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First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Bantam Press

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Copyright © Chip Heath and Dan Heath 2017
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Contents

Introduction to Moments of Elevation

So far, we’ve answered three key questions: What are defining moments? Why would you want to create them? And when should you be ready to “think in moments”? But we haven’t yet addressed the most important question: How do we create defining moments?

As we’ve seen, the leaders of YES Prep created Signing Day, a defining moment for the school’s graduating seniors. Doug Dietz and his colleagues created the “Adventure Series” of MRI installations, which turned a pit experience into a peak for young patients. So we know that defining moments can be consciously created. You can be the architect of moments that matter.

In the sections that follow, we’ll offer some practical strategies for creating special moments using the four key elements of memorable experiences: elevation, insight, pride, and connection.

We’ll begin with elevation. Moments of elevation are experiences that rise above the everyday. Times to be savored. Moments that make us feel engaged, joyful, amazed, motivated. They are peaks.

Moments of elevation can be social occasions that mark transitions: birthday parties, retirement parties, bar/bat mitzvahs, quinceañeras, and weddings.

Then there are other moments of elevation where we feel elevated by virtue of being “onstage,” so to speak: competing at sporting events, giving a presentation, performing in a play. The stakes are higher. We’re absorbed in the moment.

Finally, there are moments of elevation that happen spontaneously: The unplanned road trip. The walk on a sunny day that leaves you smiling. The first touch of a lover’s hand.

Can we create more moments of elevation? Absolutely. We can also learn to make an existing peak “peakier”—to redesign a birthday party or client presentation to make it more memorable. The recipe for building a moment of elevation is simple, and we’ll describe it in detail soon. But while elevated moments are simple to conceive, they can be maddeningly hard to bring to life. (On that subject, there’s a surprising twist ahead about the John Deere “First Day Experience” story.) The absence or neglect of peaks is particularly glaring in organizations—from churches to schools to businesses—where relentless routines tend to grind them down from peaks to bumps.

In the two chapters ahead, you’ll see how to find and enhance moments of elevation, and discover how hard that effort can sometimes be. You’ll also see why such moments are worth fighting for. No one reflecting on their life has ever wished there had been fewer.

1

Defining Moments

1.

Chris Barbic and Donald Kamentz were sitting at a pub in Houston, recuperating from another 14-hour day running their start-up charter school. They were drinking beer. Watching ESPN. And sharing a Tombstone pizza, the bar’s only food offering. They had no idea, on that night in October 2000, that they were moments away from an epiphany that would affect thousands of lives.

ESPN was covering National Signing Day,¹ the first day when graduating high school football players can sign a binding “letter of intent” to attend a particular college. For college football fans, it’s a big day.

Watching the exuberant coverage, something struck Kamentz. “It blows my mind that we celebrate athletics this way, but we don’t have anything that celebrates academics in the same way,” he said. And the students at their school—primarily kids from low-income Hispanic families—deserved celebrating. Many of them would be the first in their families to graduate from high school.

Barbic had founded a school to serve those students. He’d grown disillusioned teaching sixth grade at a local elementary school. “I saw way too many of my students head off to the local junior high excited about school and eager to pursue their dreams, only to return a few months later with that light in their eyes totally gone.” They would come back to visit him, telling stories of gangs, drugs, pregnancies. It crushed him. He knew he had two choices: Quit teaching to spare himself. Or build the school that those students deserved. So in 1998, Barbic founded YES Prep. And Donald Kamentz was one of the first people he hired.

In the pub that night, as they watched the Signing Day news, they had a sudden inspiration: What if we created our own “Signing Day,” when our students would announce where they will attend college? The event would allow them to honor all graduating seniors, since it was a condition of graduation at YES Prep that every student apply and be accepted to college, even if they ultimately chose not to attend.

Their excitement grew as they shaped the idea: They would call it Senior Signing Day, and for that one day, graduating seniors would be treated with the same hype and adulation as college athletes.

About six months later, on April 30, 2001, they held the first Senior Signing Day. Roughly 450 people crammed into a community center next door to their campus: 17 graduating seniors and their families, along with every other student in the YES Prep system—from juniors to sixth graders.

