Think about the last presentation you attended. You probably sat through forty-five minutes of slides, charts, and talking points. But what do you actually remember? Chances are, you recall two moments: something that stood out—good or bad—and how it ended.

This isn't a failure of memory. It's how memory works. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's research revealed that we don't evaluate experiences by averaging every moment. Instead, our brains take shortcuts, judging the whole by its peak intensity and its ending. Everything else fades into the background.

For anyone in the business of influence—marketers, salespeople, managers, presenters—this is quietly revolutionary. It means you don't need a perfect experience from start to finish. You need a memorable high point and a strong close. Master these two moments, and you've shaped how people remember everything that came before.

Kahneman distinguished between two selves: the experiencing self, which lives through each moment, and the remembering self, which decides what that experience meant. Here's the unsettling part: they often disagree.

In his famous cold-water experiments, participants submerged their hands in painfully cold water. One trial lasted 60 seconds. Another lasted 90 seconds, but the final 30 seconds were slightly warmer. Logically, the longer trial was worse—more total pain. Yet participants consistently preferred it and chose to repeat it. Why? The slightly improved ending made the memory better, even though the experience was objectively worse.

This has profound implications for persuasion. Your audience won't remember the average quality of your presentation. They won't mentally calculate how many good slides versus mediocre slides you showed. They'll remember the moment that made them feel something, and they'll remember how they felt walking out the door.

Many communicators spread their energy evenly across their message, treating every point with equal weight. This is strategically naive. It's like a chef putting equal effort into every ingredient rather than designing around the dish's signature element. Your audience's memory doesn't work democratically—it plays favorites. Design accordingly.

Takeaway

People don't remember experiences as they happened. They remember how experiences felt at their most intense and how they ended. The remembering self—not the experiencing self—makes decisions about whether to return, recommend, or buy.

If peaks disproportionately shape memory, then deliberately engineering them isn't manipulation—it's communication strategy. The question becomes: how do you create moments that rise above the experiential baseline?

Peaks emerge from moments of elevation—points that break the pattern and demand attention. This can be surprise: an unexpected demonstration, a story that takes an unusual turn, a statistic that reframes everything. It can be connection: a moment where you make the audience feel truly seen or understood. Or it can be achievement: a point where the audience grasps something that felt previously out of reach.

The principle is simple: peaks require contrast. A consistently excellent presentation may be pleasant, but it's also flat in memory. A good presentation with one extraordinary moment creates a mountain in an otherwise level landscape. That mountain becomes the memory.

Practically, this means concentrating your best material rather than distributing it. If you have a compelling story, a stunning visual, or a moment of genuine insight, don't bury it in the middle where it competes with everything else. Position it strategically. Create space around it. Signal its importance. Let it breathe. One powerful peak anchors more positive memory than ten moderately good points evenly spread.

Takeaway

Peaks require contrast to register in memory. Rather than distributing quality evenly, concentrate your most powerful material into deliberate moments of elevation that rise above the baseline of your communication.

Endings carry disproportionate weight because they're the last thing the remembering self encodes. Whatever emotion your audience feels as they leave becomes the emotional tag attached to the entire experience.

This is why a mediocre presentation with a powerful close often outperforms a strong presentation that trails off. The ending doesn't just matter—it retroactively shapes how everything before it is interpreted. A weak finish makes your audience subtly reframe your earlier strong points. A strong finish makes them forgive earlier stumbles.

What makes an ending strong? Three elements: resolution, elevation, and direction. Resolution means closing open loops—returning to themes or questions you introduced earlier. Elevation means ending on a high note emotionally, not just intellectually. Direction means leaving your audience with clear next steps or a lingering thought that travels with them.

The practical application is ruthless: protect your ending at all costs. If you're running short on time, cut from the middle, not the end. If Q&A risks ending on a difficult note, take questions before your planned close and finish with your prepared remarks. Never let logistics, fatigue, or audience questions dictate how you end. Your ending is too valuable to leave to chance.

Takeaway

The ending doesn't just conclude your message—it retroactively colors how your audience interprets everything that came before. Protect it from being weakened by time pressure, difficult questions, or trailing off.

The peak-end rule isn't about deceiving audiences or masking poor content with theatrical moments. It's about aligning your communication strategy with how human memory actually works.

Every day, communicators compete for space in overcrowded minds. Most of what we say washes away, leaving only traces. The peak-end rule tells us which traces remain: the moments that made people feel something, and the feeling they carried out the door.

Design those two moments deliberately. Let them carry the weight of your message. Everything else is supporting structure for the memories that actually stick.