In their book, The Power Of Moments, Chip and Dan Heath talk about the significance of creating our own defining moments in life. They describe these peaks as the punctuation in the prose of life. What we do usually is leave these moments to fate and luck, waiting for things to happen to us, when we should be looking for opportunities to craft them ourselves.

Reflecting back on what I had read, I identified two such examples in my own life. One was my recent post about achieving my first month milestone in my blogging journey. Three-quarters of the way in, I realised that I was approaching the end of the first month. And from that moment on, every post I wrote was motivated by the fact that I was getting one day closer to reaching that milestone. There was no reason why 31 days should matter when my goal is to keep writing everyday. But creating that artificial milestone gave me the impetus to finish that final lap. That first month post became a defining moment for me.

The second instance is from my school days. Our 6th grade social studies teacher was a history buff and made us enact the lessons in class. It was neither framed as a competition nor did it have any tangible reward. Just a bunch of students with props and wardrobe made out of unremarkable classroom materials, pretending to be warriors on a battlefield. Till date, I remember the last scene, where my friend, as the triumphant warrior, celebrated her victory by throwing her booty into the air with cries of ‘At last, it is mine!’ The loot was a bunch of sharpeners and erasers. I fell in love with history that day and it lasted all through my school years, even as I slogged through pages and pages of the French Revolution. So memorable was that moment. This example is more powerful to me because it shows how a teacher made a class fall in love with a subject by taking the time to craft an everlasting experience.

In both situations, the defining moment didn’t exist until someone identified the opportunity and designed it to be one. All we need is to recognise that we have the power to create them, for ourselves and for others.