Each of the seniors took the stage, announcing where he or she would be attending college in the fall: “My name is Eddie Zapata, and in the fall, I will be attending Vanderbilt University!” They would unveil a T-shirt or pennant with their chosen school’s insignia. Many of the students kept their final school decision a secret from friends, so there was suspense in the air. After each announcement, the room erupted with cheers.

Later, the students would sit at a table, with their families crowded around them, and sign letters of matriculation, confirming their enrollment in the fall. Barbic was struck by the emotion of the “signing” moment: “It hits home—the sacrifices that everybody had to make for their kids to get there. No one did it alone. There were lots of people involved.” By the end of the ceremony, there were few dry eyes in the room.

Senior Signing Day became the most important annual event for the YES Prep school network. For seniors, the event was a celebration, the capstone of their achievement. But it held a different kind of meaning for younger students. At the third Senior Signing Day, which had expanded into an auditorium at the University of Houston, there was a sixth grader in the audience named Mayra Valle. It was her first Signing Day experience, and it made a lasting impression. She remembers thinking, That could be me. No one in my family has ever gone to college. I want to be on that stage.

By 2010, six years later, the senior class had grown to 126 graduates, and Signing Day had expanded so much that it had moved to the basketball arena at Rice University, in front of 5,000 people. 90% of the graduates that year were the first members of their families to go to college.

The keynote speaker, U.S. secretary of education Arne Duncan, was moved by what he saw. He scrapped his prepared remarks and spoke freely: “No basketball game, no football game begins to compare to the magnitude and importance of what happened here today …. Thank you for inspiring not just your brothers and sisters, not just the underclassmen here, but the entire country.”

One of the graduating seniors was Mayra Valle. Six years after she imagined being on that stage, today was her day. “Good afternoon, everybody, my name is Mayra Valle,” she said, breaking into an enormous smile. “And this fall I will be attending CONNECTICUT COLLEGE!” The school was ranked one of the top 50 liberal arts colleges in the country.

The crowd roared.

2.

We all have defining moments in our lives—meaningful experiences that stand out in our memory. 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.

But is that true? Must our defining moments just happen to us?

Senior Signing Day didn’t just happen. Chris Barbic and Donald Kamentz set out to create a defining moment for their students. When Mayra Valle and hundreds of other YES Prep graduates walked onto that stage, they stepped into a carefully crafted defining moment that was no less special for having been planned. It’s a moment they’ll never forget.

Defining moments shape our lives, but we don’t have to wait for them to happen. We can be the authors of them. What if a teacher could design a lesson that students were still reflecting on years later? What if a manager knew exactly how to turn an employee’s moment of failure into a moment of growth? What if you had a better sense of how to create lasting memories for your kids?

In this book, we have two goals: First, we want to examine defining moments and identify the traits they have in common. What, specifically, makes a particular experience memorable and meaningful? Our research shows that defining moments share a set of common elements.

Second, we want to show you how you can create defining moments by making use of those elements. Why would you want to create them? To enrich your life. To connect with others. To make memories. To improve the experience of customers or patients or employees.

Our lives are measured in moments, and defining moments are the ones that endure in our memories. In the pages ahead, we’ll show you how to make more of them.

3.

Why do we remember certain experiences and forget others? In the case of Signing Day, the answer is pretty clear: It’s a celebration that is grand in scale and rich in emotion. No surprise that it’s more memorable than a lesson on multiplying fractions. But for other experiences in life—from vacations to work projects—it’s not as clear why we remember what we do.

Psychologists have discovered some counterintuitive answers to this puzzle of memory. Let’s say you take your family to Disney World. During your visit, we text you every hour, asking you to rate your experience at that moment on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is lousy and 10 is terrific. Let’s assume we check in with you 6 times. Here’s how your day shapes up:

To arrive at an overall summary of your day, we could simply average those ratings: 6.5. A pretty good day.

Now, let’s say we text you again, a few weeks later, and ask you to rate your overall Disney experience. A reasonable prediction of your answer would be 6.5, since it encompasses all the highs and lows of your day.

But psychologists would say that’s way off. They’d predict that, looking back on the day at Disney, your overall rating would be a 9! That’s because research has found that in recalling an experience, we ignore most of what happened and focus instead on a few particular moments. Specifically, two moments will stand out: riding Space Mountain and buying mouse-ear hats. To understand why those two moments matter more than the others, let’s explore some of the underlying psychology.

