This is a time here at Critical Mass when we’re trying to wrap our heads around the idea of extraordinary experiences: what makes them extraordinary and how they make us feel. So Curious couldn’t miss the opportunity of putting these questions in front of ShopTalk, our online research community that we regularly tap for insight and ideas. Their incredible stories of everything from giving birth to flying planes, and from running a marathon to surviving cancer, have got me thinking.
First, few experiences are extraordinary in themselves. The extraordinary really depends on what your ordinary looks like. Skydiving is extraordinary for someone doing it for the first time, but quite ordinary for their instructor. A bank branch in your neighborhood is quite boring in a developed country, but was extraordinary for my parents a few years ago in developing Romania. So the number one quality of extraordinary is that it’s relative. What makes it extraordinary it that it’s surprising, relative to what you know, what you expect and what you take for granted.
Secondly, what makes an experience extraordinary has a lot to do with the meanings you infuse into the experience in retrospect. Many community members talked about moments that opened their eyes to a new reality, from a stranger’s simple but unexpected act of kindness to surviving a terrible accident. So another essential quality of an extraordinary experience is that it’s memorable. It stays with you. There is a before and after an extraordinary experience, because it changes the way you look at things, or the way you do them.
And thirdly, an extraordinary experience becomes a story you want to share. We were pleasantly surprised to see how enthusiastically our community members responded to this discussion and how willing they were to share deeply personal stories. There is always something in our own extraordinary experience that we think others will grasp and appreciate. Not always because they can relate to it directly, having lived it themselves, but because an extraordinary experience connects us with other fellow humans on a fundamental emotional level.
So the challenge when it comes to creating the extraordinary in the digital realm is about capturing that something extra above what people have come to expect and take for granted. Something – a feature or application – that makes people think of life before and after they have experienced it (and wonder how they were able to live without it). And last, but not least, something that people want to talk about, because they know others will be just as “wowed” as they were. So I’m curious to know: what’s your latest digital experience that meets these extraordinary criteria?
