Imagine that you're watching a tightrope walker. You're watching her walk from one pole to another across a thin wire, occasionally changing speed. Though her wire flexes a little bit, she is light on her feet, almost dancing. By objective measures, that is a pretty amazing accomplishment.

But if you were at a circus, watching this acrobatic person walk across a tightrope, how long would it take for you to turn your attention to the lion tamer or the man who launches himself out of canons? How quickly would you lose interest in the great walker and her impossibly thin rope?

Probably, if you're like most people, pretty quickly. We have seen tightrope walking, either in person or online or in documentaries like Man on Wire. In the latter, the film's subject walked on a wire poised, illegally, between the New York World Trade Center's twin towers.

Still, it is worth wondering why you would be distracted away from something that most people could do only at great personal cost – away from something that is actually an amazing human achievement. It is worth tracing the same impulse – to scoff at or ignore amazing, show‐stopping, magical performances – across our personal and professional lives. Indeed, we do the same thing with our phones, with our jobs, with our cars, and in our streaming media accounts. We flip from thing to thing to thing. Sometimes we don't even know what we're searching for or why we're moving on.

We expect products and services and performances that, really, are magical in nature to be second nature to the companies and performers that produce them. We expect the wireless network to work – and quickly. We expect to be able to have a video call with our cousin in France. We expect to be able to move and share gigantic files both within and outside a company. We expect to shop quickly and efficiently with a few gestures and have our selected product show up at our door – and quickly. We expect magic, grow grumpy when it fails, and move on quickly – to another product, another service – at the slightest hint that something is growing stale.

If we are going to understand delight, and if we hope to procure it, we have to begin with the understanding that people in the world, including those within a very wide range of discretionary income, live in a time of relatively great abundance. Whether that means paying for a range of assorted vegetables or accessing, for nearly free, hundreds of high‐quality videos every time we want to learn to do something, we live in a time where miracles happen every day.

So now let us switch lenses and think about what it means to be the tightrope walker in such a time. That is, let us think about what it means to perform miraculous work that is very similar to the miraculous work happening in the shop of your greatest competitor, as well as the upstart startup that is just about to enter the scene with a buzzy new product that disrupts your own.

If you are a tightrope walker in the age of abundance, you are one of many. You have solved the same problem – in this case, one involving gravity and balance. To stand out, simple magic – walking along a thin rope – is not enough. You have to add a chair to the wire and then stand on it; you have to hang from the wire by your toes.

Another way to visualize this is to consider a simple line grid. The x‐axis is abundance. It goes on and on and on, a litter of options, left to right and back again, as fast as the eye can scan and the head can turn. And it is cut, from time to time, by the y‐axis, which is, for our purposes, the axis of delight. It is where, even in a world of nearly unlimited options, you uncover and present something built on top of unlimited optionality or something dug down more deeply, more meaningfully, than it first seemed. Either way, the y‐axis asks something of the viewer, of the user, of the consumer. And in the asking, its promise isn't novelty or pure satisfaction. It's something closer to transformation.

The tightrope walker is a tricky example because it could easily plant the wrong idea in your mind. Like August Van Eepoel suggested all the way back in Chapter 1, we need to add a layer – to our explanation, to your understanding – before moving forward.

Going vertical on a tightrope is not a mere feature. It is not a mere gimmick. Hanging by one's feet, bat like, or climbing onto a pole or bicycle (on top of a wire) requires new muscles, new dexterity, and is a new way of conceiving and executing the art. It is a fundamental reinvention of both the degree of difficulty, for the performer, and the investment, in terms of attention, anxiousness, and breathlessness, by the audience. The experience, itself, is different. It makes the audience want to keep watching, keep participating, stay engaged, and after the program, keep talking about the experience. Perhaps, even, it could shift somebody's mindset – when you have been walking left and right on the tightrope of [insert an area of expertise] for years, what would it look like if you started climbing up or down something like the y‐axis of the rope? What would greater height reveal? What would additional depth yield? Climbing up and down the y‐axis changes possibility, adds a new limb to an old decision tree.

Remember This Formula: Novelty + Neutrality = Not Okay

When Reshan was working as a math teacher at a school, learning to take his first few steps onto his chosen high wire, he shared with one of his colleagues – a veteran educator and technologist – a story about a powerful experience he had just had. Reshan, a younger teacher, thought he had bypassed mere horizontal movement and possibly supported the reinvention of the artform, going vertical on an early try.

He told this colleague that he had used an open‐adventure computer game as part of an approach to teaching problem‐solving. His students seemed “fully engaged,” he said, and “hardly made a sound.”

Surprisingly, for Reshan, his colleague was neither surprised nor impressed. Instead he asked: “Engaged as compared to what?”

