Eulogy virtues and 'radiating an inner light'
David Brooks and timeless simplicity
Hi friends,
Last weekend, my mother and I listened to Warren Buffett, 92, and Charlie Munger, 99, lead their annual meeting about investing, life, and virtues. My favorite lessons from Buffett are never about money. He lives a simple life in Omaha, Nebraska, in the same home he bought in 1958, doing the same job he’s always loved. There’s value in emulating his long-term orientation on relationships and your craft. There’s value in emulating his simplicity — he spends most of his days reading, learning, laughing, not chasing what he doesn’t yet have. There’s value in his lessons around reducing your desires, which eschews the human tendency to constantly want more.
To him, a rich life is doing what you want and love to do, not what others want you to do. “It's as simple as that. Really getting to do what you love to do every day—that's really the ultimate luxury,” he has said. To him, success is also loving and being loved, as we’ve discussed previously here.
I was struck by his answer to a question about how to avoid or minimize mistakes in life. “You should write your obituary and then try to figure out how to live up to it,” he said. The exercise is not only cathartic, but it aligns you. It forces you to zoom way out, away from the trivial. Are you on track? How much of your day-to-day, week-to-week busyness aligns with what’s in your eulogy? Not every action will be aligned with a long-term vision, but the act of jotting down one’s eulogy today provides some clarity, purpose, or meaning. I’m on draft two of mine, with much left to tinker and edit.
The comment conjures the work of David Brooks, who once challenged us to think of eulogy virtues vs. resume virtues. He writes that the résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace, while eulogy virtues are what’s talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest, or faithful. Writes Brooks: “Were you capable of deep love?”
We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.
But if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet.
When we reverse engineer our life, we might come away with a clearer vision or idea of who we want to become, and how we want to fill our precious days. Thinking about our eulogy virtues also begs the questions: How do you relate to the distinction between eulogy and resume virtues? When did you become aware of this distinction? What practice helps you develop eulogy virtues? How can we have fun along the way?
One way to live a ‘eulogy virtue’ comes from Adam Jaouad, who asks us to make a plan to plant a seed of hope. That might be one of the best ways to think about eulogy virtues: plant a seed of hope for someone else, and project love. How many seeds of hope can we plant for other lives before our time on this miracle planet runs out?
Writes Jaouad: “Maybe it’s joining the bone marrow registry, or encouraging your friends or loved ones to join it. Maybe it’s donating blood on a regular basis. Maybe it’s checking in with a friend who is struggling. Write about how your particular gifts or abilities could help nurture new growth.”
Wise words from writer Susan Sontag:
“A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
May you go forward and shape your own art!
A classic story:
One photo to share:
Parting quote: "Your essence will forever supersede any identity you've adopted throughout your life. You are much more than a name or a title. Remember that." (H/T The Daily Coach)
Parting question: Can you remember who you were before the world told you who you should be? (poet Charles Bukowski)
Celebrate your gifts,
Matthew
Wonderful message about what’s really important