Late one February night when I was in my mid-twenties, I collapsed in front of the television to flip through the channels. An infomercial for Tony Robbins (the well known life and work strategist) caught my attention. At work I had been assigned the job of developing the first leadership program for my company and was soaking up any and all information I came across. And this looked interesting.
The ad was for Tony’s “Personal Power II” program which consisted of thirty compact discs that you would listen to every day for a month. There were all the usual promises of a better life and immediate improvements in effectiveness, and a bunch of notable celebrities thrown in to add credence to the program. So I decided to go for it.
A few days later the box with the CDs and workbook arrived. I opened it and found a VHS tape labeled “Watch Me First.” I inserted it into the VCR and on the screen popped up Tony Robbins standing on a cliff in Fiji with the ocean behind him. He was speaking from his “Mastery University” located there. After thanking me for buying the program, he said that he was about to share a concept so powerful that—if I put it into practice—it would perhaps be more valuable than all of concepts on the CDs combined. Let me just cut to the punch line: it was. In fact, I use it regularly these 25 years or so later. Here’s what he said (and I’ll paraphrase to the best of my memory):
Some time ago a friend and I went for a six-mile run along the beach in Fiji. When we finished, I asked my friend to rate the run on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the best run we could imagine. My friend, after thinking, gave it a 7. A good run. And I agreed.
I then asked my friend this question: “If we were to decide to run it again, but we wanted our experience to be an 8 instead of a 7, what would we have had to do differently?” After thinking again, his friend said that if they had chosen a cadence to run to occasionally, rather than one running ahead of the other and going back and forth, that it would be a very good run… maybe an 8. Tony then asked him another question: “What would have made it a 9?” The friend answered that if they had spent more time taking in the beautiful scenery while they were running, rather than looking down at the ground so much, it would have been excellent… maybe a 9. “OK,” Tony said, “What would have made it a 10… the best run you can imagine?” After a few moments the friend said that if they had run in cadence for part of it, focused on the beauty around them, and then maybe turned on some motivating music at the end and sprinted the last half mile, that perhaps it would have been the best run possible. A 10.
“Well why didn’t we do that?” Tony asked.
This story led Tony to the idea that one of the stupidest things we can do as humans is to go into the seemingly insignificant moments of our lives and hope that they go well. We hope the traffic isn’t bad, we hope the weather is good, we hope the client isn’t angry, we hope our kids behave in the restaurant, and we hope the meeting isn’t too boring. We do all of this hoping but rarely do we decide — in advance—what we want the quality of these experiences to be, and to act to make the experiences to our liking. To make it simple for people, Tony developed a simple tool called the Quality Quantifier, which is just a way to measure the relative quality of a given activity on a scale of 1-10.
For example, if you are going into a meeting at work, you ask yourself to rate how you expect the meeting to go on a 1-10 scale. If you give it a low rating, you ask yourself “What could I do to move it up the scale?” If you’re feeling like the meeting will be a 3, what would make it a 6? What if you decided that if you could learn just one thing in the meeting that you could go back and act on, that it would least be a 6? Or what about having a favorite drink with you? Or choose where to sit in the room? Or whatever. You get the picture. The point is, you can design an experience and then live it, rather than just hope it goes well.
Let’s go back to the VCR and me sitting there taking all this in. I was struck by how simple this thinking was, and was also surprised that I hadn’t thought of this before. I was eager to put the concepts into practice. So I started thinking about the next thing I needed to do. It was my morning routine, which basically went like this: Wake up, run downstairs in a tee-shirt and underwear, freezing, run some hot-ish water into a bowl of instant oatmeal (tepid, really), eat it standing at the counter, run some water in the bowl and run upstairs to get a shower and go to work.
I thought about how I would rate a morning routine like that. I came up with a rating of 2. It sucked, really. And yet I did it all the time. So I wondered how I could make it just a 4. What if it were warm? And my eyes automatically shifted to look over at the thermostat on the wall. The programmable thermostat, I might add, that I had never once actually programmed. So I went over and set it to make the house warm when I woke up. Now… what could make my morning routine a 5? The answer came quickly to my brain: music. But what music? Again, the answer came quickly. I wanted to hear Lights, by Journey. So I queued up my Journey’s Greatest Hits CD in the Sony 5-CD changer that everyone had back then and put the remote control where I would see it in the morning. Back to the Quality Quantifier… what would make my routine a 6 or 7? Well, I thought, what if I were to put a kettle on the stove and actually get the water hot enough to cook the oatmeal properly? And what if I poured some cold orange juice? And what if I set a place at the table in my little breakfast area with all the windows and actually sat down and ate it for a few minutes without rushing? I was up to a 10 in my mind.
The next morning, I recall that as soon as my feet touched the floor, I felt a surge of excitement. Why? Because the house was warm. And I had chosen to do that. Walking downstairs, I reached for the remote and got the music going. When the lights, go down, in the city… The kettle was ready for me on the stove and while I waited for it to whistle I got the orange juice poured and the place setting ready, and when the whistle finally came, I poured it into the oatmeal, stirred it with more joy than I should have, and had a seat. And in that moment, with the warmth of the house, and the soundtrack of my choice, and the oatmeal just so, and me sitting in my chosen spot, I had one thrilling thought: that this was the best damn weekday morning I had experienced in a year.
But why? I’m just a guy sitting having a bowl of oatmeal before going to work! And yet that is all it took to turn my experience from a 2 to a 10. And it wasn’t just the experience itself. Perhaps more importantly, it was the sudden sense that I had slid over from the passenger seat of my life and into the driver’s seat, and I had placed my hands on the wheel. I had chosen to do something intentional, for myself, and I had taken control of something very simple that I otherwise had been leaving to chance. And this knowledge was very, very exciting.
I remember driving to work that morning, having decided in advance what sort of drive it would be. Rather than sit in traffic for 45 minutes, I would give myself an hour, but I would drive only on backroads, and I would enjoy that manual stick-shift transmission, and I would have the sunroof open and my gloves on and I would listen to some Van Halen and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t the best drive to work I could remember.
I was hooked. And I’ve been hooked ever since on the idea that if you want to improve the quality of your life, you must focus on the seemingly insignificant moments that make up 99.9% of your life. The moments in between the big events like the weddings and funerals and promotions and graduations and home closings. The big events of our lives are like the every-so-often period at the end of a sentence, but our lives are made up of the letters and words and spaces in between. This is where the real work is to be done if we are to improve the quality of our lives because this is where the vast majority of life happens.
If you were to employ a method like this, and focus on making the every day moments of your life of higher quality, what would that do to the overall quality of your life? Just taking each event from a 4 to a 6 would increase the quality of your life by half! And while sometimes you may not have the time nor the energy to take a 4 to a 10, you can almost always take it to a 6 or an 8, thereby almost doubling how well you enjoy and experience that moment. And that’s a powerful concept, especially when accumulated over the hours and days and weeks that make up our lives.
So when I ask someone how they’re spending their lives and they tell me about their retirement or their promotion or their birthday or any other occasional event, I remind them that this is not really how they’re spending their lives. They’re spending their lives on the morning routine. On the drive to work. On the dreaded meeting or phone call. On the moments spent swiping their phone screen. On the seemingly insignificant moments which are, as it turns out, all too significant in determining how our lives will be lived.