What will people say at your funeral
Summary
- This is a method to decide what is important in your life: what do you want people to say at your funeral about you
Details
- It is unlikely to be 'he made a lot of money' but more likely to be about relationships, character and hobbies
References
Quotes
In fact, Penn was a student at Stanford Business School taking a famous course, ‘Lives of Consequence’. The professor, Rod Kramer, routinely assigns his students to write their own obituaries as though they have lived an ideal life – the best they can imagine – to its end. ‘The goal of this course is to change the way you think about your
life and its possible impact on the world,’ the description reads. For many, including Penn, this was transformative. ‘This caused me to pause and ask, am I allocating enough time to the people I love? Or am I overly caught up in the career rat race?’ she later wrote. Reflecting on death shed light on how to live. I’ve often used a similar approach myself. I call it the ‘eulogy
method’. My iteration involves focusing not on your obituary, but on your funeral. Simply ask yourself: ‘What would I feel good about someone saying in my eulogy?’ Think about what you’d like a family member, a close friend, a distant relative, a co-worker, to say at your funeral. This method helps us get at the question of ‘What do I value?’ from other people’s perspective. At your funeral, even your coworkers would be unlikely to say, ‘He helped us close lots of milliondollar deals.’ They’d talk about how you were as a person – your relationships, your character, your hobbies. And they’d talk about the positive impact you had on the world, not how much money you made for your employer.