Nobody Remembers the Middle
I’ve interviewed more than a thousand people. I can’t tell you the middle of almost any answer I heard. What I can tell you, often months later, is how a candidate opened and how they landed. That’s not a flaw in my memory. It’s how memory works. We don’t store experiences as continuous recordings — we keep the start, we keep the end, and we compress everything in between. Kahneman called the end-part of this the peak-end rule; the front-loaded half is just as real. First impressions are a cliché because they’re true. The part most people miss is the symmetry: the last impression matters every bit as much, and the messy middle barely registers. ...