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Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Lessons - You Have Exactly One Thing to End Today... You Already Know What It Is (Scott)
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In today's Lessons episode, we're going to talk about ending and exiting things that aren't serving you anymore and why your inability to do that is draining your energy and basically wasting your life. You know those expired relationships, you're still keeping up with the job that you should have left two years ago, the girlfriend or the boyfriend, and you know that it's not working out. The meeting that should have ended 37 minutes ago, but didn't. People have a really hard time ending things. And if you're carrying around things that ran their course hours or even years ago, you're maintaining just friendships out of guilt. You're lying awake thinking about conversations that you should be having with that special person, but you're not. This podcast is for you. I'm going to show you why your brain literally can't let go of unfinished business. So why you need to end stuff. Why the way you end things is the only part that people actually remember, which is why it's so important to do well. And the exact five sentence formula for ending anything with grace. Instead of ghosting like a coward. This is an underrated life skill, knowing how to end things gracefully. Most people either ghost or drag things out really painfully or just explode in frustration when they're trying to cut something off instead. I want you to recognize something has run its course. Whether it's a conversation, a meeting, a job or relationship. I want you to state your intention clearly, acknowledge what was valuable, and exit while there's still mutual respect. Because the way that you leave determines whether door stays open and how you're remembered. Because every ending is also someone else's story about you. Let's talk about this. I think this is one of the most important things that I've ever learned in my life. How to exit. Let me paint a picture for you. You're sitting in a meeting that ended 37 minutes ago. Everybody knows it. The decision that was supposed to happen in that meeting happened in 12 minutes. But here you are watching grown adults repeat themselves in slightly different words because nobody knows how to say, we're done here. You look at your phone, it's 2:47. The meeting was supposed to end at 2. That is 47 minutes of your life that you'll never get back, sacrificed to the collective inability to end a simple conversation. And this is just one meeting. That relationship that you're in, it's been dead since 2021. That friendship that you maintain out of guilt, that is a corpse that you've been dragging behind you for three years. That job that makes you die a little each morning, you knew it was wrong. By week two, you are not living. You are performing CPR on things that need burial. The concept of exiting, the concept of ending things has fascinated me for a long time. So much so that I've researched and I've studied the idea of exiting and ending things that don't serve you anymore. I've looked at over a thousand resignation letters. I've analyzed breakup conversations. I've interviewed people on the podcast who've ended things well, and people who burnt everything down. And I've discovered something that changed how I see everything. Everything. The way you end things is the only part anyone remembers. There's a lesson that. Well, there's actually a conversation that led to this realization. But there's a lesson that I learned from a funeral director. The funeral director, let's call him Charlie. He had been burying people for 31 years when he told me this. Nobody remembers the middle of anything. They remember how it started, and they remember how it ended. But mostly. And we were sitting in his office. It's morbid, but a funeral director has casket catalogs all over their office, right? That's their business. Scott, I've watched families spend $30,000 trying to fix an ending, trying to rewrite the last conversation. They never had the last I love you. They never said the goodbye that they avoided. Think about your own life. You know that ex that you dated for three years. You don't remember year two. You remember meeting them. You remember the explosion at the end, the job that you had for five years. Remember the interview. And then you remember when they escorted you out, they let you go. Or your friend from college. You remember meeting freshman year, and then you remember the fight that ended everything. Obviously, there's a lot of endings in life. They don't have to be so serious and so permanent, is what Charlie was talking about with the funeral home. But the point stands. The ending isn't just the last chapter. It's the lens through which the entire story gets rewritten. But we don't know how to end things. First of all, we don't know how to do it properly. And when we do end things, we. We do it in the wrong way. There's actually science behind this, too. So Daniel Kenneman, he won a Nobel Prize for discovering this. Your brain judges every experience based on two moments.
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The peak, which is the most intense.
