The Two-Eulogy Exercise: Thirty Minutes That Show You the Gap

What the Exercise Is

A eulogy is the short speech given at a funeral about who someone was and what they meant to the people around them. This exercise borrows the form while you can still act on it.

The writer David Brooks draws a useful distinction between resume virtues, the skills you bring to the job market, and eulogy virtues, the things people say about you at your funeral. Most people spend far more deliberate effort on the first list. This exercise is thirty minutes spent deliberately on the second.

How to Run It: Thirty Minutes, Two Documents

Set aside thirty minutes with no phone. Write the first eulogy as a fair observer would deliver it today, not as a critic and not as a publicist. Then write the second as you hope it reads at the end.

Write in the third person, as the speaker would. The small distance of he or she makes honesty easier than I ever does. For the honest eulogy, work from these prompts and answer them as the evidence shows, not as you intend:

• What did you actually spend your time on this year, measured by your calendar rather than your intentions?
• Who would genuinely miss you, and what specifically would they miss?
• What stories would get told about you, and who appears in them?
• What did you consistently show up for, and what did you consistently postpone?

The Common Gap Patterns

When people compare their two documents, the same gaps tend to appear. Work crowds out people: the honest eulogy is heavy on competence and light on presence. Reconciliations sit postponed: someone belongs in the second eulogy who barely appears in the first because the repair never happened.

The third pattern is unstated love. The hoped-for eulogy says he made sure we knew, and the honest one says he assumed we knew. That gap costs nothing to close and closes almost nowhere on its own.

The honest eulogy is usually heavy on competence and light on presence.

Turning Gap Items Into Ninety-Day Actions

A gap you only feel is a mood. A gap you schedule is a plan. Take the three largest differences between your documents and write one action for each that fits inside the next ninety days.

Keep the actions small and datable. If the gap is work over people, the action is a standing weekly dinner, protected on the calendar. If the gap is a postponed reconciliation, the action is one message, sent, with no demand attached to the reply. If the gap is unstated love, the action is saying it once, plainly, to one person.

Resist the urge to write ten actions. Three, completed, move the honest eulogy further than a page of intentions ever will.

Revisit It Annually

The exercise is not a one-time reckoning. Rerun it once a year, on a date you will remember, and keep the old versions. Watching the honest eulogy move toward the hoped-for one is quiet evidence that the ninety-day actions are compounding.

This pairs naturally with any values-based goal setting you already do. Goals answer what you want to achieve. The two eulogies answer who you want to have been, which is the harder question and the one a funeral eventually answers for you.

A Half Hour Well Spent

Nobody else needs to read either document. You are not drafting a speech for anyone; you are taking a measurement, the way you would step on a scale.

Thirty minutes, two pages, three actions. Most self-examination is vaguer than this and most planning is colder. The exercise sits in the middle, and the people in your second eulogy are the ones who benefit from you running it while there is still time to close the gap.