Heath Chip - The power of moments: why certain experiences have extraordinary impact

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ALSO BY CHIP AND DAN HEATH

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Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

Simon & Schuster

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Copyright 2017 by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition October 2017

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-4776-0

ISBN 978-1-5011-4777-7 (ebook)

If youve finished The Power of Moments and are hungry for more, visit our website: http://www.thepowerofmoments.com. When you sign up for our newsletter, you get instant access to free materials like these:

1-Page Overview . A printable overview of the Elevation-Insight-Pride-Connection framework, perfect for tacking up next to your desk.

The Book Club Guide . If youre reading The Power of Moments as part of a book club, this guide offers suggested questions and topics to guide your discussion.

Recommended Reading List . All of our sources are available to you in the endnotes in this book, of course. But in this list we share the eight books and articles that we found most fascinating or useful.

The Power of Moments for Friends and Family . An inspiring and wide-ranging set of examples showing how to share more special moments with the people closest to you. It includes: birthday and anniversary ideas, more Art Aronstyle questions, actual examples of the Saturday Surprise (see Chapter 4), traditions from other cultures that we should embrace, and more.

The Power of Moments podcasts . Short podcasts, recorded by the authors, that cover the following topics in more depth:

Defining moments in education

Defining moments in health care

Defining moments in customer experiences

Defining moments for employees

To our daughters Emory, Aubrey, and Josephine, whose defining moments become ours

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 bars 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 previewing the upcoming National Signing Day, 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, its a big day.

Watching the exuberant coverage, something struck Kamentz. It blows my mind that we celebrate athletics this way, but we dont have anything that celebrates academics in the same way, he said. And the students at their schoolprimarily kids from low-income Hispanic familiesdeserved 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. Hed 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 preview, 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 systemfrom 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 schools 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 homethe 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 .