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Unpopular opinion? Today, January 1, is wholly insignificant.
Here's the deal: a few thousand years ago, some farmers decided to mark the coming planting season with a festival and to ask the gods for a blessing on their crops. In fact, in most civilizations there was something similar, usually tied to a recurring springtime event (lunar cycle, rising stars, flooding, etc). But that's just it: it's entirely insignificant except that a society decided to make it mean something. And so began the celebrations of a new year, full of all the hope and promise of what it might bring. We've always been a people that liked to gather and create moments together.
Moments are what you make of them. We tend to treat certain moments as more special than others and there's nothing wrong with that, except for those times when you're trying to create a new moment that has not yet been deemed special enough for widespread celebration. Most companies are hiring and firing all the time and employee onboarding is a fairly rote experience. Some places like John Deere, Zappos, and Pintrest treat the new hire experience differently. Most people make New Year's Resolutions. But then the moment passes and by March the gyms are empty again. (Of course, there's also the Jason Fried methodology for goal-setting: don't set any.)
Truth be told, I'm ready for an inflection point, a moment in time when we can pivot and choose a new course of action. Sometimes it takes a designated moment to serve as a common point of accountability or at least a common point of inertia. Might as well be today, I suppose.
In any case, today is significant. But only because we can choose to make it so.
And can we all agree that 2020 vision puns have already worn out their welcome? And no, today is not the new decade. But also, yes, it is a new decade. Because decades are just 10-year periods of time. It's an issue that's largely unresolvable.
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What I'm Reading
Chip Heath & Dan Heath
For those of us trying to create delightful experiences for others, this is a must-read. I got a lot out of this book professionally, but it also challenged me to think about how I'm creating moments in my personal life as well.
It's rare for me to take notes while I read, if only because somewhere north of 90% of my reading is done through audio books. However, when there are particularly salient points or insightful comments made, I use Google Assistant and/or Google Keep to take a quick note. And for this book, that happened a lot.
Here's the crux of the book:
Moments naturally occur when we're facing Peaks, Transitions, and Pits and have some combination of four elements: Elevation, Insight, Pride, and Connection.
So the challenge for us is navigating this matrix: How do we amplify the peaks, identify the transitions, fill in the pits, and use each of those four elements to create a truly memorable moment?
Bonus: they're offering a series of free resources related to the book, which I found almost as valuable as the book itself. Stories shared in the book include the popsicle hotline, Joshie the Giraffe, and Senior Signing Day.
Quote
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.
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Around the Web
Wes O'Haire, Charlotte Ratel
I'm not even going to begin unpacking this one. It's rich and if you're at all in the business of trying to create moments, this is basically a masterclass on using a host of strategies and mental constructs to create moments that resonate deeply. (Yes, it's focused on digital product design, but it's application is much, much broader than that.) The section headings should be enough to pique your interest...
Models for Problem-Solving
Models for Decision-Making
Models for Communicating
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Just for fun:
Tom Whitwell
Highlights: a chipmunk emoji cost an Israeli texter $2,000, the daily goal of 10,000 steps has nothing to do with health and more to do with the Japanese written language, and yes, songs are getting shorter because of market forces like Spotify.
If there's one thing a new year is good for, it's reflection. Reflection is, of course, easiest/most readily facilitated when you keep a log throughout the year of what you're learning and experiencing. (It's almost like moment-making throughout the year can yield a more powerful reflective experience. Hm. Didn't see that coming...)
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