Delight, Not Satisfy

The world is a place where opportunities are determined to an extent by how lucky you are. The world is also run by people. So a surefire way to improve your luck is for them to remember and recommend you to other people. And for them to remember and recommend you, you need to delight them.

If you do what people want, in line with their expectations, they become satisfied. Satisfaction is a neutral expression hovering around happiness. The next time they want to recommend someone for themselves or to someone else, you’ll be competing with everyone who has made them satisfied, which would be a lot since bare satisfaction is the highest goal most aim for and succeed.

Delight is when you exceed their expectations by a positive multiple. Delight is what makes people happy, and we rarely forget what makes us happy. Delight is when you show up to your date with Lillies which she casually mentioned in a text message two weeks ago, when your business responds to a customer query with competent agents who solve it in under 10 minutes, when a human picks up the phone instead of an IVR prompt, when you refactor the codebase to make it more maintainable for your team and when you app loads with a cut animal avatar that closes their eyes when an error occurs. These things delight us, these things make us happy in the interactions where we least expect them to, and these actions give a glimpse of beauty, a glimpse of someone who cares in a world that so craves it, yet receives so little of it.

Delight makes people remember you, it makes it a no-brainer for people to work with you, to come with you on a second date, to rave about your business to their friends and families. People love to go back to and recommend things that make them happy. If you delight at every interaction, each recommendation compounds, slightly improving your chances at luck.

But delight is hard. It wouldn’t be delightful if it was the default. Delight takes effort, to find the edges where you can delight, to put in the extra effort to delight, and to do it for every interaction. But the results combined with its compounding nature produce results so outstanding, that it doesn’t make any sense not to do it.

If delighting at every point is hard, strive to delight at the points of interaction. If it’s hard to do for every point of interaction, strive to delight at least for a single interaction.

Let every interaction be an exercise in delight, let every interaction be a positive marker that makes you a no-brainer to work with and recommend. Delight, delight, delight!