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Lessons - You Have Exactly One Thing to End Today... You Already Know What It Is (Scott) · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In today's lessons episode, we're going to talk about ending and exiting things that aren't
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  serving you anymore. And why your inability to do that is draining your energy and basically
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  wasting your life. You know those expired relationships, you're still keeping up with the job
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  you should have left two years ago, the girlfriend of the boyfriend and you know that it's not
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  working out, the meeting that should have ended 37 minutes ago but didn't, people have a really
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  hard time ending things. And if you're carrying around things that ran their course hours or even
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  years ago, you're maintaining just friendships that have guilt, you're lying awake thinking
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  about conversations that you should be having with that special person but you're not. This podcast
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  is for you. I'm going to show you why your brain literally can't let go of unfinished business
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  so why you need to end stuff, why the way you end things is the only part that people actually
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  remember, which is why it's so important to do well and the exact five sentence formula for
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  ending anything with grace instead of ghosting like a coward.
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  This is an underrated life skill knowing how to end things gracefully. Most people either ghost
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  or drag things out really painfully or just explode in frustration when they're trying to cut
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  something off. Instead I want you to recognize when something is run its course whether it's a
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  conversation and meeting a job or a relationship. I want you to state your intention clearly acknowledge
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  what was valuable and exit while there's still mutual respect because the way that you leave determines
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  whether doors stays open and how you're remembered because every ending is also someone else's story
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  about you. Let's talk about this. I think this is one of the most important things that I've ever
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  learned in my life. How to exit? Let me paint a picture for you. You're sitting in a meeting that
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  ended 37 minutes ago. Everybody knows it. The decision that was supposed to happen in that meeting
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  happened in 12 minutes but here you are, watching grown adults repeat themselves and slightly
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  different words because nobody knows how to say we're done here. You look at your phone, it's 247.
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  The meeting was supposed to end at two that is 47 minutes of your life that you'll never get back.
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  Sacrificed to the collective inability to end a simple conversation and this is just one meeting.
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  That relationship that you're in, it's been dead since 2021. That friendship that you maintain
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  out of guilt, that is a corpse that you've been dragging behind you for three years. That job
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  that makes you die a little each morning, you knew it was wrong by week two. You are not living,
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  you are performing CPR on things that need burial. The concept of exiting. The concept of
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  ending things has fascinated me for a long time. So much so that I've researched and I've studied
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  the idea of exiting and ending things that don't serve you anymore. I've looked at over a thousand
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  resignation letters. I've analyzed breakup conversations. I've interviewed people on the podcast who
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  ended things well and people who burnt everything down and I've discovered something that changed
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  how I see everything. The way you end things is the only part anyone remembers. There's a lesson
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  that, well there's actually a conversation that led to this realization, but there's a lesson
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  that I learned from a funeral director. The funeral director, let's call him Charlie, he had been
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  burying people for 31 years when he told me this. Nobody remembers the middle of anything. They
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  remember how it started and they remember how it ended, but mostly when we were sitting in his
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  office, it's morbid, but a funeral director has casket catalogs all over their office, right? That's
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  their business. Scott, I've watched family spend $30,000 trying to fix an ending, trying to rewrite
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  the last conversation they never had. The last I love you. They never said the goodbye that they
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  avoided. Think about your own life. That ex that you dated for three years, you don't remember year two.
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  You remember meeting them. You remember the explosion at the end. The job that you had for five
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  years. Remember the interview and then you remember when they escorted you out when they let you go
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  or your friend from college. You remember meeting freshman year and then you remember the fight
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  that ended everything. Obviously, there's a lot of endings in life. They don't have to be so serious
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  and so permanent is what Charlie was talking about with the funeral home, but the point stands.
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  The ending isn't just the last chapter. It's the lens through which the entire story gets rewritten,
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  but we don't know how to end things. First of all, we don't know how to do it properly,
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  and when we do end things, we do it in the wrong way. There's actually science behind this too.
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  So Daniel Keniman, you want a Nobel Prize for discovering this. Your brain judges every
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  experience based on two moments. The peak, which is the most intense, almost everything else to some
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  degree is deleted and he proved it with a cold water experiment. So participants in this experiment
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  put their hands in 14 degrees Celsius water. That's about 57 degrees Fahrenheit. It's
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  uncomfortably cold, like a mountain stream water level of cold for about 60 seconds and then he
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  did it again, but this time for 90 seconds. So there was still 60 seconds of the 14 degrees Celsius
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  57 degree Fahrenheit cold water plus 30 more seconds at 15 degrees Celsius or 59 degrees Fahrenheit.