Years later, with much more experience, Reshan knows that the question implied, of course, that his students were more engaged, temporarily, because he had offered them a deviation from a norm. The “powerful experience” was happening in his own cranium, but not his students'. To know if the teaching method and its learning effects actually had power, staying power, one other question mattered: did the engagement last over time, once the novelty wore off?

A deviation from the norm – even a minor disruption of the default – is enough to grab the attention of an experienced participant. Some might call such a deviation a hook. Others might call it a pattern‐breaker. Humans are routine‐seeking, pattern‐noticing creatures (Piaget, 1936; Mattson, 2011). They pick up when there is a glitch or a contrast. But to chase those moments, to play only to them, is to miss the chance to connect on a deeper level – with trainees, customers, colleagues, and clients.

A good measure of a new tool, a new process, a new experience, is whether the engagement – the intrinsic motivation to continue using that new tool, engaging in that new process, and wanting to be a part of a new experience – persists even as the novelty (the newness) of the thing diminishes.

Or, as one of Steve's uncles from Jersey City, New Jersey, might have said, “There's the thing … and then there's the thing around the thing. The thing around the thing makes the thing the thing.”

For example and to translate, as kids, when Steve and his brother and sister went to visit his grandparents (also in Jersey City, New Jersey), one of the highlights of the trip was the crusty, chewy Italian bread that they procured at the local bread store. The bread, itself, was not exemplary. It was made of white flour, had a tough crust that could give you near‐whiplash as you pulled at it with your teeth and then snapped your head back when you finally snagged a morsel. And then it was chewy as bubble gum. But it came from a particular store from a particular bread baker who always greeted Steve's father like he knew him and always gave Steve and his siblings a cookie on the side. And it came after a walk back to his grandparents' home, where neighbors sitting on porches, too, seemed to know his father and always commented on the loaves sticking out of the crinkly paper sack. The highest quality bread that Steve will ever taste will never taste as good as the subpar Italian bread of his youth, wrapped in the experience that led up to it. The thing around the thing often makes the thing the thing.

Follow Resnick's Roadmap

Less arcanely, MIT's Mitch Resnick explained the success of his own learning and creation tool, Scratch, in a manner that articulated perfectly the ways in which delight can be baked into products or experiences. It offers a nice roadmap for designers of everything from trainings to new pieces of software to conversations.

First, we see choice points that allow users to follow an adventure that suits them:

A big reason for the success of Scratch is that children can use it in so many different ways: Some create animated games, while others create musical compositions; some create geometric patterns, while others create dramatic narratives; some plan out their projects systematically, while others tinker and experiment. (Resnick, 2017)

Next, we see the option to personalize one's creation:

To make their projects more personal and distinctive, children can import their own images and their own voices. (Resnick, 2017)

There is also no set endpoint, no expert to please. (In fact, the expert – adult – becomes a former expert, returned to inspired and animated amateur‐hood by the participants he or she is watching in the Scratch environment).

We design our technologies as spaces to explore, not as collections of specific activities. Our hope is that children will continually surprise us (and surprise themselves, too) as they explore the space of possibilities. (Resnick, 2017)

Important, too, Scratch functions almost like a game that not only can be picked up and played right away, but also one that does not have a clear end.

The design challenge is to develop features specific enough so that children can quickly learn how to use them, but general enough so that children can continue to imagine new ways to use them. (Resnick, 2017, p. 175)

After hearing this description, we might ask ourselves: What is Scratch, actually? Is it the code underneath? Is it the interface? Is it the intention and concentration that each user brings to it? Is it the experience that each user has when working in it? Is it the memory of discovery and aha moments that happened – of learning that happened – when a user engaged deeply with this software? Is it the product produced by the user?

We are not sure, but we do know that thinking only about the code and the product produced – the first and last questions above – would be a gross understatement of the value that Scratch brings to the lives of its users. The extra stuff, the delightful stuff uncovered in those middle questions above, is why people go back to Scratch.

Novelty does not make us want to do that. It wears off. Delight, on the other hand, is the game you want to keep playing. It stacks meaning on top of meaning, burrowing into the depths of a person's identify and function.

Think about a mobile device. If you have one and use it frequently, you are certainly aware of the way features are added constantly in the form of sounds or backgrounds or simply new things you can do with known apps or the phone itself. But if you were to lose your phone in the middle of a big trip, chances are, you wouldn't miss each individual feature. You would miss the deep stuff: you would miss the freedom of mobility that the seamless mobile device gives to you, the confidence that comes with being able to access a map from anywhere and quickly access directions to any destination, the ability to connect, in multiple ways, with anyone in your network. You would miss, in other words, the you that you are when you have a fully charged smartphone in your hand. A successful product – or experience – makes the user the unit of delight. You, only better.

Features and benefits allow you to try on behaviors and postures well beyond your human capacities. But, for them to feel genuine, they have to lead to a transformation inside of you.