Consider an experiment in which participants were asked to undergo three painful trials. In the first, they submerged their hands for 60 seconds in buckets filled with frigid, 57-degree water.² (Keep in mind that 57-degree water feels much colder than 57-degree air.)

The second trial was similar, except that they kept their hands submerged for 90 seconds instead of 60, and during the final 30 seconds, the water warmed up to 59 degrees. That final half minute was still unpleasant, but noticeably less so for most participants. (Note that the researchers were monitoring the time carefully, but the participants were not told how much time had elapsed.)

For their third painful experience, the participants were given a choice: Would you rather repeat the first trial or the second?

This is an easy question: Both trials featured 60 seconds of identical pain, and the second trial added another 30 seconds of slightly reduced pain. So this is kind of like asking, Would you rather be slapped in the face for 60 seconds or 90?

Nevertheless, 69% chose the longer trial.

Psychologists have untangled the reasons for this puzzling result. When people assess an experience, they tend to forget or ignore its length—a phenomenon called “duration neglect.” Instead, they seem to rate the experience based on two key moments: (1) the best or worst moment, known as the “peak”; and (2) the ending. Psychologists call it the “peak-end rule.”

So in the participants’ memories, the difference between 60 and 90 seconds washed out. That’s duration neglect. And what stood out for them was that the longer trial ended more comfortably than the shorter one. (Both trials, by the way, had a similar peak moment of pain: close to the 60-second mark.)

This research explains why, in reflecting on your Disney experience, you’ll remember Space Mountain (the peak) and the mouse ears (the end). Everything else will tend to fade. As a result, your memory of the day is far more favorable than the hour-by-hour ratings you provided.

The peak-end rule holds true across many kinds of experiences. Most of the relevant studies tend to focus on short, laboratory-friendly experiences: watching film clips, enduring annoying sounds, etc. On longer time frames, peaks continue to matter but the relative importance of “endings” fades somewhat. Beginnings matter, too: When college alumni were asked about their memories from college, fully 40% of those memories came from the month of September! And beginnings and endings can blur—if you change cities for a new job, is that an ending or a beginning or both? That’s why it’s preferable to talk about transitions, which encompass both endings and beginnings.

What’s indisputable is that when we assess our experiences, we don’t average our minute-by-minute sensations. Rather, we tend to remember flagship moments: the peaks, the pits, and the transitions.³

This is a critical lesson for anyone in service businesses—from restaurants to medical clinics to call centers to spas—where success hinges on the customer experience. Consider the Magic Castle Hotel,⁴ which as of press time was one of the three top-rated hotels in Los Angeles, out of hundreds. It triumphed over competition like the Four Seasons Hotel at Beverly Hills and the Ritz-Carlton Los Angeles. Magic Castle’s reviews are stunning: Out of more than 2,900 reviews on Trip-Advisor, over 93% of guests rate the hotel as either “excellent” or “very good.”

There’s something odd about the hotel’s ranking, though: If you flipped through the photos of the resort online, you would never conclude, “That’s one of the best hotels in L.A.” An interior courtyard features a pool that might qualify as Olympic size, if the Olympics were being held in your backyard. The rooms are dated, the furnishings are spare, and most walls are bare. In fact, even the word hotel seems like a stretch—the Magic Castle is actually a converted two-story apartment complex from the 1950s, painted canary yellow.

The point is not that it’s a bad-looking place; it’s fine. It looks like a respectable budget motel. But the Four Seasons it ain’t. Nor is it particularly cheap—the pricing is comparable to Hilton or Marriott hotels. How could it be one of the top-rated hotels in Los Angeles?

Let’s start with the cherry-red phone mounted to a wall near the pool. You pick it up and someone answers, “Hello, Popsicle Hotline.” You place an order, and minutes later, a staffer wearing white gloves delivers your cherry, orange, or grape Popsicles to you at poolside. On a silver tray. For free.

