They will tell you about the three weeks before, lying awake running through what they’d packed, what they’d see first, who they’d become for two weeks in a place they’d never been. And they will tell you about the years after — the way the story has been told so many times it has worn smooth, the way one photograph has quietly replaced the four hundred others as the whole memory. Ask for the trip itself, the actual days, and you’ll get fragments. A meal. A wrong turn. A feeling, mostly, that it was good.

The event happened. But it isn’t where the person is living. It never really was.

We tend to think of an experience as a solid thing — a block of time with a beginning and an end, fully present while it’s happening, then filed away intact. But that isn’t how a mind treats its own life. What a person actually carries forward is not the event. It’s the anticipation of it, and the memory of it. The event itself is closer to a hinge — the point two long, elastic pieces of time swing on — than it is to the experience itself.

This is not a metaphor doing more work than it should. It is close to how memory itself behaves. We don’t remember duration; we remember peaks and endings. We don’t relive an experience faithfully; we reconstruct it, each time, a little more in the shape of the story we’ve decided it is. The version of the trip a person carries at sixty is not a preserved recording of the version they lived at thirty. It is a memory of a memory of a memory, revised at every telling, anchored to a small number of moments that have been asked to stand in for the whole.

Which means the event was never the main event.

If that’s true, it changes what “designing an experience” should actually mean. Most of the effort in most industries goes into the middle — the two hours of the show, the week of the vacation, the ninety minutes of the meal. That middle matters, obviously. But it is the shortest-lived part of the whole arc, both in the moment and afterward. The anticipation can last weeks. The memory can last a lifetime. The event itself might last an evening. Pouring all the design effort into the smallest, most fleeting segment of that arc, while leaving the other two to chance, is a strange way to build something meant to matter to a person for years.

A well-designed “before” does two jobs, not one. It makes the waiting itself feel good — that much the earlier essays in this set have already made the case for. But it also plants the material a memory will later be built from: an image worth keeping, a phrase worth repeating, a small ritual specific enough to survive being retold at a dinner table a decade later. Anticipation that gives someone nothing to hold onto afterward has done half its job. It made the wait pleasant and left the memory to chance.

The same is true, in mirror image, of the after. Most experiences end and are simply over — the last day of the trip is spent packing, not reflecting; the credits roll and the lights come up before anyone has had a moment to actually place what just happened. But endings are doing more architectural work than almost anything else in the arc. They are what the whole memory will eventually be filed under. A closing image, a small object to take home, a single sentence someone says on the way out — these aren’t decoration on the tail end of an experience. They’re closer to what the experience actually becomes, once enough time has passed for the middle to blur.

Which brings the shape of it full circle. A person doesn’t really live an event once. They live it three times — once in anticipation, once in the room, and once, over and over, in the retelling. The middle is real, and matters, and is not nothing. But it is the shortest-lived of the three, and the part with the least control over what a person will actually carry forward.

Ask someone about the trip in twenty years, and they still won’t tell you about the trip. They’ll tell you about the night before, and the way they tell the story now. Design for that, and you’ve designed for the only two parts of the experience that were ever going to last.

One is waiting to hear if she got the job. The other is waiting to hear if her test results are normal. From across the room, you could not tell them apart. Same stillness. Same reflexive checking, then putting the phone face-down, then picking it back up. Same held breath every time the screen lights up with someone else’s name.

We do not have a separate word for these two kinds of waiting. We call both of them anticipation, and let the rest go unsaid.

But they are not the same thing wearing different clothes. One of these women is rehearsing a future she wants. The other is rehearsing one she’s afraid of. The architecture in her mind is identical — imagine it, feel it, imagine it again — but what’s being built inside that architecture could not be further apart.

Somewhere between these two women is every customer, every guest, every person a business has ever made wait. Most of those businesses have no idea they’re building anything at all.

So what actually separates the wait that delights from the wait that corrodes?

It is not time. A five-second wait can be unbearable. A nine-month one can be sacred. It is not intensity, either — the woman waiting on the job offer may feel just as much as the one waiting on the test.

