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The Power of Moments: Who Gets to Design Your Memories? · The Book Brief Project

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  Speaker 1: In 1993, a group of volunteers sat down in a
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  Speaker 1: lab and put one hand into a bowl of water
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  Speaker 1: at 14 degrees Celsius, cold enough to ache. They held
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  Speaker 1: it there for 60 seconds. Then they did it again
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  Speaker 1: with the other hand. Same water, same minute. But this time,
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  Speaker 1: when the minute was up, nobody told them to stop.
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  Speaker 1: They kept the hand under for 30 seconds more, while
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  Speaker 1: a researcher let slightly warmer water run in. One degree warmer.
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  Speaker 1: Still cold. Still painful. Just a little less. Afterwards, they
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  Speaker 1: were asked which trial they would rather repeat. Most of them,
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  Speaker 1: about 7 in 10, picked the second one, the longer one.
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  Speaker 1: 90 seconds of pain instead of 60, because it ended gentler.
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  Speaker 1: The psychologist behind the study was Daniel Kahneman, and the
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  Speaker 1: result became some of the cleanest evidence for what he
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  Speaker 1: called the peak-end rule. Memory keeps no record of an experience.
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  Speaker 1: It keeps the sharpest point and the last stretch and
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  Speaker 1: lets the rest go. How long something lasted barely registers.
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  Speaker 1: Nobody in that lab was thinking about hotels or schools
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  Speaker 1: or birthday parties. But the result points somewhere uncomfortable. If
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  Speaker 1: memory edits our lives this way, keeping the peaks and
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  Speaker 1: the endings, then whoever arranges the peaks and the endings
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  Speaker 1: is doing part of the editing. Who gets that job,
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  Speaker 1: and how many times can they do it before the
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  Speaker 1: trick stops working? 24 years later, two brothers wrote a
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  Speaker 1: book that answers the first question with real enthusiasm and
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  Speaker 1: mostly leaves the second alone. The book is The Power
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  Speaker 1: of Moments by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, and the
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  Speaker 1: brothers are not memory researchers. Chip teaches at Stanford's business school,
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  Speaker 1: and Dan works out of Duke. Their earlier books, made
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  Speaker 1: to stick and switch among them, follow the same method.
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  Speaker 1: They go into the academic literature, find a result ordinary
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  Speaker 1: people could use, and build a field manual around it.
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  Speaker 1: Their books are full of stories that stay with you,
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  Speaker 1: which is fitting, since staying with you is the whole
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  Speaker 1: subject of the first one. That method matters here, because
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  Speaker 1: a manual has a built-in grammar. It asks how. It
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  Speaker 1: almost never asks whether the power of moments opens in
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  Speaker 1: a pub in Houston. Two men who run a young
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  Speaker 1: charter school called Yes Prep are watching sports television, and
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  Speaker 1: the screen is full of National Signing Day, the morning
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  Speaker 1: when high school football stars announce which college they will
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  Speaker 1: play for. Cameras, parents crying in the bleachers. The two
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  Speaker 1: educators have an infuriating thought. Their own students, mostly from
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  Speaker 1: low-income families, many of them the first in their families
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  Speaker 1: headed to college, will be accepted to universities that spring.
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  Speaker 1: and nobody will clap. So they built their own version.
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  Speaker 1: On April 30, 2001, 17 graduating seniors walked onto a
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  Speaker 1: stage in a community center and announced where they were
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  Speaker 1: going to college, in front of roughly 450 people. Every
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  Speaker 1: student in the school system was in the room, down
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  Speaker 1: to the 6th graders. The Heaths follow one girl through it.
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  Speaker 1: Myra Vail watched her first signing day as a 6th grader,
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  Speaker 1: sitting in the audience and imagining herself up there. Years later,
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  Speaker 1: she was. The moment did its work twice. It worked
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  Speaker 1: for the seniors on stage, and it had already worked,
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  Speaker 1: long before, on the kid in the seats who decided
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  Speaker 1: she wanted to be one of them. From cases like this,
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  Speaker 1: the Heaths pull out a structure. A defining moment, they argue,
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  Speaker 1: is built from some mix of four elements. Elevation is
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  Speaker 1: what lifts it above the everyday. Insight shows you something
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  Speaker 1: you had missed. Pride catches you at your best and
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  Speaker 1: connection binds you to the people around you. Signing day
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  Speaker 1: has all four, which is why it lands so hard.
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  Speaker 1: Most days in a life have none of them, which
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  Speaker 1: is why they vanish. Then the book turns to a hotel.
