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to be a whole person, you wil do better in every area of life. And learning to prune and execute necessary endings are important aspects of being a whole person.
    For this reason, I recommend that as you go through this book, you see it as not just about business or leadership but about your whole life. In that way, it is about you . You are the one who is doing business and also doing life, and if you change and become a person capable of executing necessary endings, you wil not only have better business performance, but you wil also be less likely to raise failure-to-launch kids or be stuck in some other area of life.
    So, with that, let’s get oriented to the idea of seeing necessary endings as a normal part of life instead of as a problem and find out how to execute them.

Chapter 3
    Normalizing Necessary Endings: Welcome the Seasons of Life into Your Worldview

    I was introduced to Blair by a friend of mine on a golfing trip. “So what do you do, Blair?” I asked.
    “I am in bonds!” he said, with an upbeat kind of energy sparked by the question. I remember thinking, Must like it , that bond work .
    “It’s more than that,” our mutual friend said. “He is one of the top guys in the country right now.”
    “Wow, that’s cool,” I said. “Have you been in bonds for a long time?”
    “No, not too long,” he said. “It’s a second career for me. I was in chemical manufacturing for a long time, and then made a switch a couple of years ago.”
    “And you got to the top in a second career that fast?”
    “Yep, it just al worked,” he said, an answer that seemed to have a lot of drop-down menus behind the headline. So the performance coach part of me had to hear the rest of the story, as I know that those sorts of changes don’t happen without a lot of good things occurring in a person.
    “How did you go from manufacturing to bonds? What was that move like?” I inquired.
    “Wel , I owned a company that sold a chemical process that had the writing on the wal , so I got out just in time,” he said. “Or after it was time, depending on how you look at it.”
    “What do you mean the ‘writing on the wal ’?” I asked. “What kind?”
    “The process that we sold looked like it was becoming less and less needed because of other changes in technology, and our sales were reflecting that. It was becoming obsolete. As I looked into the future, it was not looking good. So, I sold it. Got out, did some classwork, studied, got a securities license, and here I am.”
    “OK, but you aren’t twenty-five with a backpack and a bike going to class. Wasn’t that a big deal?” I wondered out loud as I pictured what kind of disruption this must have been in the middle of life.
    “Yeah, it was. Mortgage, kids headed for col ege, and I had sunk a lot [ heavy sigh , eyes closed ] of money into the company. To make the change and to watch al of that go away was not easy. But, I knew, after a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of effort, going over it and over it trying to find a way to make it work, that it had no life in it. As hard as I had tried to make a go of it, I had to get out and do something different.”
    And he did. And he had found life again in his new career.
    He told me, though, there had been many temptations to keep believing that the old business could turn around, and many times he kept investing good money after bad—second mortgages on the house, outside money, the whole thing. But he final y came to what we wil examine later as “the moment.” There was a moment in time where he knew that it was “time” to get out . He had to end it and move on.
    What impressed me was not only his courage to begin a whole new career at his stage in life, but also the contrast to another friend whom I was watching in a similar situation but with a much different outcome. Geoff was also in a business whose time had come and gone with changes in technology, but he was stil holding on. His company was tied to