The difference is agency.

Anticipation is bearable — even pleasurable — in proportion to how much a person can see, understand, or influence inside the waiting itself. Take that away, and the very same architecture that makes a countdown delicious makes a countdown unbearable. Same structure. Opposite feeling. One variable.

This is easy to see in a hospital and easy to miss in a business, which is exactly the problem.

Consider the tracking page that updates to “out for delivery” and then sits there, unmoving, for six hours. Nothing has actually changed for the person watching it — except that now they are watching. Consider the progress bar on a loading screen that fills to ninety percent and then stalls, because the number was never tied to anything real in the first place. Consider hold music that repeats “your call is important to us” with no estimate, no position in line, no way to know if anyone is coming. Consider the countdown clock on a product drop, ticking down not to something you’ll receive, but to the moment you’ll be told, along with ten thousand other people, that it’s already gone.

None of these were built to torment anyone. That’s what makes them worth naming. They were built by people solving a narrower problem — reduce calls to support, keep a page from feeling static, create urgency around a launch — without asking what the waiting itself would feel like from the inside. The suspense was a side effect. Nobody chose it. It just accumulated, the way it always does when a system is designed around the business’s need to say something rather than the person’s need to know something.

This is the part worth being precise about, because it’s the difference between a discipline and a trick.

Anticipation design, done with any integrity, increases a person’s agency inside the wait. A real update, even a small one. An honest estimate instead of a hopeful one. A way to see what’s actually happening, or at least to understand why they can’t. The feeling it produces is trust — the sense that someone is looking out for you while you can’t look out for yourself.

Anticipation extracted, rather than designed, does the opposite. It manufactures suspense without giving anything back. It borrows the same tools — the countdown, the notification, the “almost there” — and empties them of the one ingredient that made them humane. What’s left is a person alone with their own imagination, and no way to steady it.

Same tools. Opposite ethics. The line between them is not visible on a dashboard. It shows up later, in whether the person waiting feels cared for or managed.

Go back to the two women.

One gets the call. The job is hers. The other gets the call. The results are clear. In this telling, both waits end the way they hoped — but even if they hadn’t, even if one of them had gotten the worse news, there is a version of that wait that would have still felt humane, and a version that would have felt cruel, and the difference would have had nothing to do with the outcome.

It would have come down to whether, in the waiting, she was ever given anything to hold onto.

Every person who designs a system that makes someone wait — a shipping page, a hiring process, a product drop, a phone queue — is making that choice, whether they know it or not. Between building trust and building suspense. Between anticipation and dread, which were never as far apart as we like to think.

A customer pays for the mortgage before the underwriter has finished the file. A patient pays the deposit before the surgery date arrives. A fan pays for the pre-order before a single unit has shipped. The transaction is instant. Everything the transaction was supposed to buy — the house, the health, the object — is still somewhere out ahead, unrealized, sitting in a gap that hasn’t been paid for at all, because nobody thought to price it.

That gap has a name. Call it the Waiting Economy: the space between order and fulfillment, where nothing has technically gone wrong and value is nonetheless being made or spent, minute by minute, mostly by accident.

Every business already operates inside this economy. Almost none of them keep a ledger for it.

Consider what actually happens inside a “your order is on backorder” email with no further word for six weeks. Nothing has been stolen. No law has been broken. And yet, over those six weeks, something real is being drawn down — patience, goodwill, the presumption of good faith the customer extended at the moment of purchase — and it is being drawn down whether or not the business ever sees the bill. Some of that debt comes due as a chargeback. Some of it comes due as a support call that costs more to handle than the item was worth. Some of it never comes due at all — it simply leaves as silence, as a customer who doesn’t come back and never says why.

