Here are my notes on Chip & Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments.


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  • Life is measured in moments. (× Tiny Experiments) Moments give shape to time.
    • A few minutes can change a life.
  • Understand when special moments are needed.* Mark special occasions with a special moment. Transitions, decisions, milestones.
    • Couch to 5k: many milestones. (Same for Duolingo, drum textbooks, etc. — × Tiny Experiments) — “many intermediate “finish lines””.
  • You can deliberately create moments with people. Terminal cancer patient organizing special dinners with each of his close friends.
    • Create your perfect days. Plan in your perfect days.
      • “I experienced more Perfect Moments and Perfect Days in two weeks than I had in the last five years, had my life continued the way it was going before my diagnosis. […] **If I told you to aim to create 30 Perfect Days, could you? How long would it take? Thirty days? Six months? Ten years? Never? I felt like I was living a week in a day, a month in a week, a year in a month.” (× Waking Life)
      • “I was blessed. I was told I had three months to live“ (O’Kelly, Chasing Daylight)
      • Novelty slows down time. This is why time goes faster as we age.
        • Deliberately plan in new experiences – to age slower.
        • Set regular big goals/projects! Live big!
  • Moments make a decision official.
    • Moments make a transformation official. Make a moment to mark your transition to others — for there to be a “before” and an “after”. Team meeting to apologize as a boss, to allow to call out on bad behaviour and distinguish between “old me” and “new me”.
      • Create a reset point (make a moment) for others to notice change. — or nudge them to behave differently.
    • Moments signify a transformation to your subconscious (× symbolic rituals (Psycho-Cybernetics)) – cf Hero’s Journey (The Hero With a Thousand Faces).
  • Treasure chest: collection of artefacts of the moments that defined us (× “thousand of meaningless things filled with meaning for someone unknown” (All the Living and the Dead))
  • Defining moments can be positive (pride) or negative (humiliation, anger, trauma, etc. – × Tyrone (Kitchen Confidential))
    • Moments of pride are moments that define us – moments of achievement, courage. ^glt48x
  • EPIC: Elevation (boost sensory appeal — nice dinner, massage, environment, etc.), Pride, Insight (Self-insight), Connection
  • Elevation
    • Break the script. (Surprise — × Made to Stick (unexpected))
      • “Infrequently enough that it is unexpected.” (× Debt (irregularity in gifts for reciprocity)) Don’t break the script consistently – or the delight becomes an expectation. Add randomness.
        • Loyalty card schemes are the opposite – the gift is expected. (Also “Employee of the Month” — programmatic)
    • Peaks are rare because it’s usually no one’s job to create a peak. (You are required to “do your job” – it’s optional to make something extraordinary out of it.)
      • Peaks and exceptional experiences as things “people didn’t have to do”.
    • Pret A Manger: discretionary free drinks/food to give away – employee decides which customers to gift to (× BG).
      • Employees are given agency – a boon in a world of rules. Humanity towards employees and in turn towards customers.
      • Southwest Airlines: second mission (circle) “Have fun at work”
    • Redesign experiences that suck. MRI machines for kids as “hollowed-out canoe – hold still so it won’t tip over” (immersively). Transforming pits into peaks.
    • Focus on making extraordinary experiences rather than fixing mediocre experiences. (Offence, not just defence.) Focussing on extraordinary experiences to a few rather than trying to please everybody (Rent-A.) Knowing who’s not your core audience to satisfy – skimping on your non-core-audience.
    • “Reduce negative variance and increase positive variance.”
    • Beware “Couldn’t we just…? – compromising for mediocrity.
      • × De-Growth: unscalable, personalized, human practices.
    • Raise the stakes (add positive pressure): competition, game, performance, deadline, public commitment.
  • Pride
    • Recognition best practices: spontaneous (unscheduled) and about a specific behaviour. Personal, not programmatic (“Employee of the month”).
    • (Symbolic, witty) Gifts of recognition: pair of headphones for a good listener, etc.
    • 360 reviews – from managers, peers and subordinates – to assess how someone is perceived in a company.
    • Rule of thumb for the extraordinary: people pull out their phone camera.
    • Milestone effect: people push to reach a milestone (finish before a mark).
      • Milestone effect
  • Insight
    • Lead to own insight. (× Made to Stick) Don’t tell, don’t show me – let them realize. Make it their own insight. Don’t start with solutions, but dramatize, stage the problem – for self-insight.
    • Make the abstract concrete. Donations helping something specific and concrete (× Made to Stick) – getting a personal message back from what the donations enabled.
    • Accomplishment journal (partnered goals — × Tiny Experiments)
    • Father to daughter at dinner table every week: “What did you guys fail at this week?” “If we had nothing to tell him, he’d be disappointed.” (× Improvise)
      • We fail when we don’t try something we want to do (rather than not achieving the right outcome)
      • “To produce moments of self-insight, we need to stretch: placing ourselves in new situations that expose us to the risk of failure.”
        • Mentors can help us stretch further than we thought we could.
    • Surface hidden accomplishments. (Walked the distance across India)
    • You can get over any fear. (Exposure therapy — also × CZC (though there it was more about changing one’s relationship to fear)) Two hours to get arachnophobes to touch a tarantula.
    • Preloading. Planning the next day lets you notice ways to optimize it ahead of time, sleeping over it.
    • Role-play. Don’t just read about it. (e.g. conflict de-escalation; emergency response)
  • Connection
    • Home visits of teachers to parents. “What matters to me” prompt to patients, for their well-being in the hospital.
    • Baggage-handling, not baggage-ignoring: in customer support, acknowledge past calls & difficulties.
    • Humour defuses.
    • Teambuilding: create a synchronized moment, invite shared struggle, connect to meaning.
      • Role-play collaboration (e.g. pit stop crew)
    • Passion vs purpose Interesting to me vs gives meaning to life (contributes to others). Five Why’s can help go from passion to purpose (Cleaning hospital rooms because my boss tells me to … because it keeps patients happy)
    • Relationships don’t automatically deepen with time. (e.g. small talk with cousins at Thanksgiving) (Though: time spent together forges friendship)
    • Meetings can be alive. “People hate meetings because emotion is deliberately squeezed out. But this is a choice, not an inevitability. You can just as easily conduct a meeting that has drama, meaning, and connection.”
      • Brave plant. When running a meeting, have a plant that asks a tough question — to allow others to do the same. (× Nudge)
  • Regrets of the dying:
    • “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
    • “I wish that I had let myself be happier.”
  • What would you do if you knew you would not live until 40?
  • “…the whiplash cause 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.”