The Importance of Planning Exits rather than Entrances: Ending with the Beginning in Mind
I came across a thought-provoking Moet & Chandon advertisement recently (shocking, I know) where two impossibly glamourous young model-types are pictured leaving a limousine with a magnum of the eponymous champagne. The tag line reads:
Turn an Exit into an Entrance. Be Fabulous.*
It was the first time that I came across a perfect summation of the counter-intuitive philosophy that I've proselytized for years, namely that exits are often more important than entrances.
Let me explain. People frequently go to great lengths to plan their entrances, but they almost never give thought to their exits. Perhaps this is driven by the belief that you never get a second chance to make a first impression, as the saying goes. But what we often forget is that you never get a second chance to make a final impression, either. What makes the latter in some ways more critical than the former is that we are usually given opportunities, over time, to reinforce or - if need be - reverse the impact of an entrance. We are not afforded that luxury with our exits, however. Our last act is, in fact, the last word.
I've been thinking a lot lately about endings. Perhaps it's because I experienced the passing of a loved one recently, and the reality of her being gone is still being absorbed. As someone put it well, I will never get over her departure, but I will start to get used to it. While she didn't get to completely stage manage her exit, she clearly had put a great deal of thought into the way she wanted to leave, as well as what she left behind. She understood that those final acts would serve as her adieu, and that those statements, both verbal and symbolic, would echo beyond her earthly lifetime.
Unfortunately, many of us fail to have that foresight. Most of us forget the importance of the final frame. We focus almost exclusively on the opening credits in the scenes of life.
The primacy of entrances over exits is a long-standing component of conventional wisdom, even if it is fundamentally ill-conceived. Nearly every aspect of public and private life, both past and present, reinforces this notion.
In the political square, for example, elected officials have 'advance' people who arrive well before they do to map out, in meticulous detail, every aspect of their entrances. Presidents give Inaugural addresses every four years but rarely, if ever, make as much-ballyhooed farewell speeches. In the run-up to next year's presidential elections, we've been treated to a meticulously staged-managed declaration of candidacy by Barack Obama, but I doubt that we'll see a similar spectacle if he drops out of contention.
History offers many of the same examples of this error. General Dwight David Eisenhower spent almost 3 years devising the amphibious D-Day invasion in Normandy - the opening of the Western front in World War II - but it fell to General George Marshall to cobble together his plan for the reconstruction of Europe in a few short months. Closer to today, US military commanders carefully choreographed the commencement of combat operations (the 'Shock and Awe' phase) in the recent Iraq war but failed to formulate so much as an outline of a strategy for the occupation afterwards.
On a more personal level, people succumb to this same strategic misstep frequently as well. We fret over first dates but end entire relationships with something as desultory as a text message. We prepare fastidiously for an interview and dress to impress on our first day at a new office, but we quit jobs on a whim and slink out of a company, hoping not to have to honor our two weeks' notice. In an unintended irony, we labor over and spend lavishly on weddings, our introductions to married life, but leave both the details and the debt of our funerals largely unarticulated and unaccounted for.
Indeed, there is an instinctive and, some might say, intellectual bias towards beginnings. Even the great Aristotle wrote over two Millennia ago that "well begun is half done." At the same time, however, we all probably intuitively suspect how important exits are to forming that last - and lasting - impression. But do we realize just how much weight those final moments carry? Probably not.
Cognitive psychology is crystal clear on the subject, however. One of the most influential books I ever read, The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz, makes a powerful and impassioned argument about the 'tyranny' of too much choice. In building his very persuasive case, Dr. Schwartz introduces us to a psychological Power Law called the Peak | End Rule. First discovered by Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, the principle states that "what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended. This 'peak-end' rule is what we use to summarize the experience, and then we rely on that summary later to remind ourselves of how the experience felt." Simply put, our entire recollection of an event, a period of time, a relationship or even a person can come down, in large measure, to how we felt at the zenith or nadir of the experience and especially at its' conclusion.
Would it were that this was the only psychological force at play in making endings matter. The more we learn about how we think, the more it becomes apparent that perception and memory are fickle and partially false constructs. "Memories - especially memories of experiences - are notoriously unreliable. Perceptions are portraits, not photographs,", as Daniel Gilbert put it in his recent best-seller, Stumbling on Happiness.
In some ways, this should not surprise us. The faithful representation of all that we've seen and felt would take up terabytes of a 'human hard drive'. How, as Gilbert asks, "do we cram that vast universe into the relatively small storage compartment between our ears?" The answer is that "the elaborate tapestry of our experience is not stored in memory - at least not in its entirety. Rather, it is compressed for storage by first being reduced to a few critical threads ... or a small set of of key features. Later, when we want to remember our experience, our brains quick reweave the tapestry by fabricating - not by actually retrieving - the bulk of the information that we experience as a memory."
What this means is that those 'snapshots' in our mind, the seemingly oh-so-vivid memories, should be more properly viewed as impressionist paintings rather than high-resolution photographs. What's more, as we have learned through the Peak | End Rule, exits shape and 'paint' those perceptions, and in turn they inform the interpretations that we mistake for memories. We "misremember the past", in effect, and exits have a direct influence on that process.