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  Speaker 1: The Magic Castle Hotel in Los Angeles is, by the
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  Speaker 1: Heath's own account, unremarkable on paper. The rooms are dated.
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  Speaker 1: The pool is small. and the building looks like a
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  Speaker 1: converted apartment complex because it is one. And yet for years,
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  Speaker 1: it sat near the top of the city's hotel rankings,
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  Speaker 1: above famous names charging several times as much. The difference
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  Speaker 1: is a cherry red phone mounted on a wall by
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  Speaker 1: the pool. You pick it up, someone answers with the words,
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  Speaker 1: Popsicle Hotline. And a few minutes later, a staff member
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  Speaker 1: in white gloves carries your grape or orange popsicle out
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  Speaker 1: on a silver tray. It costs the guest nothing and
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  Speaker 1: the hotel almost nothing. It is the thing every guest
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  Speaker 1: goes home and describes. Most organizations, the Heaths argue, spend
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  Speaker 1: their energy filling pits, fixing complaints, and sanding down the
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  Speaker 1: worst parts of an experience. That work matters, but a
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  Speaker 1: filled pit is a flat stretch, and flat stretches are
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  Speaker 1: exactly what memory lets go. The hotel left its rooms
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  Speaker 1: merely fine and spent its attention on a few peaks instead.
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  Speaker 1: The authors call the technique breaking the script. Every experience
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  Speaker 1: runs on one. Check-in, room, pool, checkout, and a peak
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  Speaker 1: is what happens when the script breaks in your favor.
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  Speaker 1: The strongest pages in the book, though, belong to Insight,
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  Speaker 1: and the case the Heaths choose is grim. In rural Bangladesh,
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  Speaker 1: a development worker named Kamal Kaur faced villages where open
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  Speaker 1: defecation was normal and sickness was constant. Lectures about germs
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  Speaker 1: had failed for decades, so his team stopped giving them.
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  Speaker 1: They walked with villagers through the ground where people relieved themselves,
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  Speaker 1: asking questions, letting the flies make the case. Then a
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  Speaker 1: facilitator would ask for a glass of drinking water, pluck
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  Speaker 1: a hair, touch it to the filth, dip it in
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  Speaker 1: the glass, and offer the glass around. Nobody would drink.
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  Speaker 1: Then came the question of where those flies landed next.
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  Speaker 1: The villagers worked out the rest on their own, and
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  Speaker 1: many of those villages went on to build latrines. The
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  Speaker 1: Heaths call this tripping over the truth, and it is
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  Speaker 1: the best evidence in the book for its larger claim.
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  Speaker 1: The moment was staged deliberately. What it revealed was was
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  Speaker 1: not staged at all. The staging only made the truth
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  Speaker 1: impossible to step around. So the Heaths have taken away
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  Speaker 1: the comfortable idea that defining moments simply happen to us
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  Speaker 1: by fate or luck. What they have not settled is
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  Speaker 1: the second half of that question from the lab. Who
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  Speaker 1: gets to build the peaks and how many of them
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  Speaker 1: can be built? Before following it, I want to be
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  Speaker 1: clear about how much of this I accept. because the
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  Speaker 1: turn only means something if the agreement is real. The
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  Speaker 1: Heaths are right about memory, and right that institutions squander
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  Speaker 1: the few moments people keep. A new employee's first day
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  Speaker 1: is usually forms, a missing laptop, and a manager stuck
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  Speaker 1: in meetings on the one day that person is asking
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  Speaker 1: whether they belong. Graduations and hospital discharges, moments people replay
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  Speaker 1: for decades, get handled like paperwork. If this book persuaded
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  Speaker 1: one more school to build its own signing day, it
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  Speaker 1: has earned its shelf space. Early in the book, describing
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  Speaker 1: Myra Vell walking onto that stage, the authors write that
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  Speaker 1: she stepped into a carefully crafted moment, no less special
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  Speaker 1: for having been planned. For signing day, I believe them completely.
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  Speaker 1: But that sentence carries the whole book on its back.
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  Speaker 1: And the further you travel from Houston, the less weight
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  Speaker 1: it can hold. Go back to their own mechanics. A
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  Speaker 1: peak is defined by the plane around it. Strategic surprise
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  Speaker 1: only works because there is a script for it to break.
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  Speaker 1: The popsicle phone delights because no other hotel has one
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  Speaker 1: and because the rest of the stay is ordinary. These
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  Speaker 1: objections come from the book itself. From premises it states
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  Speaker 1: plainly in its own pages. Now, set those premises beside
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  Speaker 1: the book's ambition, which is that everyone should do this.
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  Speaker 1: Every manager and every teacher. Every company with a customer.
