One self lives the moment, another tells the story of it

Ask someone how their holiday went and they will tell you a short story. A few bright scenes, a final impression, a verdict: “we had a great rest” or “it was so-so”. Ask the same person in the middle of that holiday, at some ordinary moment, what they feel right now, and the answer will probably not match the story they tell later.

This is not because they forgot or decided to polish things up. The one who tells the story is not the one who lived through it.

For a company selling to people, including a foreign company selling into Russia, this split has direct consequences. Your customers will judge you by a story. The story is assembled by rules that have little to do with how evenly good your service was.

Two selves working at the same time

In the systems framework I use, there are two selves that exist simultaneously and do different jobs.

The experiencing self lives the moment. It receives the full stream of sensory signals without a filter, from the bottom up: temperature, fatigue, a flash of irritation, a second of pleasure. Everything arrives, nothing is selected, and there is no plot.

The narrating self, sometimes called the descriptive self, works the other way round, from the top down. It does not live through anything. It selects. Out of the stream of raw signals it builds a story and adjusts the past to the needs of the present and the future. The selection is run by the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex. They set the filters that decide what goes into the final account and what stays behind as unnoticed noise.

Both selves are always at work. The trouble starts when we treat the output of the second as a record of the first.

Why the story and the experience diverge

This is why a retelling of a day almost never matches what was going on inside during that day. The experiencing self recorded every minute honestly, including the dull, unpleasant and unremarkable stretches. The narrating self, preparing its account, threw most of that material away and kept a few anchor points. Usually these are the most intense moments and whatever happened at the end.

The well-known colonoscopy experiment shows this with some rigour. Patients whose procedure ended more gently were later more willing to agree to a repeat procedure, even though the total pain they had experienced was no smaller than in other patients, and sometimes larger. The narrating self did not rate the experience by the sum of suffering. It rated it by the peak-end rule: how bad it was at the worst moment, and how it finished.

The final story is an edited version of the lived experience. And it is this edited version, rather than the raw experience, that shapes what the person does next.

A hard week that is remembered as a good one

Take a working week full of small troubles: missed deadlines, irritating calls, fatigue. The experiencing self lived each of those minutes as unpleasant. But if the week ended with one good event, such as praise, a task closed well, or a warm conversation with a colleague, the narrating self will build a story along the lines of “the week was fine, good even”. Dozens of hours of real irritation get pushed into the shade.

It works in reverse too. A week can be comfortable on average and end with one unpleasant moment. The story that forms will be “that was a hard week”, although for most of the time the experiencing self registered nothing resembling hardship.

Now replace the week with a customer’s purchase: the first search, the call with a manager, the contract, the wait, delivery, the first use. It is the same mechanism, and the customer’s verdict about you is formed the same way.

What this means for a company selling into Russia

The applied conclusion matters most to anyone who designs an experience for other people that stretches over time: onboarding, service, training, a project with several stages. If the score is formed by the peak and the ending rather than by the average, then it is reasonable to manage those two points on purpose instead of trying to make every single moment evenly comfortable. A process that leaves one bright positive moment and a good ending will be remembered better than one that was uniformly pleasant and forgettable from start to finish.

For a foreign company this cuts against a habit. Western service design, trained on mature markets and on Google-era funnels, tends to optimise the average: fewer steps, faster load times, a smoother form. Those things matter, and none of them is wasted effort. But when the product arrives in Russia, the parts of the journey that tend to get the least attention are exactly the ones the narrating self keeps.

Three places deserve a closer look.

The ending is often outsourced. A large share of goods bought online in Russia reaches the customer through a pickup point or a courier service run by someone else. The final moment of the purchase, the one the customer will remember, happens at a counter you did not design, with packaging you may not have seen since it left the warehouse. For services, the ending is often the last message in a messenger chat or a closing document. If the ending belongs to a partner or a default template, your score is being written by someone who does not know it matters.

Reviews are written at the ending. On Russian marketplaces and in map services, where customers leave reviews of shops and service businesses, the review is typically written right after the final touchpoint. That is the narrating self at work, with the ending freshest in memory. A company that reads its average review score as a measure of the whole process is reading the story, and should interpret it that way.

The peak can be negative by default. In most processes there is one moment of highest tension: the first payment, a delay, a call where something went wrong. If nobody designed that moment, it becomes the peak by accident, and a negative one. For a company working through a translated site, a distributor, or a support team that answers in a second language, the chance of an accidental negative peak is higher than at home, because more of the chain sits outside your direct control.

What local practice requires

I will not give you numbers on how much the ending weighs in your category. The source of this article does not contain them, and I do not want to invent a benchmark that would be quoted back at a board meeting. What I can describe is the order of work that follows from the mechanism.

First, map the journey as the customer lives it, step by step, including the parts that happen outside your company: the marketplace, the courier, the messenger, the accounting department that sends closing documents. Foreign teams usually map only the parts they own.

Second, find the peak. Ask where tension is highest, where people complain, where they drop out. That is the point the narrating self is most likely to keep, for better or worse.

Third, find the real ending. It is rarely the “thank you” page. Often it is days later, at the handover, the first use, or the final invoice.

Fourth, decide what you want each of those two points to feel like, and put resources there first. Evenly smoothing the rest can wait.

This is also where customer research for the Russian market earns its cost. Interviews after the fact give you the story. Observation during the process gives you the experience. You need both, and you need to know which one you are looking at. A foreign company planning a launch should build this into its market entry plan from the start, rather than discover it later in reviews.

Why this is no reason to distrust the story

None of this means the customer’s story is false, or that your own stories about your year are. The narrating self is neither a deception nor a weakness. It is a necessary function. Without selection and packaging into a story it would be impossible to learn from past experience, plan the future, or explain to yourself and others what happened.

The problem appears when people forget it exists and take the final version for a literal copy of what was lived. This applies inside a company as much as outside it. If your team judges the past quarter in Russia as “hard” because it ended with one painful event, that is the narrating self talking. The raw record may be far more balanced than the story about it, and decisions made on the story alone can be wrong.

The same holds for your own evaluation of a launch. Before deciding a market “did not work”, it is worth pulling the data week by week and comparing it with the story the team tells. Sometimes they match. Sometimes the story was written by the last bad month.

Questions to ask this week

A short route you can walk now:

1. Where is the ending of your customer’s purchase? Name the exact moment and who controls it.
2. Where is the peak? The single moment of highest tension in the process, and whether anyone designed it.
3. What do your reviews measure? Treat them as the story, formed at the ending, rather than as an average of the whole experience.
4. What would the experiencing self say? If you only have after-the-fact surveys, add a way to learn how a step feels while it is happening.

A story about a life is the work of one self, and the lived life is the work of another. The distinction is useful because it keeps you from confusing the story with the material it was made from.

The one who tells your customer’s story about you was never present at every moment of it. It was there at the end and at the brightest point. The rest it filled in by rules it does not know it follows.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Проживает момент один, рассказывает о нём другой