The End Matters Every Day
A single interaction can control someone's narrative for decades. The biggest factor is how it ends.
Today, you will encounter a number of people for the last time. This is not an ominous warning of loss; the “last time” is a common byproduct of lives moving in different directions. Some of these interactions are transient, like a conversation with a fellow airline passenger. Some are more established, like a coworker changing jobs. Regardless of duration, only a few things tend to factor into how others remember us. This is what they’ll use to tell stories about us in the future.
A single interaction can control someone's narrative for decades. The biggest factor is how it ends.
When I was a kid, my Grandmother and I were diehard Astros fans. I collected baseball cards obsessively, she taught me to read newspaper box scores, and every summer I would visit her for a week in Houston that coincided with a 3-4 game series. She'd take me to the Astrodome hours before each game to watch batting practice. Sometimes pitching coaches would play catch with a swarm of glove wearing kids in the stands, and on the luckiest of days, you might snag an autograph and a short conversation with an All-Star.
One summer, I chose a series against the San Diego Padres. The Padres bench in the early 90's ran deep with future Hall of Famers including: Tony Gwynn, Benito Santiago, and one of my favorites, Fred "Crime Dog" McGriff. Fred was a 6'3" lefty first-baseman named to the All-Star team 5 times. He hit 493 home runs in his career, leading the American League in home runs in 1989 with the Blue Jays, and the National League in 1992 with the Padres. In addition to his impressive stats, Fred had a toothy smile that ran ear-to-ear that made him look like the nicest guy on the planet.
I leaned out over the railing of the visitor's dugout, eyes glued to the Crime Dog taking bating practice. Baseball glove on my right hand (because I was a lefty just like Fred), and in my left a sharpie and a mint, 1986 Donruss Rookie Card of Fred McGriff. There's a chance a sacrilegious Padres cap even sat atop my head (much to my Grandmother's chagrin), because I found a brown SD cap years later buried in a box of baseball mementos. As Fred walked back from the batter's box, I jittered around with a handful of boys about my age all getting up the nerve to ask for his autograph. But as he entered the dugout and we called out in unison, Fred threw his helmet against the bench and yelled some version of "Fuck off!" before storming back to the locker room.
Complete heartbreak.
The problem with memory is that it doesn't weigh all the evidence evenly. We don’t ask ourselves to consider the broader context of why a person behaved a certain way. Whether it’s a single interaction with a first baseman, or a co-worker you ate lunch with twice a week for years, we’re still likely to distill our memory down to two components. Daniel Kahneman named this innate heuristic the "Peak-End Rule".
Much of the research on the "Peak-End Rule" focuses on pain or discomfort. A classic study evaluated colonoscopy patient’s experiences based on whether the camera followed the standard procedure, or was left stationary for a short time to induce a brief interval of milder pain before extraction. Patients remembered the longer procedure, with a milder pain at the end, as less painful. The inverse holds true for pleasurable experiences too. For example, on vacation we tend to remember peak experiences (snorkeling with Manta Rays or an elegant anniversary dinner) and the end (a sunny final day on the beach after a week of rain, or a surprise upgrade to first class on the flight home).
Our tendency to distill an experience to a few component parts means that order is crucial. Less pain at the end is more desirable, even if the duration of pain is longer. An upgrade to first class is more likely to be remembered coming home from vacation than when you initially fly to your destination. In two studies on pleasurable experiences conducted by Rupert and Wolford, they concluded, "If you were planning to give multiple gifts for a future holiday, you might consider giving only the best one—or at least making sure that you give the best one last." This means that the way we say goodbye, even when we don’t know it’s the end, matters significantly.
When I hear the name Fred McGriff I instantly think of a towering angry man throwing things and yelling at kids. It’s all that sticks.
Recently I’ve wondered, “How many people do we see for the last time each day?”
I decided to estimate it by creating a Fermi Problem. Fermi Problem’s are back-of-the-envelope estimations that require complex assumptions, and are named after the great physicist who used to pose these questions to friends. One of his favorites was “How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?”
I constructed my own Fermi Problem about a Chicago father of two that commutes to an office of 150 people, and plays in a pickup basketball league at the Y on Thursdays. I posed this question to 3 different AI Chatbots, asking them to answer as Enrico Fermi. They estimated that our example persona would encounter between 3 and 7 people for the last time on any given day. Accounting for employee attrition at your job, the transience of encounters with people like retail or wait staff, and the tendency for people to come in and out of our lives through hobbies like gym memberships or a child's extra curricular groups, this range of 3-7 seems realistic.
So today you are likely encounter a handful of people for the last time.