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  Still cold, just one degree warmer. And then he asked, which experiment would you rather repeat?
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  And 69% of the participants chose to repeat the longer trial, which doesn't make any sense,
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  because they did the same amount of uncomfortable hand in cold water for both. So people literally
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  chose more pain because it ended marginally better. This is motivation. This is actual neuroscience.
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  Your brain doesn't count minutes or measure suffering. It takes a screenshot of the worst moment
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  and the last moment averages them and calls out your memory. Another example, a colonoscopy that
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  ends badly feels worse than one twice as long that ends better. A vacation with a terrible last day
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  becomes a terrible vacation. A relationship that explodes, erases three good years. We remember
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  the ending, but we don't know how to do it properly. And this is why I decided to count how many
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  mental corpses I was dragging around that I hadn't ended yet. So January 2019, I did an audit of my
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  life. There were 17 things in my life that should have been dead, killed off, canceled, exited.
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  There was a business partnership that turned toxic about a year before. There was a client who hadn't
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  paid me on time since 2017. There was a personal training package with about 23 sessions left.
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  There was a friendship. There was no longer a friendship. There was a romantic situation. There was
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  neither romantic nor a situation. There was a newsletter that I hadn't sent in eight months. There
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  was a domain name for a business that I'd never start. There was also a storage unit full of
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  things that I never needed. So there was 17 zombies. Each taking up, say, 3% of my mental ram.
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  That is 51% of my brain running background programs for dead things. And it was no wonder. I was
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  exhausted. I was stressed out. And there's actually research that shows about why this mental
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  math matters so much. There is something called the zygrenic effect. So your brain treats unfinished
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  business like this fire alarm that just won't stop. So every incomplete loop, every unended thing,
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  it occupies mental space until it's resolved. If you look at the math, that conversation that
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  you're avoiding, 3% of your mental energy. The job that you should quit, 3% for sure. The
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  relationship that ended but didn't, 3%, the project that you'll never finish, 3%, that friendship,
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  that you're maintaining out of guilt, another 3%, 5 unended things equals 15% of your mental
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  capacity gone. 10, 30%, 17, 51%, you are operating at half capacity because you will not bury the dead.
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  But when you end something cleanly, you get that energy back immediately with compound interest.
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  And this isn't just about personal energy. This idea is destroying entire economies.
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  That endings cost US businesses $1 trillion annually. Not million, not billion, but 52% of people who
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  quit could have been saved with one conversation. But that conversation never happens because managers
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  don't know how to have ending conversations. And employees don't know how to start them. And
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  the replacement costs were one employee, 50% to 213% of their annual salary. And the productivity
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  loss from someone mentally checked out, but physically present, 1.8 trillion more. And that's just
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  money. Human cost is worse. We've been so terrified of ending things that we invented a whole
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  new way to avoid them. There's a ghosting epidemic. 65% of Americans were ghosted last year.
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  The average person ghosted three times. Washington, DC, leads the nation. 76% of residents
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  ghosted annually, averaging 5.1 times each. 77% of Gen Z admits to ghosting someone.
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  35% of job candidates, ghost employers, 61% of job seekers are ghosted by companies.
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  We've become a society of cowards who cannot end things and cannot say goodbye.
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  There is actually a group of Spanish researchers who studied 626 adults who'd been ghosted.
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  And the result significantly less satisfaction with life, higher helplessness, and crushing loneliness.
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  The damage from avoiding a five minute conversation lasts years. But why do we do it? 50% say conflict
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  avoidance. We rather inflict lasting psychological damage than have one uncomfortable conversation.
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  But honestly, after studying all those resignation letters after reading into why we don't exit
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  things properly, I've actually discovered there's a very simple formula that can solve all of this.
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  Even if we don't know why we all do it, there's actually a solution to ending and exiting things
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  the right way. So every graceful ending or exit it could be in business. It could be in personal
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  relationships. It doesn't really matter. It has five elements. So recognition, ownership, appreciation,
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  clarity, and benediction. Let me go through these. Recognition, not denial means you're saying
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  something like this isn't working for either of us. It could be friendship, relationship, job.
