The Power Of Endings

Both work and personally.

There are a lot of “soft” concepts associated with work that we should probably pay more attention to — compassion and patience come to mind — and another one I recently started thinking on is “the goodbye.”

Here’s a great article — one of the better I’ve seen on HBR in a while — about Andres Iniesta and his farewell from Barcelona, a club he’s been associated with for 22 years. The article makes a lot of powerful points about goodbyes, both personal and professional, and how the goodbye should be a crucial part of the modern career arc, especially since there’s so much fluctuation — we’re leaving jobs in 3.6 years on average, so don’t we need to think about “the goodbye” more?

We do, but as the article notes:

At many workplaces, we often lack the rituals and spaces to end projects and tenures. This is why we cannot be fully human in organizations that have few rituals and little space for stillness, silence, sadness.

Indeed.

This whole thing is kinda what I never “got” about work