Now consider the opposite: a construction crew that leaves a single handwritten note on the kitchen counter at the end of each visit, explaining what got done and what’s next, during a renovation that will take four more months. Nothing about the actual timeline has changed. The house is not one day closer to finished. But something has still been created in that gap — trust, mostly, and the kind of goodwill that turns into a five-star review, a referral, a customer willing to absorb a delay without a fight. That value didn’t come from the renovation. It came from what the company did with the waiting.

This is the part most businesses miss: the fulfillment gap is not neutral time. It is not a cost to be minimized down toward zero, the way a shipping department might treat time-to-delivery. It is closer to a market — one with its own currency, its own inflation, its own bankruptcies — running in parallel to the transaction everyone actually tracks.

Most companies invest heavily on either side of this gap and almost nothing inside it. Marketing spends to win the moment of purchase. Operations spends to make good on the moment of delivery. The Waiting Economy in between — the underwriting silence, the backorder limbo, the pre-order queue — is treated as dead space to be gotten through as fast as possible, rather than a zone that is already producing an outcome, good or bad, with or without anyone managing it.

That is a strange blind spot for something this large. For certain purchases — a home loan, a custom order, an elective surgery, a long pre-order — the waiting period can outlast the transaction and the delivery combined. A customer may spend more days living inside the gap than they will ever spend using what they bought. Treating that much time as unmanaged is not a minor oversight. It is leaving the largest room in the house unfurnished.

None of this requires a company to make the wait shorter, which is often not possible anyway — the surgery takes as long as it takes, the underwriting takes as long as it takes. It requires treating the wait as a thing being actively managed rather than merely endured: give people real information instead of silence, real signs of progress instead of a static status, some small proof, along the way, that they haven’t been forgotten the moment the payment cleared.

The businesses that understand this aren’t doing anything mystical. They have simply noticed that the ledger everyone else is ignoring is still being kept — by the customer, in their own private account of how it felt to wait — and they’ve decided to make sure that account comes out in their favor.

The grand opening.

The concert.

The wedding.

The graduation.

The launch.

The ribbon cutting.

We pour extraordinary energy into making the event itself unforgettable—and comparatively little into everything that happens before it.

But people don’t simply experience moments.

They live through seasons.

The weeks leading up to a graduation are filled with nostalgia, anxiety, excitement, countdowns, photographs, conversations, rituals, and countless small signals that something important is approaching.

The months before a baby arrives are not empty waiting rooms. They’re filled with names, dreams, ultrasounds, decorating bedrooms, buying tiny clothes, wondering who this person will become.

The best vacations often begin long before the plane leaves the runway. Researching restaurants. Sending hotel links to friends. Watching travel videos. Imagining yourself there.

By the time the experience arrives, part of it has already happened.

That’s what interests me.

I call it Anticipation Design.

It’s the practice of intentionally designing the emotional experience before the experience itself.

Because anticipation isn’t a side effect.

It’s part of the product.

We Overvalue Peaks

Experience design has traditionally focused on the peak.

How do we make opening night incredible?

How do we make check-in seamless?

How do we create the perfect meal?

Those questions matter.

But they leave an enormous opportunity untouched.

What happens thirty days before?

What happens when someone buys the ticket?

What story are they telling themselves while they wait?

How often are they thinking about what’s coming?

Every day between “yes” and “here” is design space.

Most organizations leave it empty.

The Season Is Where Meaning Grows

Imagine two graduations.

The first sends a reminder email a week beforehand.

The second spends three months helping students reflect on who they’ve become, inviting families into the journey, celebrating milestones, collecting memories, revealing surprises, and building a shared sense that something meaningful is approaching.

The ceremony might be identical.

The experience isn’t.

One designed an event.

The other designed a season.

The Before Changes the During

Psychologists have long recognized that expectation shapes experience.

A thoughtfully crafted trailer changes how we watch a film.

A beautifully wrapped gift changes how we receive it.

A countdown changes how we value what’s coming.

The mind doesn’t wait for reality.

It rehearses it.

Good anticipation isn’t manipulation.

It’s an invitation to imagine.

And imagination changes what people feel when the moment finally arrives.

Designing Seasons

If you’re creating an experience, ask different questions.

