be “more” if I couldn’t even register for one college course?’ I turned around and went back to the school.” She finished college and graduate school, started a business, sold it, and now advises female business owners and entrepreneurs.
When we began to read these powerful stories, we thought we were reading about epiphanies. “Eureka!” moments. But what dawned on us, as we read more of them, is that these were not stories about sudden realizations. These were stories about action.
Julie Kasten visited a career counselor. Suresh Mistry applied for a new job. Warren Talbot and his wife set a date to travel the world. Nancy Schaufele turned around and went back to register for college.
Often, what looks like a moment of serendipity is actually a moment of intentionality. What Kasten, Mistry, and the others experienced as the shock of an insight was actually, we came to believe, the whiplash caused by realizing they could ACT and then willfully jolting their lives in a new direction. They were not receiving a moment, they were seizing it.
And that’s a critical distinction. Some defining moments are orchestrated. But many other moments we’ve encountered are plunged into: Some hotel staffers discover a little boy has left behind his stuffed giraffe and decide to do something special for him. A man decides to push past small talk with his coworker and realizes how much they have in common. A mentor chooses to stay all night with his psychiatric intern who has witnessed a tragedy.
This is what we hope you take away from this book: Stay alert to the promise that moments hold. These moments do not need to be “produced.” Yes, we examined some moments that took a lot of time and money to plan: The Sharp All-Staff Assembly. Signing Day. The Trial of Human Nature. And, yes, it often takes real effort to elevate a moment properly—it matters that the Trial was held in a courtroom and not in the school cafeteria. But keep in mind these are once-a-year events!
Many of the moments in this book, though, are free and unproduced—the kinds of moments that arise every day. You compliment a colleague on the way she handled a client emergency. (Recognize others) You ask your children at the dinner table, “What have you failed at this week?” (Stretch for insight) You and a colleague decide to meet after work for a cupcake. (Break the script)
The most precious moments are often the ones that cost the least. In June 2007, Darcy Daniel’s three-year-old daughter, Wendy, came down with a stomachache. A doctor in the rural Vermont town where they lived discovered she had a severe E. coli infection, which triggered an escalating progression of health threats: Her kidneys failed and she spent weeks on dialysis. Horrible stomachaches led to a portion of her colon being removed, twice. Infections from the repeated surgeries led to heart failure; she coded and had to be resuscitated. She desperately needed a kidney transplant, but none of the many people who volunteered were compatible.
She spent Halloween in the hospital; her costume was laid on top of her, because she had too many tubes coming out of her body to put it on. Thanksgiving came and went. One day in December, not long before Christmas, it began to snow outside. For a child from Vermont, it was cruel, having to watch the snow through the windows. Wendy loved to make snowmen, to go sleigh riding. She hadn’t been outside for two months.
Her lead nurse, Cori Fogarty, and patient care associate Jessica Marsh hatched a plan. If Wendy couldn’t play in the snow, they would bring the snow to her. But it was more complicated than that. Because of Wendy’s heart condition, the staff was monitoring every milliliter of water that she consumed. So Jessica went and filled an emesis bucket with snow, weighed it, let it melt, and then poured it into a graduated cylinder. Now they knew how to translate the weight of snow into its volume of water. So they went and refilled the bucket with exactly the right amount of snow so that if Wendy ate it all—as three-year-olds are prone to do—she’d be just fine.
When they brought the bowl of snow into Wendy’s room, she lit up. “I have never seen such joy and pure innocence on a child’s face,” said Marsh.
“Can you imagine,” said Darcy, “a child who has only seen the inside of a hospital room for months, who only knew the sounds of the machines and the buzzers, the television, the whoosh of the forced air, who only knew the sterility of the meal trays, the plastic covered hospital bed, the stethoscope hanging over her head, getting a bowl of snow? . . . It was bliss, it was joy. She thought it was the best thing in the world. . . . It reminded her of home.”
Wendy’s long nightmare eventually ended. She received a successful kidney transplant and, since then, has grown into a healthy young girl. She plays soccer, runs triathlons, and won medals in the Transplant Olympics. Mercifully, she has forgotten much of her health ordeal. But her mom hasn’t.
Darcy wrote in a blog post years later about the bucket of snow: “It is those moments of compassion and spontaneity that we are grateful for, now, looking back. It’s easy to forget the monotony of the endless days that stretched together during her recovery. But that one moment of brightness, that is one moment that we will never forget.”