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  Number two is ownership, not blame. I need something different. Number three is appreciation, not
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  erasure. I value what we shared. Number four is clarity, not ambiguity. This is my last day.
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  This is goodbye. And lastly, number five is benediction. Don't be bitter. I wish you well. This
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  isn't working for either of us. I need something different. I value what we've shared. This is goodbye.
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  I wish you well. Some version of those five sentences. That's it. You can end almost anything with
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  five sentences. And you can end it and you already know exactly what needs those five sentences.
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  Because you know what it is. You've been thinking about it. It's entire time. The thing that
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  should have ended six months ago or two years ago or ten years ago. You know it's dead. They
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  probably know it's dead. You're both just standing there, staring at the corpse, pretending it's
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  sleeping. It's not. It's dead. You gotta exit. You gotta end it. And here's what you're actually
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  afraid of. You're not afraid that ending it will hurt them. But you're subconsciously afraid
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  that they'll be relieved that they've been waiting for someone to finally say what you've both
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  been thinking that the only thing worse than staying in something dead is discovering that the other
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  person wanted out too. So let me make it simple for you. Here's the five sentences. Just fill in the
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  blanks. This is what you say to them. You write it out. You say it to them in person. Say it on a
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  Zoom call. Say it on a phone call. Whatever. I've realized that blank isn't working for either of us.
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  I need blank at this point in my life. I've valued blank about our time together. End it and say
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  I wish you well. Send it. Say it today. Not tomorrow. Not after the holidays. Not when you're ready
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  today because something magical happens when you finally master endings. You stop being afraid
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  of beginnings because when you know you can end something gracefully. You can start something boldly.
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  When you trust yourself to leave when it's time you can fully arrive while you're there. You stop
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  hedging. You stop keeping one foot out the door. You stop holding back 30% just in case you need to run.
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  So you can go all in knowing that you can get all out. That's when life actually starts. But you're
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  still listening to this podcast instead of doing it. This podcast, depending on if you listen to it at
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  one or one point two or one point five X probably took you about 10 to 15 minutes to listen to the whole
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  thing. Now in those 15 minutes you could have ended that meeting. Sent that resignation at that
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  conversation and made that call. But instead you're listening to podcasts about ending things and
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  that's the trap. We all fall into this trap. So don't feel guilty and just I'm telling you you do
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  have to take action. But we always read about change instead of changing. We listen to YouTube. We
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  listen to podcasts about change. We don't actually change. And then we plan our endings instead of
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  actually ending things. And then we think about the conversations that we have to have instead of
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  having them. And then we never take action right now. You're listening to a podcast about ending
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  things properly. The unended things that you're thinking about that are in your life right now that
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  you have to kill off those corpses that are not serving you anymore that are taking up that
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  mental clutter and that mental bandwidth. They didn't get ended while you listen to this podcast.
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  They got about 15 minutes older. 15 minutes better and 15 minutes heavier. So here's what happens
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  right now. That thing that you need it to end. It's not getting better. It's not going to fix itself.
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  They're not going to end it for you. And every day that you don't end it is a day that you've decided
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  to keep dying slowly. Every week that you wait is a week deleted from your life. Every year that you
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  tolerate it is a percentage of your existence that you will never recover. Stop living like you
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  live forever that life is infinite because it's not a formula to give yourself a better life to end
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  the things that are no longer serving you. It's in this podcast. Five sentences. Very simple. Your
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  whole life's going to change. And the moment to change your life is right now. The only question really
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  is whether or not you're going to use it because whether you end it or not eventually it's ending
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  anyways. Everything ends. The only choice is whether it ends with grace or with you ghosting.
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  Whether it ends with a period right now or an explosion. Whether you remember to someone who had the
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  courage to say goodbye or you're just a coward who disappeared. Every ending is also someone else's
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  story about you. Take control of the narrative. Grow a pair. Do the right thing. Cut off the things
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  that aren't serving you. I want you to use this ending framework to regardless of what someone
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  else thinks about you in your job, in your friendship, in your relationship. They cannot say
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  and they cannot tell a story about you not having the courage and things properly. It's your move.