My grandmother said, “People should leave at the best of times.” It was not my grandmother who won the Nobel Prize for this perception, but the psychologist Daniel Kahneman. He named this phenomenon the “law of peaks and ends”: our memory of an event is limited to the peak and the end, and the course of events has little effect on memory. The more quickly the end occurs after the peak, the more impressive the event will be to us.
Most people do not understand this law. For example, when preparing for a performance, we invest a lot of time in preparing costumes, make-up, props, creating a good stage effect, and trying to leave a good impression on the audience. But we often neglect the preparation at the end of the exit. Sometimes, even though people have a good impression of the show at the beginning, a bad ending can leave an indelible bad impression.
Once I went to a party where I was satisfied for the first 3 hours and was only bored for the last hour. 3 hours of fun minus 1 hour of boredom equals 2 hours of fun, which means I spent 2 hours happily, but that’s not how our memories are calculated. If I go to another party and stay there for only 1 hour, I have a full 60 minutes of fun. The second party left a much better impression on me than the first one.
The same goes for watching a movie. If the plot of a 90-minute movie is mediocre in the first hour, we will still recommend the movie to others if the last half hour moves us. On the contrary, if the creativity of the plot is shown to the fullest in the first half hour, but the end is very mediocre, then the movie will definitely have a very bad reputation.
When attending a party, we’d better leave right after the climax. Quietly, don’t spend too much time on goodbyes, and you’ll find that you’ve had a very pleasant evening, a pleasure that will stay with you for a long time. But if you are the host, and of course you cannot leave, then you must always be ready to have another climax after midnight and send your guests off without a hitch. That way, all will praise you for throwing a successful party.
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