Then there’s the Snack Menu, a list of goodies—ranging from Kit-Kats to root beer to Cheetos—that can be ordered up at no cost. There’s also a Board Game Menu and a DVD Menu, with all items loaned for free. Three times a week, magicians perform tricks at breakfast. Did we mention you can drop off unlimited loads of laundry for free washing? Your clothes are returned later in the day, wrapped in butcher paper and tied up with twine and a sprig of lavender. Which is much more pomp and ceremony than the doctor used when handing off your first child.

The guest reviews for the Magic Castle Hotel are rapturous. What the Magic Castle has figured out is that, to please customers, you need not obsess over every detail. Customers will forgive small swimming pools and underwhelming room décor, as long as some moments are magical. The surprise about great service experiences is that they are mostly forgettable and occasionally remarkable.

Now, when you phone the “Popsicle Hotline,” is that a defining moment? In the context of a lifetime, certainly not. (Hard to imagine a deathbed regret: “If only I’d chosen the grape …”)

But in the context of a vacation? Of course it’s a defining moment. When tourists tell their friends about their vacation to Southern California, they’ll say, “We went to Disneyland, and we saw the Walk of Fame, and we stayed at this hotel, the Magic Castle, and you won’t believe this, but there’s a phone by the pool …” The Popsicle Hotline is one of the moments that defines the trip. And it was an engineered moment—the kind of moment that other hotels fail to conjure. (Courtyards by Marriott are fine places, but can you imagine raving about them to a friend?)

The point here is simple: Some moments are vastly more meaningful than others. For tourists, the Popsicle Hotline is a 15-minute experience that pops out of the surrounding 2-week vacation. For students at YES Prep, Senior Signing Day is a single morning that rises above a 7-year journey.

But we tend to ignore this truth. We’re not very good at investing in such moments. For example, a teacher plans his history curriculum for a semester, but every class period gets roughly the same amount of attention. There’s no attempt to shape a few “peak” moments. Or an executive leads her company through a fast-growth period, but there’s little to distinguish one week from the next. Or we spend weekend after weekend together with our kids, but in memory all those times blend together.

How can we fight this flatness and make moments that matter? Let’s start with the basics: How are we defining a “defining moment”? In common usage, the term is applied in a variety of ways. Some use it to capture dramatic times when people have their character tested, as with a soldier showing courage in battle. Others use the term more liberally, as almost a synonym for “greatest hits.” (For example, an online search of the term yields results such as “Defining Moments in 70s Television,” which must have been a short list indeed.)

For the sake of this book, a defining moment is a short experience that is both memorable and meaningful. (“Short” is relative here—a month might be a short experience in the span of your life, and a minute might be short in the context of a customer support call.) There may be a dozen moments in your life that capture who you are—those are big defining moments. But there are smaller experiences, such as the Popsicle Hotline, that are defining moments in the context of a vacation or a semester abroad or a product development cycle.

What are these moments made of, and how do we create more of them? In our research, we have found that defining moments are created from one or more of the following four elements:

ELEVATION: Defining moments rise above the everyday. They provoke not just transient happiness, like laughing at a friend’s joke, but memorable delight. (You pick up the red phone and someone says, “Popsicle Hotline, we’ll be right out.”) To construct elevated moments, we must boost sensory pleasures—the Popsicles must be delivered poolside on a silver tray, of course—and, if appropriate, add an element of surprise. We’ll see why surprise can warp our perceptions of time, and why most people’s most memorable experiences are clustered in their teens and twenties. Moments of elevation transcend the normal course of events; they are literally extraordinary.

INSIGHT: Defining moments rewire our understanding of ourselves or the world. In a few seconds or minutes, we realize something that might influence our lives for decades: Now is the time for me to start this business. Or, This is the person I’m going to marry. The psychologist Roy Baumeister studied life changes that were precipitated by a “crystallization of discontent,” moments when people abruptly saw things as they were, such as cult members who suddenly realized the truth about their leader. And although these moments of insight often seem serendipitous, we can engineer them—or at the very least, lay the groundwork. In one unforgettably disgusting story, we’ll see how some relief workers sparked social change by causing a community to “trip over the truth.”

PRIDE: Defining moments capture us at our best—moments of achievement, moments of courage. To create such moments, we need to understand something about the architecture of pride—how to plan for a series of milestone moments that build on each other en route to a larger goal. We’ll explore why the “Couch to 5K” program was so successful—and so much more effective in sparking exercise than the simple imperative to “jog more.” And we’ll learn some unexpected things about acts of courage and the surprising ripple effects they create.