Clearly, our emphasis on entrances is not serving our best interests. What can and should we do? Simple - we ought to put as much time and thought into our exits as we do our introductions. We should end with the beginning in mind.
An exit is a passage, after all, from one state to another. We need to start by recognizing that every ending is actually an opening of sorts - the start of the period of time where memory and revisionism 'reweaves' the tapestry of events that just happened. Seen in this light, the end is really prologue to a perpetual epilogue, whereby the 'ending' we thought that we experienced is actually constantly being rewritten and reviewed.
So how does one put this 'Exit-tential' philosophy into practice? First, you should focus on how you want the encounter you're ending to be remembered. I call this legacy thinking, and it should - to a greater or lesser extent - suffuse many aspects of your previously entrance-centered existence. When you prepare for your life's set pieces, ponder on how you can better dictate their perceived denouement. Approach each concluding stage - no matter how anodyne or seemingly small - the way presidents attack their final terms in office, obsessed with what historians will write of them.
This probably all sounds highfalutin and hard to accomplish, but it's actually easier than you think. The next time you move on from a job, take the time to tie up all the loose ends and exit on a high note. When you terminate a relationship with a girlfriend, find the feelings to do it properly, respectfully and sensitively. As you leave a party, set aside a moment to say goodbye to everyone to whom you talked (and especially the hosts).
To some, this might seem to be common decency and | or common sense. No argument from me there. However, these simple gestures are sadly infrequent in our increasingly ill-mannered world. Moreover, they represent small but significant steps towards a new level of thinking that factors in the epilogues to one's entrances.
This approach can be applied at a very granular level. When you are leaving a place where you've just visited friends, give them a goodbye call from the airport before your flight boards and let them know how much you appreciated the time that you spent together. Try to close out cafe conversations with confidantes as you would write a conclusion to an essay, capturing key ideas and charting the date for the next chat.
A lot of this must appear absurd, and on some level I can see why. However, we all recognize that when an event or experience is well-ended we appreciate the difference. When rock god Bono departs the stage after a live concert, he and U2 have fine-tuned their finales so well that they simultaneously satisfy their audience with at least one encore, while still leaving them wanting more. When Jerry Seinfeld concludes a comedy set, he does so as the words - and the raucous laughter - of his last great joke linger in the air.
Jacqueline Kennedy understood this reality, even in her moment of maximum grief. She carefully choreographed her husband and assassinated president John F. Kennedy's state funeral, down to the last decisive detail of having the coffin, draped with the Stars and Stripes, laying on a gun carriage drawn by six grey horses while a black riderless horse pranced along behind. That iconic image, along with that of the slain leader's casket lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda, simultaneously served to give the country ceremonial closure while cementing JFK's Camelot legacy. Of course, Mrs. Kennedy was simply taking a page from ancient history and the Egyptians in particular, who perfected the glorious goodbye with their elaborate tombs and pyramids to honor their fallen pharaohs.
These, then, are examples of graceful and well-considered exits. There are others. Some industries and disciplines incorporate this thinking into their orthodoxy. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists talk about having 'exit strategies' for their companies and investments. The language of theatre, too, has included the idea of 'exit, stage right' in its vernacular. Presidents, as well, are preoccupied by perpetuity and often engage in a flurry of activity towards the ends of their tenures in order to shape their legacies.
As mere mortals, maybe we don't need to ponder our place in history. But we ought to turn a wider-angle lens on life, look beyond our natural bias towards beginnings and plan the postscripts to our experiences. We need to stumble through fewer emergency exits, and compose more carefully crafted epilogues.
What makes an excellent exit, in my opinion? First, one must wrap up loose ends, putting a period at the end of the metaphorical sentence. Second, one should leave a lasting and positive impression, so that their lingering thought of you is ultimately a flattering but not fleeting one. Finally, a perfect postscript brings with it classy closure.
Endings matter, and the sooner we realize this and respond accordingly the better off we'll be. Even ostensibly 'final' exits aren't really final, though (Funerals aren't the last time you find yourself thinking of someone, for instance). They are more properly viewed as transitions rather than finales. In some ways, every end is a beginning. It's the start of the period that follows the one you just concluded. Endings always seem to be followed by epilogues, which then serve as prologues themselves. Today, more than ever, everything seems to be cyclical, if not circular. This philosophical fatalism should not numb one to the importance of leaving a mark when you leave, though. Instead, it should embolden you to compose every conclusion with a coda, so that you don't leave up to chance the legacy you're about to create.
If Stephen Covey made famous the mantra to "begin with the end in mind" as one of his sacrosanct Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I'd like to add (and perhaps memorialize) an eighth:"end with the beginning in mind". Keep an eye on your personal postscript. Practice legacy thinking, but start today. Don't just leave - depart. Don't just end - climax. Don't just stop - culminate. Conclude with a crescendo, not with a clunk. Take time to formulate your final impression.
I'll leave you to ponder these provocative words from Mary, Queen of Scots, perhaps the original 'Exit Strategist', as they sum up rather succinctly my sentiments and put an elegant, if figurative, period on this peroration:
"In my end is my beginning."
The End. (or is it?)
