Making surprises is one of the best skills that when perfected, will help you excel not only in your career, but also in your social and private lives.
Surprise your customers with great service, underpromise then over-deliver, and customers will love you and will feel super satisfied, and they will recommend you to their peers.
In a middle of a project where deadlines are tight, imagine if you come to one of your subordinates and ask them to take a long weekend to relax, and recharge. Wouldn’t that be amazing?
A subordinate who does a mistake, and he is expecting to take the blame for it, but you stand as a leader and take the blame instead of them. How would they feel?
Buy a flower to your wife with no reason, just because it is Sunday, and she will be flying!
Take your kids on a spontaneous camping trip and they will be over the moon.
You find a person in the street carrying heavy bags, you rush to help him, although he is not that old, and he is not expecting you to help him. Wouldn’t that make his day?
A joke is a surprise. You tell a certain story where the audience is expecting things to go in a certain direction, but you say something unexpected and suddenly your audience bursts out laughing.
Mastering the art of Surprise will put you ahead on many fronts.
But for a surprise to be a surprise, you need to be unexpected (only sometimes). You need to always find ideas how you can deliver your messages in new ways and choose the best times to do that.
You need to capture the moment where your audience is lowering their expectations and then surprise them with your offering.
The problem with exceeding expectations is that, when done often, it becomes the new normal.
People adjust their expectation levels quickly, they get used to that, and the thing that once was “extra cherry on the cake” will be a “requirement” and people will get angry when they don’t find it.
Surprises should be rare enough so that the audience doesn’t get used to them, but at the same time frequent enough to deliver that extra value to your audience and wow them.
Surprises should also be declared as “surprises” and the audience should know that this is not the “normal” to avoid the effect of human hedonic adaptation and keep the allure of surprises when they are made.
The art of making surprises is a fine skill. One that is a must-have for ambitious people, entrepreneurs, and partners alike.
