Making singular moments work for you

Author / brothers Chip and Dan Heath have a new book coming out in October called The Power of Moments and they’ve released the first chapter. (Contact me if you’d like the PDF ). Judging from the first chapter, no doubt they’ve got another New York Times bestseller on their hands like their previous books Decisive, Switch, and Made to Stick.

Moments is subtitled Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact, and it’s about how some moments stay with us for years even decades after the fact.

For instance, I was in high school in Arizona for the 1979 total eclipse, although that far south it was only a partial eclipse for us. It was in the morning and I remember getting out of class and putting on cheap solar-safe glasses and looking to the east and seeing the familiar crescent shape of a partial eclipse. I know we horsed around a little, before and after, but the rest of the day is lost to memory.

Along with countless others I saw another partial eclipse just last Monday. Because of its relative uniqueness, that eclipse also promises to be memorable. I also remember the births of my kids quite vividly.

But that cuts both ways. Try as I might, I can’t forget when my youngest was desperately ill with pneumonia. I took pictures of her in the hospital with more than a dozen lines going into her little body. But I never look at them because I remember the experience only too well. 

If you’re the right age and you’re American, you know exactly where you were on 9-11, or the Challenger disaster, or the first Moonwalk, or JFK’s assassination. Because of some unusual circumstances, I remember where I was the day Anwar Sadat was shot and killed in Cairo in October 1981. I’ll bet most Egyptians past 45 can too. Brits and probably other citizens of the Commonwealth countries remember when Di married Prince Charles, and later when she died in Paris.

These occasions get seared into our memories by virtue of their singularity. By contrast, I don’t remember what I ate for lunch last Monday on the day of the eclipse…notwithstanding the fact that I went straight to lunch afterwards… because while the eclipse was uncommon, lunch was just another meal.

I remember sitting in a television studio with my boss and Bo Jackson, right in the middle of his glorious two-sport days when he was both an All Star in MLB and an All Pro in the NFL. Bo was signing dozens of baseballs that we were going to sell for charity. If you’ve ever seen something like this one or more people open up the cases of balls and then the individual boxes. Then they turn the balls so it’s easy for the player to sign in that space where the seams are closest together. Then, after the balls in the case are all signed, they close everything back up.

My boss asked me if I wanted a signed ball. Of course I did. He tossed it to me while the ink was still wet, and Bo’s signature smeared in my hand. That I remember. What I don’t remember is who of my colleagues from Children’s Miracle Network was doing all the boxing work that day. And I don’t know what I did with that ball with the smeared signature. Memory is a fickle thing

“We all have defining moments in our lives—meaningful experiences that stand out in our memory,” the Heaths write. “Many of them owe a great deal to chance: A lucky encounter with someone who becomes the love of your life. A new teacher who spots a talent you didn’t know you had. A sudden loss that upends the certainties of your life. A realization that you don’t want to spend one more day in your job. These moments seem to be the product of fate or luck or maybe a higher power’s interventions. We can’t control them.”

If that little head fake were true, the book is over, right?

Instead the Heath Brothers promise the book will “examine defining moments and identify the traits they have in common… Second, we want to show how you can create defining moments by making use of those elements.”

What constitutes these defining moments? The Heaths identify four elements. In their telling, a defining moment may have one these elements, or all of them.

Elevation. Moments that transcend the ordinary.

Insight. Moments when people abruptly see things as they really are.

Pride. Moments that capture us at our best, for instance achievement or courage.

Connections. Moments that are social like weddings, graduations, births, vacations, baptisms, bat and bar mitzvahs.

My youngest in the hospital brought both connection, insight, and elevation. Connection, because my wife never left my daughter’s bedside during her three weeks of hospitalization and, notwithstanding our physical distance from one another, she never felt dearer to me. Insight because it was clear very early in the experience what really mattered most to me. And elevation because our kids, until that point, had been quite healthy. When her health took a sudden turn for the worse, it was a transcendent moment. And so I can say with just a modicum of understanding, “God bless those parents whose kids are in the hospital.”

You can see that the first letter of the four elements spell out EPIC, something the Heaths have mixed feelings about.

“Epic seems too grandiose and too shallow all at once,” they write in a footnote. “Also, and this is a personal failing, we can’t read the word epic without imagining it being spoken by a stoned surfer dude. (You see what we mean now, don’t you?) So, bottom line, if the EPIC acronym helps you remember the four elements, please keep it with our compliments. But this is the last time we’ll mention it.”

In Joshua Foer’s fine book on memory called Moonwalking With Einstein, he falls in with a bunch of memory athletes from Europe who, wanting to make a party more memorable, compelled partygoers to crawl into the venue through a darkened tunnel. That would do the trick for me. Add in a hail of live bullets being fired overhead and it would be exactly like a few days of my Army basic training which I have never forgotten either.

Based on the first chapter of The Power of Moments, I don’t think the Heaths are talking about making defining moments out of things that are merely memorable, like low-crawling in basic training or Princess Diana’s death in a road tunnel under Paris. So I look forward to reading the rest of the book.