Not:

“How do we make opening day memorable?”

Instead:

When does the experience actually begin?

What could someone discover a month beforehand?

What conversations could happen while they wait?

How could curiosity build naturally over time?

What rituals could become part of the journey?

What stories could people tell before they’ve even arrived?

Designing anticipation isn’t about making people wait longer.

It’s about making the waiting matter.

Maybe

The experiences we remember most rarely begin when the doors open.

They begin the first time we imagine ourselves there.

Maybe that’s the real work.

Not designing better moments.

Designing better seasons.

A golden ticket is a possibility.

One satisfies desire.

The other activates imagination.

This is the difference at the center of what I think of as the Golden Ticket Problem.

Why do some prizes, invitations, campaigns, openings, and experiences feel merely nice, while others feel charged with possibility? Why does one offer feel transactional, while another becomes something people want to talk about, enter, follow, and remember?

The answer is not always the value of the reward.

The answer is often the quality of the maybe.

A chocolate bar gives you what it says it will give you. You want chocolate. You get chocolate. Desire meets object. The loop closes.

A golden ticket opens a door.

It suggests that something else might happen. Something rare. Something hidden. Something that could change the story you are living inside.

That is why the golden ticket is such a powerful metaphor for anticipation. It is not only about winning. It is about being chosen by possibility.

There is a very specific emotional charge inside that idea.

Maybe it will be me.

That sentence is small, but it is potent.

Maybe it will be me.

Maybe I will be picked. Maybe I will be seen. Maybe I will get access. Maybe I will walk through the door. Maybe I will become the kind of person this happens to.

This is different from wanting a thing.

It is wanting a turn in the story.

A good anticipation campaign understands this. It does not only present an offer. It creates a little world of possibility around the offer. It lets people enter the emotional state of almost.

Almost chosen.

Almost inside.

Almost there.

Almost transformed.

This is why some giveaways feel flat and others feel alive. The flat ones focus only on the prize. Win dinner. Win tickets. Win a stay. Win a gift card. Win a product.

There is nothing wrong with that. People like prizes.

But a prize alone is not necessarily magical.

Magic enters when the prize becomes a doorway into a larger imagined experience.

Win the table in the hidden room.

Win the first night before anyone else sees it.

Win the room with the view and the handwritten itinerary.

Win the key to a place that only opens once.

Win a role in the story.

Win the chance to become part of something before it fully arrives.

The object matters less than the imaginative frame around it.

That is the golden ticket principle.

People do not only want the chocolate factory because there is candy inside. They want it because it is hidden, impossible, strange, selective, and sealed off from ordinary life. The ticket does not just offer admission. It suggests transformation.

The person who finds it is no longer only a customer.

They are a character.

This is where many campaigns miss the deeper opportunity. They treat people like targets, leads, subscribers, followers, or buyers. But people respond more deeply when they are treated like participants in a story.

A participant has a role.

A participant has suspense.

A participant has something to wonder about.

A participant feels implicated in what might happen next.

This does not require enormous budgets. It requires sharper emotional design.

A small restaurant opening can create a golden ticket feeling.

A hotel can do it.

A theater can do it.

A yoga studio, bookstore, gallery, retreat, bakery, cinema, or local shop can do it.

The question is not, “How do we get attention?”

The better question is, “What possibility are we inviting people to believe in?”

Attention is not the same as anticipation.

Attention says: look at this.

Anticipation says: this might become something.

That distinction matters.

Attention can be bought, interrupted, forced, or chased. Anticipation has to be cultivated. It needs timing. It needs enough information to spark desire and enough mystery to keep imagination alive.

Too much reveal, and the spell collapses.

Too little clarity, and people do not know what they are being invited into.

The golden ticket lives in the tension between the known and the unknown.

You know there is a door.

You do not know what will happen when it opens.

That is the emotional architecture of maybe.

And maybe is not weak. Maybe is one of the strongest forces in human behavior.

Maybe keeps people checking.

