"At The End Of The Day"

I’ve been hearing house lights all week.

I’m at a startup conference, sitting in the dimmed room with a lanyard around my neck, and nearly every speaker so far has reached for the same switch. They get three minutes into an answer that finally has some teeth, and then: “at the end of the day.”

Up come the lights. The room blinks. Whatever was about to get said goes and finds its coat. (I run a bar. I know exactly what that switch does to a room. It’s the one we hit when we want everybody to go home.)

I thought about keeping a list of what each speaker said mattered at the end of the day. I’m glad I didn’t. It would be unbearable, and not because it would be long. Every one of those sentences landed on a different thing. It’s about the people. It’s about the customer. Each one delivered as the final answer, each one quietly cancelling the speaker before it. Stack enough bottom lines on top of each other and you don’t have a bottom line anymore… you have a buffet of big ideas that make you need to loosen your belt.

What’s more after they say it..it is almost never something anyone in the room would fight about. Nobody stands up in the dark and says, actually, I don’t think it’s about the people. That’s the job the phrase is doing. It walks a speaker right up to the edge of a claim somebody could check, then sets them down somewhere carpeted and safe. It sounds like a conclusion. It works like an exit.

I’ve heard it at work, recently, too. Tell a team that at the end of the day we have to hit the number, and you’ve told them exactly whose clock counts. It isn’t theirs. They’ll set their watches to it anyway… right up until they don’t or can’t or worse, they head to another meeting where they hear someone else say “At the end of the day…”

Stay Positive & Maybe Better For Us To Pivot To “At the start of the day…”