Quotes from Chip Heath

If you want to be part of a group that bonds like cement, take on a really demanding task that's deeply meaningful. All of you will remember it for the rest of your lives.

Curiosity, he says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.

Direct the Rider. What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. So provide crystal-clear direction. (Think 1% milk.) Motivate the Elephant. What looks like laziness is often exhaustion. The Rider can't get his way by force for very long. So it's critical that you engage people's emotional side

The "occasionally remarkable" moments shouldn't be left to chance! They should be planned for, invested in.

Your brain hosts a truly staggering number of loops. The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory.

In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought.

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

As Mark Twain said, "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.

And that's the charge for all of us: to defy the forgettable flatness of everyday work and life by creating a few precious moments.

If you're struggling to make a transition, create a defining moment that draws a dividing line between Old You and New You.

Our lives are measured in moments, and defining moments are the ones that endure in our memories.

How do you build peaks? You create a positive moment with elements of elevation, insight, pride, and/or connection.

Generative metaphors and proverbs both derive their power from a clever substitution: They substitute something easy to think about for something difficult.

spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don't buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children's pictures.

Don't obsess about the failures. Instead, investigate and clone the successes.

Here's our three-part recipe to create more moments of elevation: (1) Boost the sensory appeal; (2) Raise the stakes; (3) Break the script. Usually elevated moments have 2 or 3 of those traits.

The psychologists Amos Tversky and Eldar Shafir offered college students a five-dollar reward for filling out a survey. When given a five-day deadline, 66% of the students completed the survey and claimed their rewards. When given no deadline, only 25% ever collected their money.

Studies of the elderly show that people regret not what they did but what they didn't do.

The advice we give others, then, has two big advantages: It naturally prioritizes the most important factors in the decision, and it downplays short-term emotions.

Big-picture, hands-off leadership isn't likely to work in a change situation, because the hardest part of change—the paralyzing part—is precisely in the details.

defining moments can be consciously created. You can be the architect of moments that matter.

To experience more defining moments, we need to rethink the way we set goals.

To change behavior, you've got to direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, and shape the Path. If

When Blakely and her brother were growing up, her father would ask them a question every week at the dinner table: "What did you guys fail at this week?" "If we had nothing to tell him, he'd be disappointed," Blakely said. "The logic seems counterintuitive, but it worked beautifully. He knew that many people become paralyzed by the fear of failure.