Those people carry memories of our interactions, largely distilled to the peak experiences, and the end. In those memories our actions can make one more transformation. We tend to attribute another person's actions to their character, not the circumstances. Fundamental Attribution Error is a cognitive bias that makes a leap from one observed action (like cheating on a test) to an application of that action to all things about a person's character (they are dishonest). Essentially we ignore context. Instead we oversimplify and assume a person behaves consistently in all circumstances.
This handful of memories, and a leap from action to character can fuse into a narrative. In our absence, others repeat this narrative over time, and ultimately these narratives (and the biases they contain) have the power to inform our legacy. Here is how these concepts can build or destroy.
There was another first-baseman and future Hall of Famer on the field that day with Fred. His name was Jeff Bagwell. Baggs was the 1991 National League Rookie of the Year, the first Astros player ever to win the award. I had a life-sized poster of him on the back of my bedroom door, and despite his budding stardom, Jeff could occasionally be spotted mowing his own lawn in Sugar Land just around the corner from my cousin's house.
I didn't meet Jeff that day as an adorable, idolizing 10-year-old. I met him in my 30's as I passed through first class on the way to my economy seat to Cabo. I probably hadn't watched a single baseball game that year, but my admiration for him remained. I built up my courage (just like I'd done with Fred) on my way from the plane’s entrance. As we locked eyes I extended my hand and said, "I just want to thank you for such an uplifting career as an Astro. My Grandmother took me to a series every summer to watch you and we had so much fun together whether you won or lost.” Jeff stood up, looked me in the eye and shook my hand as he asked my name. We spoke briefly and then wished one another a good vacation and I headed back to my seat. It was a perfect interaction. He was a total class act. But his warm response to being interrupted on vacation was a peak in our brief relationship, it wasn't the end.
In Mexico, as we all stood around waiting for our checked bags, Jeff and his family stood across the terminal from me. I spotted him early, but tried to ignore being star struck from our encounter to leave him in peace. Then the oddest thing happened. As Jeff pulled the last bag off the conveyer belt he walked all the way around the carousel and stood a few feet behind me. "Brian!" he shouted, "have a great vacation!" He held up his hand to wave and walked away.
It was a 3-hour flight from Houston. He had ample time to forget the name of one of a thousand adoring fans that approach him every day. He’d already given me the gift of his graciousness on the plane. He could have grabbed his golf clubs, his fishing poles and his family and walked out the door to catch a shuttle to their hotel, safely leaving the nostalgic imprint of our conversation in my memory. But before he did, he walked 40 yards through a crowd to say goodbye to a grown man who used to watch him play baseball with his Grandmother.
This is how legacies are built. Legacy is not who we were, or what we did. It's the story other people tell about what we did. While we get fixated on the milestones of our own efforts, in the memory of others it may be as simple as a casual wave or an angry bark.
We remember the peaks and ends of our interactions with others. We assume (rightly or wrongly) that our interaction is consistent with the way that person always behaves, particularly when those interactions are infrequent or one-off's, and we tell ourselves a story about that person's character.
Those stories get repeated through an extended social network we may rarely interact with, and in some cases may even make the leap across several levels of connection to influence how others perceive us. When the stories are powerful enough, and the network is active enough, they can influence public opinion. But even in the cases where the public remains indifferent, there is a person somewhere whose story of you remains one of admiration or disdain, and that perception is likely formed from just a few flashes of memory right at the end.
I'm confident the story I've repeated about Fred McGriff for 30 years has had no impact on his legacy, and it probably shouldn't. I’m likely making the same Fundamental Attribution Error. I’ve never considered the circumstances of that morning for Fred leading up to batting practice. USA Today interviewed Fred's old teammates and competitors on the occasion of his introduction into the Hall of Fame, a few spoke of his tremendous kindness and character. But I have just the one experience. One that was both the Peak and the End of my interest in Fred "Crime Dog" McGriff, because he told an idolizing 10-year-old to "fuck off".
Jeff Bagwell, on the other hand, towers in my memory as a gracious and down-to-earth man of character.
In our own interactions, we don’t always know the end is near. And while we have an opportunity to make an outsized impact by parting on a high note, it’s not always possible or even reasonable. So what can we do?
We can treat the bias of others as a watch dog on our character. Others will continue to unfairly oversimplify the complexities of who we are. What we can control is to always act consistently with our values, and when possible, recognize the end could be near for any relationship. Make the end count.
It would be almost 30 years later, long after Jeff Bagwell retired from baseball and I bumped into him on a flight to Mexico, that the Astros would finally win their first World Series. Even for a now fair weather Astros fan, it should have been a moment commemorated in memory. It was a peak moment in the 50-year history of the club. But the legacy of that 2017 team is different for me. Now I only remember the end...the Astros cheated their way to a World Series championship.
Your legacy begins today. Act accordingly.