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  Speaker 1: A manual is written to be followed at scale, and
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  Speaker 1: the Heaths wrote a very followable manual. A peak installed
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  Speaker 1: everywhere stops being a peak. That is just arithmetic. Eight
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  Speaker 1: years on, You can watch the arithmetic play out, the
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  Speaker 1: confetti that bursts across your phone when you finish a task,
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  Speaker 1: the handwritten note on the hotel pillow printed in a
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  Speaker 1: font designed to look handwritten, the welcome box from a
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  Speaker 1: new employer with a branded mug and a card about
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  Speaker 1: joining the family, the proposal staged for the camera with
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  Speaker 1: a second person hired to film it. Each of these
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  Speaker 1: is a moment built more or less as the book recommends,
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  Speaker 1: and almost none of them is remembered a week later.
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  Speaker 1: The trouble was never the planning. It is the volume.
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  Speaker 1: To be fair, the Heaths see a version of this coming.
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  Speaker 1: They warn that a surprise repeated becomes an expectation, and
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  Speaker 1: they tell organizations to keep varying their peaks. That is
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  Speaker 1: sound advice for one hotel managing its own guests. It
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  Speaker 1: does nothing for a guest whose bank, airline, phone, and
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  Speaker 1: employer are all reading the same book. There is a
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  Speaker 1: name for this, and it is older than the Heaths.
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  Speaker 1: In 1961, the historian Daniel Boorstin described what he called
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  Speaker 1: the pseudo-event, something that happens because someone arranged for it
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  Speaker 1: to happen, mainly so that it would be noticed and remembered.
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  Speaker 1: He was thinking of the press conference and the anniversary
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  Speaker 1: celebration invented by a publicity firm. Boorstin granted that pseudo-events
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  Speaker 1: were real enough. What worried him was that a culture
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  Speaker 1: fed on them would slowly lose the ability to tell
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  Speaker 1: the arranged from the lived and then stop caring about
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  Speaker 1: the difference. The Heaths never mentioned Boorstin, but their book
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  Speaker 1: reads like his diagnosis rewritten as a prescription. They take
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  Speaker 1: the arranged moment, insist it can mean as much as
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  Speaker 1: the lived one, and they have signing day to prove it.
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  Speaker 1: The proof is real. What it proves is narrower than
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  Speaker 1: the book needs. Signing Day works because a school with
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  Speaker 1: thin resources found one morning a year to honor kids
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  Speaker 1: nobody else was honoring. Scarcity is built into it. The
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  Speaker 1: Popsicle phone works because it belongs to one odd hotel.
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  Speaker 1: Every time the method succeeds somewhere new, it draws down
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  Speaker 1: a little more of the thing it runs on. So
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  Speaker 1: where does that leave the book? As a guide for
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  Speaker 1: one institution that has been ignoring the moments people remember,
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  Speaker 1: it is close to perfect. and I would hand it
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  Speaker 1: to any school principal tomorrow. As a philosophy for how
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  Speaker 1: a whole economy should treat our attention and our memory,
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  Speaker 1: it is a recipe for inflation. And there is a
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  Speaker 1: cost I can't settle, one the book never touches. Once
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  Speaker 1: you have read The Power of Moments, you start seeing
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  Speaker 1: the scripts, the milestone email, the ceremony with its carefully
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  Speaker 1: placed surprise. You admire the craft. Then the suspicion leaks backwards,
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  Speaker 1: into moments nobody designed, a friend's toast at a wedding,
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  Speaker 1: a comment from a teacher you still carry 20 years later.
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  Speaker 1: You catch yourself checking whether that one was built too.
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  Speaker 1: The book gives you the eyes of a set designer,
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  Speaker 1: and set designers rarely get to sit in the audience.
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  Speaker 1: If this kind of pace works for you, one book
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  Speaker 1: per episode, read slowly and argued with. Follow the Book
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  Speaker 1: Brief Project. Another one, already waiting on the desk go
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  Speaker 1: back to the lab in 1993 the volunteers who chose
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  Speaker 1: the longer trial made a reasonable choice their memory did
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  Speaker 1: what memory does and on its own terms it was
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  Speaker 1: right because the ending really was gentler the one thing
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  Speaker 1: they did not know was that someone standing beside the
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  Speaker 1: bowl had decided how it would end. The Heaths have
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  Speaker 1: handed that tap to all of us and to everyone
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  Speaker 1: who wants something from us. The water will feel warmer.
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  Speaker 1: Whether you would still choose it, knowing whose hand is
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  Speaker 1: on the tap is the part they left for you.