Defining Moment: the Defined Life

“One more thing…” — Steve Jobs

It may be obvious, but it bears saying: unlike the Highlander, when it comes to the Defining Moment there can be more than one. If you’ve tried this process on one of your dreams, close your eyes, take a breath, and ask yourself: What would I really like?

Poof! Another Defining Moment is born, and you can start the whole process over again. It is something that gets easier with practice. You get better at understanding just how many resources you have available to you. You get better at identifying risks and implications. The whole process can move faster, and notebooks filled with the processes are really fun to go back and look over. It’s like a scrapbook for the inside of your brain.

Reverse Engineering

There’s another neat thing about Defining Moments: when you’ve gone to that much trouble to create one, you also acquire more skill at identifying them when they happen. There may be some moment — seeing your child smile as you play with them on the floor, letting a well-turned sentence flow out of your keyboard, that burst of endorphins as you get most of the way through your workout — when you suddenly realize that you feel happy. A little voice inside may take note of that moment and say “*Ah ha!*” and file it away.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could start to shape your life so that moments like that happen more often. What is life, after all, but a series of moments one after the other. I’m not saying it has to be a constant effervescent experience of liminal consciousness, now — remember, this is a blog about how to make hard times happier, not how to be happy — but you can learn how your relaxing and quiet times are Defining Moments as well as the exhilarating experience of meeting a challenge and overcoming it.

Pay attention. Defining Moments are all around you, and there’s only one person who has the responsibility to both find and create them. You know who that is already; the question is when will you get around to doing something about it?

“What. Are you. Prepared. To DO?” — Sean Connery, The Untouchables