That’s what a defining moment looks like. A burst of magic—thoughtful, playful, emotional—that was conjured into reality by two caregivers who thought a sick girl deserved an escape.
And that’s the charge for all of us: to defy the forgettable flatness of everyday work and life by creating a few precious moments.
What if every organization in the world offered new employees an unforgettable first-day experience?
What if every student had an academic experience as memorable as prom?
What if every patient was asked, “What matters to you?”
What if you called that old friend right now and finally made that road trip happen?
What if we didn’t just remember the defining moments of our lives but made them?
We can be the designers of moments that deliver elevation and insight and pride and connection. These extraordinary minutes and hours and days—they are what make life meaningful. And they are ours to create.
* * *
I. Lest you think we have an army of enthusiastic readers who respond to our every query, let us refer you to a previous newsletter where we asked for decision-making stories and received exactly two responses, one of which was Dan
’s anxious test to see if the survey tool was functioning properly.
Want More?
If you’ve finished The Power of Moments and are hungry for more, visit our website: http://www.thepowerofmoments.com. When you sign up for our newsletter, you get instant access to free materials like these:
• 1-Page Overview. A printable overview of the Elevation-Insight-Pride-Connection framework, perfect for tacking up next to your desk.
• The Book Club Guide. If you’re reading The Power of Moments as part of a book club, this guide offers suggested questions and topics to guide your discussion.
• Recommended Reading List. All of our sources are available to you in the endnotes in this book, of course. But in this list we share the eight books and articles that we found most fascinating or useful.
• The Power of Moments for Friends and Family. An inspiring and wide-ranging set of examples showing how to share more special moments with the people closest to you. It includes: birthday and anniversary ideas, more Art Aron–style questions, actual examples of the “Saturday Surprise” (see Chapter 4), traditions from other cultures that we should embrace, and more.
• The Power of Moments podcasts. Short podcasts, recorded by the authors, that cover the following topics in more depth:
• Defining moments in education
• Defining moments in health care
• Defining moments in customer experiences
• Defining moments for employees
Acknowledgments
We are deeply grateful to the readers who contributed feedback on early drafts of this book. It is no small commitment that we asked of you—spending hours reading a half-baked book and sharing with us what was working and what wasn’t. Your comments led to some big changes and countless small ones, all positive (including saving other readers from many unfunny jokes). Thanks, too, to the people who joined us for group discussions in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and New York City. The book got so much better thanks to your ideas—we hope you can tell.
A heartfelt thanks to those who pointed us toward ideas or stories that made it into the book: to Joe McCannon for highlighting the idea of “shared struggle”; to Nella Garcia and Mark DiBella for sharing the Signing Day story; to Cheryl Fergerson, Addie Simmons, and Victor Mata for sharing some of their time on Senior Signing Day 2016; to Angela Duckworth and Lauren Eskreis-Winkler for inspirations and research pointers; to Fred Houston for sharing the Deloitte retirement tradition. To Patricia Dinneen for the connection to Michael Palmer; to Robert Heuermann for the “inanimate carbon rod” pointer; to William Fultz for the treasure chest idea; to Matt Dixon for discussion of the offense/defense idea in Chapter 3; to Rabbi Naphtali Lavenda for sharing the story of rabbinical role-play; to Megan Burns for encouraging us to dig into the Forrester data and to Laura Tramm and Roxana Strohmenger for helping us with the analysis; to Frank Tooley, Katie Boynton, and Mike Overly for helping us solve the flight safety announcement mystery—and for doing battle with the Southwest bureaucracy (hello legal department!) to get us permission to tell the story; and to Eli Finkel for his eagle-eyed identification of “responsiveness” as the critical ingredient missing from our initial writing about connection.
There were also several people who helped us along the way through multiple conversations on many different aspects of defining moments. Thanks to Soon Yu, Paul Maloney, Darren Ross, Nick Stroud, Bridget Stalkamp, and Megan Burns.
Thanks to Lorna Lippes and Maya Valluru for research assistance (and especially for slogging through hundreds of online reviews of service experiences). Extra-special notes of appreciation to Christy Darnell for managing our reader feedback, and to Dave Vance for his comedic inspirations, and to Peter Griffin for his editing magic.