CONNECTION: Defining moments are social: weddings, graduations, baptisms, vacations, work triumphs, bar and bat mitzvahs, speeches, sporting events. These moments are strengthened because we share them with others. What triggers moments of connection? We’ll encounter a remarkable laboratory procedure that allows two people to walk into a room as strangers and walk out, 45 minutes later, as close friends. And we’ll analyze what one social scientist believes is a kind of unified theory of what makes relationships stronger, whether the bond is between husband and wife, doctor and patient, or even shopper and retailer.

Defining moments often spark positive emotion—we’ll use “positive defining moments” and “peaks” interchangeably throughout the book—but there are categories of negative defining moments, too, such as moments of pique: experiences of embarrassment or embitterment that cause people to vow, “I’ll show them!” There’s another category that is all too common: moments of trauma, which leave us heartbroken and grieving. In the pages ahead, we’ll encounter several stories of people dealing with trauma, but we will not explore this category in detail, for the simple reason that our focus is on creating more positive moments. No one wants to experience more moments of loss. In the Appendix, we share some resources that people who have suffered a trauma might find helpful.

Defining moments possess at least one of the four elements above, but they need not have all four. Many moments of insight, for example, are private—they don’t involve a connection. And a fun moment like calling the Popsicle Hotline doesn’t offer much insight or pride.

Some powerful defining moments contain all four elements. Think of YES Prep’s Senior Signing Day: the ELEVATION of students having their moment onstage, the INSIGHT of a sixth grader thinking That could be me, the PRIDE of being accepted to college, and the CONNECTION of sharing the day with an arena full of thousands of supportive people. (See the footnote for a mnemonic to remember this framework for defining moments.)fn1

Sometimes these elements can be very personal. Somewhere in your home there is a treasure chest, full of things that are precious to you and worthless to anyone else. It might be a scrapbook, or a drawer in a dresser, or a box in the attic. Maybe some of your favorites are stuck on the refrigerator so you can see them every day. Wherever your treasure chest is, its contents are likely to include the four elements we’ve been discussing:

• ELEVATION: A love letter. A ticket stub. A well-worn T-shirt. Haphazardly colored cards from your kids that make you smile with delight.
• INSIGHT: Quotes or articles that moved you. Books that changed your view of the world. Diaries that captured your thoughts.
• PRIDE: Ribbons, report cards, notes of recognition, certificates, thank-yous, awards. (It just hurts, irrationally, to throw away a trophy.)
• CONNECTION: Wedding photos. Vacation photos. Family photos. Christmas photos of hideous sweaters. Lots of photos. Probably the first thing you’d grab if your house caught on fire.

All these items you’re safeguarding are, in essence, the relics of your life’s defining moments. How are you feeling now as you reflect on the contents of your treasure chest? What if you could give that same feeling to your kids, your students, your colleagues, your customers?

Moments matter. And what an opportunity we miss when we leave them to chance! Teachers can inspire, caregivers can comfort, service workers can delight, politicians can unite, and managers can motivate. All it takes is a bit of insight and fore-thought.

This is a book about the power of moments and the wisdom of shaping them.

2

Thinking in Moments

1.

What was your first day like at your current (or most recent) job?

Is it fair to say that it was not a defining moment?

Judging from the stories we’ve heard from underwhelmed employees, what follows is a pretty typical description of a first day: You show up. The receptionist didn’t think you were starting until next week. You’re shown to a desk. There’s a monitor and an Ethernet cable on the desk but no computer. There’s also a single binder clip. The chair still bears the imprint of the previous owner, like an ergonomic buttocks fossil.

Your boss has not arrived yet. You’re given an ethics and compliance manual to review. “Why don’t you read over this and I’ll swing back in a few hours?” says the receptionist. The sexual harassment policy is so long and comprehensive it makes you wonder a bit about your colleagues.

Eventually, a friendly person from your floor introduces herself and whisks you around the office, interrupting 11 different people to introduce you. As a result, you worry that you have managed to annoy all of your colleagues within the first hour of your employment. You immediately forget all their names. Except Lester, who might just be the reason for the sexual harassment policy?