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Almost everything else, to some degree, is deleted. And he proved it with a cold water experiment. So participants in this experiment put their hands in 14 degrees Celsius, water that's about 57 degrees Fahrenheit, and it's uncomfortably cold, like a mountain stream. Water level of cold for about 60 seconds. And then he did it again, but this time for 90 seconds. So there was still 60 seconds of the 14 degrees Celsius, 57 degree Fahrenheit cold water plus 30 more seconds at 15 degrees Celsius, or 59 degrees Fahrenheit, still cold, just 1 degree warmer. And then he asked, which experiment would you rather repeat? And 69% of the participants chose to repeat the longer trial, which doesn't make any sense because they did the same amount of uncomfortable hand in cold water for both. So people literally chose more pain because it ended marginally better. This isn't motivation. This is actual neuroscience. Your brain doesn't count minutes or measure suffering. It takes a screenshot of the worst moment and the last moment, averages them and calls out your memory. Another example, a colonoscopy that ends badly feels worse than one twice as long. That ends better. A vacation with a terrible last day becomes a terrible vacation. A relationship that explodes erases three good years. We remember the ending, but we don't know how to do it properly. This is why I decided to count how many mental corpses I was dragging around that I hadn't ended yet. So, January 2019, I did an audit of my life. There were 17 things in my life that should have been dead, killed off, canceled, exited. There was a business partnership that turned toxic about a year before. There was a client who hadn't paid me on time since 2017. There was a personal training package with about 23 sessions left. There was a friendship. There was no longer a friendship. There was no. There was a romantic situation that was neither romantic nor a situation. There was a newsletter that I hadn't sent in eight months. There was a domain name for a business that I'd never start. There was also a storage unit full of things that I never needed. So there was 17 zombies, each taking up, say, 3% of my mental RAM, that is 51% of my brain running background programs for dead things. And it was no wonder I was exhausted. I was stressed out. And there's actually research that shows about.
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Why this mental math matters so much.
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There's something called the Zeigar Nick effect. So your brain treats unfinished business like.
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This fire alarm that just won't stop.
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So every incomplete loop, every unended thing.
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It occupies mental space until it's resolved.
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If you look at the math, that conversation that you're avoiding 3% of your mental energy. The job that you should quit.
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3% for sure. The relationship that ended but didn't. 3%.
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The project that you'll never finish.
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3%.
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That friendship that you're maintaining out of guilt.
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Another 3%. Five unended things equals 15% of your mental capacity gone. 10, 30%. 17 51%.
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You are operating at half capacity because.
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You will not bury the dead. But when you end something cleanly, you get that energy back immediately with compound interest. And this isn't just about personal energy. This idea is destroying entire economies. Bad endings cost US businesses $1 trillion annually. Not million, not billion. But 52% of people who quit could have been saved with one conversation. But that conversation never happens because managers don't know how to have ending conversations and employees don't know how to start them. And the replacement cost for one employee is 50% to 213% of their annual salary. And the productivity loss from someone mentally checked out but physically present, 1.8 trillion more. And that's just money. Human cost is worse.
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We've been so terrified of ending things.
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That we invented a whole new way to avoid them. There's a ghosting epidemic. 65% of Americans were were ghosted last year. The average person ghosted three times. Washington D.C. leads the nation. 76% of residents ghosted annually, averaging 5.1 times each. 77% of Gen Z admits to ghosting someone. 35% of job candidates ghost employers. 61% of job seekers are ghosted by companies. We've become a society of cowards who who cannot end things and cannot say goodbye. There is actually a group of Spanish researchers who studied 626 adults who'd been ghosted. And the result? Significantly less satisfaction with life, higher helplessness and crushing loneliness. The damage from avoiding a five minute conversation lasts years.
