Writing your own eulogy

Why it is important to define your life purpose by starting with your eulogy. 

What is your mission? What is your purpose? Do you even have a defined life mission? Have you thought about what that is? Even better, have you thought about the why? Why do you exist? What are you doing here? If you were to give your own eulogy, what would it say?

Part of me wonders if we need all of the answers now or if the answers can come as we experience life. Is our life purpose necessarily defined and set in stone at 25 years of age, or is it more fluid and defined at 35 or 45?

I think we need to have at least some of the answers. I think we need some definition of our life’s purpose and mission and we need to write it down so that we can come back to it and reflect.

I don’t think it’s good enough to say to say, “I want to make a difference in people’s lives”.That needs to be flushed out more.

“I want to make a difference in people’s lives by …
…having a job that will help me make a difference”.
…becoming a religious leader…”.
…being a great parent and partner…”
…writing a book that gets people to think differently about their own lives…”.
…remembering to give charity every day…”.
…remembering to say at least 3 nice things to 3 different people each day…”.
…taking the ordinary, no matter what it is in my life (a new customer/client, 30 minutes of silence before the kids wake up, driving to work, spending time with the kids, speaking with someone I never met before) and making it special…”

If I were to write my own eulogy today, I would want people to say first that I was an awesome parent, a fantastic husband, and that I was a difference maker. That I was so engaging in even the mundane that it made a difference to whomever I was talking to or whoever read one of my books, heard me speak at a conference, or met with me one-on-one. That I was able to turn the mundane, and to make it special.

This is a lofty expectation of what someone might say about me; and now, I need work backwards. I need to work toward making this incredibly lofty eulogy a reality. To do so, I need to figure out the how. How can I do that? What few things must absolutely go right in order for me to achieve this lofty objective? What challenges am I likely going to face? How will I deal with them? Where will I record my struggles and my successes to measure my progress?

I think that if we all work backwards from our eulogy, define the steps necessary to get to what we want people to say about us in a mission statement, we can likely lead more engaging and fuller days because we are working toward something incredibly meaningful. For without it, we are no different from any other species that wakes up, does some work, eats, and goes back to sleep.