We feel so lucky to have partners like Christy Fletcher and her crew at Fletcher & Company, as well as our new team at Simon & Schuster, where we have reunited with our first editor, Ben Loehnen. Ben, thank you for giving us our first shot in this business—and now our fourth.
None of our work would be possible without the love and support of our (highly responsive!) family. We love you, Mom, Dad, Susan, Susan Joy, Emory, Aubrey, Amanda, Josephine, Oksana, Hunter, and Darby.
About the Authors
© AMY SURDACKI
CHIP HEATH is a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, teaching courses on strategy and organizations. He has helped more than 450 start-ups hone their business strategy and messages. He lives in Los Gatos, California.
DAN HEATH is a senior fellow at Duke University’s CASE center, which supports entrepreneurs fighting for social good. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SimonandSchuster.com
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Chip-Heath
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Dan-Heath
ALSO BY CHIP AND DAN HEATH
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
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Appendix
Dealing with Moments of Trauma
We’re sorry that you’re here. Whatever you’re facing, know that there are other people who have walked in your shoes, and their experiences can give you reasons to hope even in the midst of trauma.
Moments of trauma cause profound pain and hardship; what’s less intuitive is that they also, in some cases, produce positive growth, a phenomenon called “posttraumatic growth.” This growth does not make the tragedy less tragic, and it does not cure the underlying pain. But the researchers Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun have found that “great good can come from great suffering.”
Post-traumatic growth has been documented among people who have lost a spouse; veterans of combat; refugees forced to flee their home country; patients with HIV or cancer; parents with very sick children; and people who have been sexually assaulted or abused. Some studies have found that trauma survivors report positive personal changes at a higher level than people who have not experienced trauma.
What follows are five recommendations for finding great good in great suffering. The recommendations are inspired by the five domains where trauma survivors regularly report positive growth. (These five domains are drawn from the work of the post-traumatic growth researchers Tedeschi and Calhoun. This appendix draws heavily on a particular review article of theirs—see the citation at the end of the Appendix. All quotations come from the review article.)
Look for small peaks. People who have experienced trauma often report that they have a greater capacity to enjoy small things in life that previously they might have ignored: a beautiful garden, a strong cup of coffee, a morning with a child. Hamilton Jordan, former presidential advisor to Bill Clinton, said,
After my first cancer, even the smallest joys in life took on a special meaning—watching a beautiful sunset, a hug from my child, a laugh with [wife] Dorothy. That feeling has not diminished with time. After my second and third cancers, the simple joys of life are everywhere and are boundless, as I cherish my family and friends and contemplate the rest of my life, a life I certainly do not take for granted.
Geology professor Sally Walker, who survived an airline crash that killed 83 others, said, “When I got home, the sky was brighter, I paid attention to the texture of sidewalks. It was like being in a movie. . . . [Now] Everything is a gift.”
In Chapter 3, we tell the story of Eugene O’Kelly, who was dia
gnosed with terminal brain cancer and told he had three months to live. In response, he began to create a series of “Perfect Moments” he could share with loved ones—for instance, enjoying a nice meal and strolling afterward through Central Park. He marveled how these special moments allowed him to live “a month in a week.”
Celebrate and honor relationships. One parent, describing the death of her son, said, “When he died people just came out of the woodwork” to help. She experienced renewed appreciation for her friends. She came to cherish her husband more.
Not all friends are active in reaching out. Many trauma sufferers have noted that in tough times you find out who your real friends are. By winnowing unsupportive relationships and rededicating themselves to the supportive ones, people often emerge feeling more secure and cared for. They also find that they have acquired a heightened sense of compassion and empathy for others who are grieving or in pain.
In Chapter 11, we discuss ways to create closer relationships, including the idea of “responsiveness,” which says that relationships grow when partners understand, validate, and care for each other. As a trauma survivor, you are in a good position to be responsive to others—you can understand what other trauma sufferers are going through, and you are in a position to validate their thoughts and reactions because you have grappled with tragedy. You can provide loving support in ways that might be more challenging for others. For example, many parents who have lost a child find that their friends eventually stop mentioning the child, fearing that the mention might trigger painful memories. But parents who have lost a child know that the child is never far from mind. So making a comment like “Mark would have loved this vacation/football game/new car” is more likely to be received as thoughtful and warm rather than as reopening an old wound.