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Why do we do it? 50% say conflict avoidance. We rather inflict lasting psychological damage to than have one uncomfortable conversation. But honestly, after studying all those resignation letters, after sort of reading into why we don't exit things properly, I've actually discovered there's a very simple formula that can solve all of this. Even if we don't know why we all do it, there's actually a solution to ending and exiting things the right way. So every graceful ending or exit, it could be in business, it could be in personal relationships. It doesn't really matter. It has five elements. So recognition, ownership, appreciation, clarity, and benediction. Let me go through these. Recognition, not denial, means you're saying something like this isn't working for either of us could be friendship, relationship, job. Number two is ownership, not blame. I need something different. Number three is appreciation, not erasure. I value what we shared. Number four is clarity, not ambiguity. This is my last day. This is goodbye. And lastly, number five is benediction. Don't be bitter. I wish you well. This isn't working for either of us. I need something different. I value what we've shared. This is goodbye. I wish you well. Some version of those five sentences. That's it. You can end almost anything with five sentences. And you can end it and you already know exactly what what needs those five sentences. Because you know what it is. You've been thinking about it this entire time. The thing that should have ended six months ago, or two years ago, or 10 years ago.
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You know it's dead.
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They probably know it's dead. You're both just standing there, staring at the corpse, pretending it's sleeping. It's not. It's dead. You gotta exit. You gotta end it. And here's what you're actually afraid of. You're not afraid that ending it will hurt them, but you're subconsciously afraid that they'll be relieved. That they've been waiting for someone to finally say what you've both been thinking. That the only thing worse than staying in something dead is discovering that the other person wanted out too. So let me make it simple for you. Here's the five sentences. Just fill in the blanks. This is what you say to them. You write it out. You say it to them in person. Say it on a zoom call. Say it on a phone call. Whatever. I've realized that blank isn't working for either of us. I need blank at this point in my life. I valued blank about our time together. End it and say, I wish you well. Send it.
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Say it today.
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Not tomorrow, not after the holidays, not when you're ready today. Because something magical happens when you finally master endings. You stop being afraid of beginnings. Because when you know you can end something gracefully, you can start something boldly. When you trust yourself to leave when it's time, you can fully arrive. While you're there, you stop hedging. You stop keeping one foot out the door. You stop holding back 30% just in case you need to run. You can go all in knowing that you can get all out. That's when life actually starts. But you're still listening to this podcast instead of doing it. This podcast, depending on if you listen to it at 1 or 1.2 or 1.5x probably, probably took you about 10 to 15 minutes to listen to the whole thing. Now, in those 15 minutes, you could have ended that meeting, sent that resignation, had that conversation, and made that call. But instead, you're listening to podcasts about ending things. And that's the trap. We all fall into this trap. So don't feel guilty. Just, I'm telling you, you do have to take action. But we always read about change instead of changing. We listen to YouTube, we listen to.
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Podcasts about change, we don't actually change.
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And then we plan our endings, and instead of actually ending things, and then we think about the conversations that we have to have instead of having them, and then we never take action. Right now, you're listening to a podcast about ending things properly. The unended things that you're thinking about that are in your life right now, that you have to kill off, those corpses that are not serving you anymore, that are taking up that mental clutter and that mental bandwidth, they didn't get ended while you listened to this podcast. They got about 15 minutes older, 15 minutes deader, and 15 minutes heavier. Here's what happens right now. That thing that you needed to end, it's not getting better. It's not going to fix itself. 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 to keep dying slowly. Every week that you wait is a week deleted from your life. Every year that you tolerate it is a percentage of your existence, that you will never recover. Stop living like you live forever. That life is infinite because it's not formula to give yourself a better life, to end the things that are no longer serving you. It's in this podcast. Five sentences, very simple. Your whole life's going to change, and the moment to change your life is right now. The only question, really, is whether or not you're going to use it. Because whether you end it or not, eventually it's ending anyways. Everything ends. The only choice is whether it ends with grace or with you ghosting. Whether it ends with a period right now or an explosion. Whether you're remembered as someone who had the courage to say goodbye or you're just a coward who disappeared. Every ending is also someone else's story about you. Take control of the narrative. Grow a pair. Do the right thing. Cut off the things that aren't serving you. I want you to use this ending framework. So regardless of what someone else thinks about you, in your job, in your friendship, in your relationship, they cannot say and they cannot tell a story about you not having the courage to end things properly. It's your move.