Does that sound about right?

The lack of attention paid to an employee’s first day is mind-boggling. What a wasted opportunity to make a new team member feel included and appreciated. Imagine if you treated a first date like a new employee: “I’ve got some meetings stacked up right now, so why don’t you get settled in the passenger seat of the car and I’ll swing back in a few hours?”

To avoid this kind of oversight, we must understand when special moments are needed. We must learn to think in moments, to spot the occasions that are worthy of investment.

This “moment-spotting” habit can be unnatural. In organizations, for instance, we are consumed with goals. Time is meaningful only insofar as it clarifies or measures our goals. The goal is the thing.

But for an individual human being, moments are the thing. Moments are what we remember and what we cherish. Certainly we might celebrate achieving a goal, such as completing a marathon or landing a significant client—but the achievement is embedded in a moment.

Every culture has its prescribed set of big moments: birthdays and weddings and graduations, of course, but also holiday celebrations and funeral rites and political traditions. They seem “natural” to us. But notice that every last one of them was invented, dreamed up by anonymous authors who wanted to give shape to time. This is what we mean by “thinking in moments”: to recognize where the prose of life needs punctuation.

We’ll explore three situations that deserve punctuation: transitions, milestones, and pits. Transitions are classic occasions for defining moments. Many cultures have a “coming of age” ritual, like the bar and bat mitzvah or the quinceañera. In the Sateré-Mawé tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, when a boy turns 13, he comes of age by wearing a pair of gloves filled with angry, stinging bullet ants,¹ leaving his hands covered in welts. Because someone apparently asked, “How can we make puberty harder?”

Coming-of-age rituals are boundary markers, attempts to crisp up an otherwise gradual evolution from adolescence to adulthood. Before this day, I was a child. After this day, I am a man. (A man with very swollen hands.)

Transitions, like milestones and pits, are natural defining moments. The transition of getting married is a defining moment in life regardless of whether it is celebrated. But if we recognize how important these natural defining moments are, we can shape them—make them more memorable and meaningful.

That logic shows why the first day of work is an experience worth investing in. For new employees, it’s three big transitions at once: intellectual (new work), social (new people), and environmental (new place). The first day shouldn’t be a set of bureaucratic activities on a checklist. It should be a peak moment.

Lani Lorenz Fry understood this opportunity. Fry, who worked in global brand strategy and marketing at John Deere, had heard from the company’s leaders in Asia that they were struggling with employee engagement and retention. “John Deere is not a well-known brand there,” Fry said. “It’s not like the Midwest in the U.S., where your grandpa probably had a John Deere tractor.” As a result, employees had less of an emotional tie to the brand.

Fry and her colleagues on the brand team saw an opportunity to build that connection—and it had to start on the employee’s first day. Collaborating with the customer experience consultant Lewis Carbone, the team designed what it called the First Day Experience.² Here’s the way they wanted the day to unfold (you may notice some differences from the first-day story above):

After the John Deere brand team completed its plan for the First Day Experience, some offices across Asia began to roll it out. In the Beijing office, it was such a hit that employees who’d been hired earlier were joking, “Can I quit and rejoin?” In India, the program has helped to differentiate John Deere in the highly competitive labor market.

Shouldn’t every organization in the world have a version of this First Day Experience?

2.

John Deere’s First Day Experience is a peak moment delivered at a time of transition. When a life transition lacks a “moment,” though, it can become formless. We often feel anxious because we don’t know how to act or what rules to apply. Consider a story shared by Kenneth Doka,³ a licensed mental health counselor who is also an expert on grief.

A woman came to him who had lost her husband to Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS). They’d had a happy marriage, she said. He was a good father and a good husband. But ALS is a cruel, degenerative disease, and as her husband’s illness advanced, he required more and more care. It was tough for both of them. He was a proud man—the owner of a small construction firm—and “didn’t do sick well,” as she said. They fought more than they ever had.

But they were devout Catholics, and they had tremendous faith in their marriage. She said that every night, after a tough day, they’d put their hands together in bed so that their rings touched, and they’d repeat their wedding vows to each other.When she came to see Doka, it had been six years since her husband passed, and she told him that she thought she was ready to start dating again. “But I can’t take my wedding ring off,” she said. “I can’t date with my wedding ring, and I can’t take it off.” She believed that marriages were for life, but she also knew that she had honored her commitment. She was confused and stuck.