Maybe keeps people talking.

Maybe makes people forward the email, send the post, enter the drawing, invite the friend, imagine the outfit, save the date, take the chance.

Maybe gives the future texture.

Of course, there is responsibility here. The golden ticket feeling should not be used to disguise an empty experience. Anticipation creates a promise. The stronger the anticipation, the more carefully the actual experience needs to honor it.

You cannot build a beautiful door to a disappointing room and expect people to thank you for the doorway.

The reveal must respect the anticipation that came before it.

But when the before and the experience are aligned, something powerful happens. People feel like they were part of the meaning before the meaning fully arrived. They do not just remember what happened. They remember how it felt to wonder.

That is the real prize.

The chocolate bar is consumed.

The golden ticket is remembered.

Because the golden ticket does not simply give someone something.

It gives them a new relationship to possibility.

And that is what the best anticipation does.

It makes people feel, even briefly, that the future has opened a little.

That something could happen.

That they could be part of it.

That maybe — just maybe — it will be them.

—
Bri
Founder, The Maybe Company

She is not racing. There is no finish line anywhere nearby, no crowd, no medal. And yet something is happening on that dark, ordinary run that has almost nothing to do with fitness. She is trying on a person. Each mile is a small rehearsal of someone who finishes marathons — how that person moves, how that person thinks about discomfort, what that person eats for breakfast. By the time she reaches the actual starting line, months from now, she will not become that person in an instant. She will have been becoming her, quietly, for months.

This is the part that gets missed when people talk about anticipation as just a feeling to be managed. It is not only a feeling. It is a rehearsal space for identity — the place where a person tries on who they’re about to be, before the world requires it of them.

Psychologists have a name for the self a person imagines becoming: a possible self. It is not a fantasy in the idle sense. It functions, in the mind, almost like a draft — something revised, practiced, worn in, long before it has to be lived. A person moving to a new city is not just waiting for a moving truck. Somewhere in the weeks before, they are already trying out a version of themselves who lives there: imagining a morning routine in an apartment they haven’t seen furnished, picturing themselves ordering coffee in an accent they don’t have yet, rehearsing, in small private moments, a person who belongs somewhere they’ve never been.

That rehearsal is not a side effect of the wait. It may be the entire point of it.

Which reframes what “the before” is actually for. It is easy to think of anticipation design as the art of building excitement — a countdown, a preview, a tease. But if the real work happening during the wait is identity rehearsal, then the more precise job is to give a person something to rehearse with. Not just a reason to feel eager, but material for the self they’re about to become: a training plan that lets the future runner practice being one, a moving checklist that lets the future resident start making small decisions as if they already lived there, a syllabus that lets a student begin thinking like the professional they’re paying to become before the first class has even started.

An experience with nothing to rehearse leaves the self unchanged in the run-up, and asks for a costume change on the day itself — the marathon-day version of a person who hasn’t done any of the identity work the race quietly assumes. That mismatch is its own kind of shock, distinct from being unprepared physically. It’s arriving at a threshold you haven’t yet grown toward.

An experience that gives the self real material to work with produces something different at the finish line, or the front door, or the first day. Not a sudden transformation, but a recognition. The woman crossing the marathon finish line is not becoming a runner in that moment. She is meeting, for the first time in public, a person she has already been quietly practicing being for months. The moment doesn’t create her. It confirms her.

This is, in the end, the deeper reason the experience begins before it happens. Not because the marketing starts early, or because the countdown builds excitement, though both of those things are true and useful. It begins early because the self does. Every person walking toward some anticipated threshold — a wedding day, a diagnosis, a new job, a finish line — has already been quietly rehearsing who they’ll be when they get there. The event is not the beginning of the transformation. It is closer to opening night for a person who has been in rehearsal all along.

Design for the rehearsal, and the event stops being a test the person might fail. It becomes the moment they finally get to perform who they’d already, privately, become.

They begin earlier.

