What makes you happy? If we asked you this question, you could give us a thousand different answers and all of them would be equally true.
To sum up every single possibility, scientists say that behind anything that triggers happiness there’s a common point: positive surprise! That’s what psychologists call delight: it’s something that doesn’t only make you happy, but it can also have a transformative effect… and if you learn how to design it, you can make your life (and someone else’s too) much better!
The power of delight
While surprise is the reaction you experience when you walk into an unexpected or misexpected event, delight is defined as a positive surprise that makes you happy and potentially changes your life – it can happen little by little, not necessarily all at once.
It’s something that feels great for both surprise makers and recipients, shifting their perspective about unpleasant or neutral activities and turning them into positive ones. This, as a consequence, can also improve focus and productivity and activate the “share phase”.
When you design delight for others, you show them that they matter to you and you reach them on an emotional level. Basically, you give them a meaningful and memorable experience – and if you learn how to do that, you can bring more happiness into your life too!
What makes you happy? Designing delight!
If you want to make someone happy by surprising them, first of all you have to understand where their expectation bar lies. In order to do that, you should pay attention to what they say or complain about: that will tell you more about their expectation bar, thus you will be able to design something that falls above it – you will design delight!
But how exactly can you do that? Here are a few effective tricks:
Under promise and over deliver: set the other person’s expectation bar a little bit lower than what you plan to deliver and then… surprise!
Bury a cookie: hide a small surprise where and when you know it’s unexpected. Make sure it’s nothing too valuable or precious… what makes you happy in this case are the simple things!
Give just because: design delight, but don’t give any explanation about it. Research shows that not knowing the reason behind a positive surprise makes you happier: the more random and inexplicable it is, the more and longer you feel happy.
We all deserve more delight in our lives, so you can learn how to design it and give it to someone you care about… or you can also think of what makes you happy and surprise yourself!
But there’s a third option: if you wish really hard to be surprised and extremely delighted, you can ask us to do that for you. With our secret tools we will understand what makes you happy and we will design a mystery holiday that goes beyond any possible expectation! Too good to be true? Test us! ;)
Comments