Doka has written extensively about the power of “therapeutic rituals” to help people who are grieving. He suggested that she needed a “ritual of transition” to take off the ring, and she liked the idea. So, with her permission, he worked with her priest to create a small ceremony.

It happened one Sunday afternoon, after Mass, in the church where she was married. The priest had called together a group of her close friends and family members, many of whom had attended her wedding.

The priest called them up around the altar. Then he began to ask her some questions.

“Were you faithful in good times and bad?”

“Yes,” she said.

“In sickness and health?”

“Yes.”

The priest led her through her wedding vows—but in the past tense. She affirmed, in the presence of the witnesses, that she had been faithful, that she had loved and honored her husband.

Then the priest said, “May I have the ring, please?” She took it off her finger and handed it to him. She would tell Doka later that “it came off as if by magic.”

The priest accepted her ring. He and Doka had arranged for her ring to be interlocked with her husband’s ring and then affixed to the front of their wedding photo.

The ceremony allowed her to attest, to herself and the people she loved, that she had fulfilled her vows. It signaled to everyone present that her identity was about to change. It was a moment that allowed her a fresh start.

At the heart of the “reverse wedding” story is a powerful insight. At the point the widow went to see Doka, she was ready to begin dating again. And it’s clear that, even if she hadn’t met Doka, she would have started dating eventually on her own. Maybe it would have taken a month, maybe a year, maybe five years. And throughout that uncertain time, she would have felt anxious: Am I ready? Is it “okay” for me to be ready? What the widow in Doka’s story needed was a landmark moment to capture the transition she was making. After that Sunday afternoon ceremony, I was ready.

We have a natural hunger for these landmarks in time. Take the prevalence of New Year’s resolutions.⁴ The Wharton professor Katherine Milkman said she found it striking that “at the start of a new year, we feel like we have a clean slate. It’s the ‘fresh start effect’ … all of my past failures are from last year and I can think, ‘Those are not me. That’s old me. That’s not new me. New me isn’t going to make these mistakes.’ ”

In other words, New Year’s resolutions are not really about the resolutions. After all, for most people, the resolutions haven’t changed. Most people wanted to lose weight and save money on December 31, too. What we’re doing on New Year’s Day is more like a mental accounting trick. Our past failures are left on the ledger of Old Me. New Me starts today.

New Year’s resolutions should really be called New Year’s absolutions.

Milkman realized that if her “fresh start” theory was right, then the slate-cleaning effect shouldn’t be confined to New Year’s Day. It should also be true for other landmark dates that would give us an excuse to reset our record, such as the start of a new month or even a new week.

Milkman and her colleague Hengchen Dai tracked down attendance data for a university fitness center, and they found strong proof of their “fresh start” hypothesis. The probability that students visited the gym increased at the beginning of each new week (by 33%), new month (by 14%), and new semester (by 47%).

So “fresh starts” happen not only on New Year’s Day, but also on any other landmark date. If you’re struggling to make a transition, create a defining moment that draws a dividing line between Old You and New You.

3.

There are certain landmark dates that are near universal. A survey by the researchers Adam Alter and Hal Hershfield asked participants to specify the most significant birthdays across a person’s life span.⁵ The winners (ranked in order of votes) were:

These are milestone birthdays, and every one of them calls for a celebration or, in the case of the 100th birthday, a grudging gratitude that the odometer is still moving. Other than 18 and 21, which come with an expansion of civic and alcoholic rights, respectively, these numbers are arbitrary. Turning 50 seems like a real threshold of some kind, but of course it’s not. There is no day in your whole life when you are more than a day older than the day before (unless Daylight Savings is the black magic it seems to be). Aging is exquisitely incremental. To add meaning to our lives, though, we concoct these thresholds—30, 40, 50—and then freak out when we get close to them.

But being arbitrary doesn’t make these occasions less meaningful. Milestones are milestones. And just as there are familiar defining moments that mark transitions, such as graduation ceremonies, there are others that commemorate milestones: 40th birthday parties. 25th anniversary trips. 30th-year-on-thejob plaques or gold watches.