They begin when someone hears about the dinner, the trip, the screening, the opening, the performance, the retreat, the invitation, the prize. They begin in the moment a person starts imagining what might happen.

That moment is usually treated as marketing.

I think it is part of the experience.

Anticipation Design is the intentional shaping of the emotional before.

It is the design of the period before something happens: the wondering, the waiting, the imagining, the invitation, the almost, the maybe. It asks a simple question that most businesses, brands, and cultural spaces skip over too quickly:

What does this feel like before people arrive?

We tend to think of experiences as events. A meal. A hotel stay. A film screening. A concert. A class. A campaign. A launch. Something with a beginning, middle, and end.

But emotionally, that is not how people experience things.

A dinner can begin days before the reservation. A movie can begin with the trailer. A hotel stay can begin with the photograph that makes someone imagine themselves elsewhere. A theater performance can begin with the poster, the title, the rumor, the email, the walk up to the building.

The experience begins when possibility enters the mind.

And possibility has a feeling.

It can feel thrilling. Personal. Nervous. Exclusive. Tender. Social. Secretive. Transformative. It can make people feel like something is about to happen, and that they might be changed by being part of it.

That feeling is valuable. Not just commercially valuable, though it is that too. It is emotionally valuable.

The anticipation before an experience can become one of the most meaningful parts of the experience itself.

Think about a child waiting for a birthday. A couple waiting for a baby. A fan waiting for an album. A traveler counting down to a trip. A town wondering what will open behind a papered-over storefront. A guest wondering what the night might become.

In each case, the thing has not happened yet.

But something is already happening.

The person is rehearsing a future. They are placing themselves inside a possibility. They are building emotional attachment before the actual moment arrives.

Anticipation Design treats that as material.

Not decoration. Not hype. Not empty buzz. Material.

The before can be designed with care, taste, rhythm, and restraint.

It can be designed through language, timing, mystery, ritual, invitation, suspense, participation, reveal, scarcity, countdown, storytelling, and social imagination. It can be quiet or theatrical. Elegant or strange. Intimate or public. A whisper or a spectacle.

The point is not to manipulate people into wanting something they do not want.

The point is to honor the truth that wanting is already part of experience.

People do not only buy products, attend events, book tables, visit hotels, or enter campaigns because of what is offered. They are drawn toward the feeling of what could happen next.

That is the territory of Anticipation Design.

For a restaurant, anticipation might begin with a reservation confirmation that feels like the first scene of the evening rather than an administrative receipt.

For a hotel, it might begin with a pre-arrival note that makes a guest imagine the air, the room, the morning, the version of themselves they hope to meet there.

For a theater, it might begin with a trailer, a letter, a question, a symbol, or a ritual that gives the audience something to carry with them before they sit down.

For a brand, it might begin with a campaign people do not simply see, but enter.

For a cultural space, it might begin with a sense that something is gathering before it has fully appeared.

The best anticipation does not just say, “This is happening.”

It says, “Something might happen to you here.”

That is a different promise.

Anticipation Design is concerned with the space between announcement and arrival. Between invitation and participation. Between hearing about something and deciding to care.

It is the design of the maybe.

And the maybe matters because people are not only rational decision-makers. They are imaginative beings. They make meaning before they have evidence. They attach to possibilities before they become realities. They want something to look forward to.

In a culture obsessed with optimization, conversion, and immediate gratification, anticipation can seem inefficient. Why wait? Why tease? Why unfold slowly? Why not just reveal everything at once?

Because waiting is not always absence.

Sometimes waiting is where desire grows.

Sometimes the mystery is what makes the invitation feel alive.

Sometimes the most powerful part of an experience is not the payoff, but the moment when people begin to believe something could happen.

That is what I want to study, name, and build.

Anticipation Design is a field guide to the emotional before.

It is a way of thinking about experiences before they begin.

It is a practice for anyone who creates moments people want to enter, follow, talk about, and remember.

And it starts with this belief:

The before is not empty.

The before is where the experience begins.

—
Bri
Founder, The Maybe Company