The New York Times bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick explore why certain brief experiences can jolt us and elevate us and change us—and how we can learn to create such extraordinary moments in our life and work. While human lives are endlessly variable, our most memorable positive moments are dominated by four elements: elevation, insight, pride, and connection. If we embrace these elements, we can conjure more moments that matter. What if a teacher could design a lesson that he knew his students would remember twenty years later? What if a manager knew how to create an experience that would delight customers? What if you had a better sense of how to create memories that matter for your children? This book delves into some fascinating mysteries of experience: Why we tend to remember the best or worst moment of an experience, as well as the last moment, and forget the rest. Why “we feel most comfortable when things are certain, but we feel most alive when they’re not.” And why our most cherished memories are clustered into a brief period during our youth. Readers discover how brief experiences can change lives, such as the experiment in which two strangers meet in a room, and forty-five minutes later, they leave as best friends. (What happens in that time?) Or the tale of the world’s youngest female billionaire, who credits her resilience to something her father asked the family at the dinner table. (What was that simple question?) Many of the defining moments in our lives are the result of accident or luck—but why would we leave our most meaningful, memorable moments to chance when we can create them? The Power of Moments shows us how to be the author of richer experiences.

Two leadership experts set out to find out how era and values shape those who lead, from those raised in the shadow of the Depression and World War II to today's young computer generation.

A non-technical (but serious) treatment of those parts of Earth history leading up to human history, as well as some pre-historical aspects of humanity. Many “events” in Earth’s history necessarily preceded the emergence of human beings (and intelligence). Geology has provided us with a great deal of information about these various steps on the way to intelligent life, and how and why they were important. Some of these events were on a cosmic scale (no universe – no life!), some were planetological/astronomical (no Earth – no life), some were essentially chemical (how did life emerge in the primordial ocean and why do we have oxygen in the atmosphere?), and some were details of evolutionary history (how did life colonize the land and how did mammals develop?). In this book an enthusiastic professor of geosciences presents a broad introduction from the Big Bang to the present and into the future, lucidly explaining aspects from various disciplines to interested, non-specialist readers.

To many of us, the experiences that we grew up taking for granted leave become distant dreams in our adult lives: marriages that last a lifetime; safe neighborhoods to call home; the certainty that our children will have a better life than we did; and most of all, lots of time to spend as we wish, living for the moment. Instead, we find our time and energy spent recovering from the past or protecting ourselves from the future. The result is a desperate, sometimes dangerous, and often unsuccessful, search for meaning in our lives. In Real Moments, Barbara De Angelis defines happiness not as an acquisition, but as a skill--the skill of capturing every moment and living it completely. With insight, wisdom, and vision, she teaches us how to rediscover real moments with our mates and our children, with our work and our play, in sex and intimacy, and real moments with ourselves. It is an examination of our relationship with the process of living itself, offering inspiration as well as practical tools for creating more of one of the most precious moments of all--moments of true meaning in our lives.

We are our stories.Within those stories come moments. Those moments transform and define who we are in some form, both good and bad, with enlightenment, joy, sadness through instruments of change.These are moments of a developing life. This book translates moments that transformed me into how I have lived and continue to live my life. The moments stated in this book often affected those involved in my change, including family, friends, and those unknowns I have crossed paths with throughout my life. I live richly. Moments of profound change in their different iterations are noted throughout the pages of this book.Remembering defining moments throughout life is a universal endeavor and, in many cases, not all, a blessing.