Stage 3: Vision & Direction | Your Eulogy

The Rocking Chair exercise asked how you want to feel looking back at your life. This one asks a different question: what do you want other people to say about you once you're gone?

It comes from Stephen Covey's second habit in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989): begin with the end in mind. Covey suggested imagining your own funeral and listening to what four speakers would say. The logic is straightforward. If you know what you want people to remember, you can work backwards to figure out how to live.

Writing your own eulogy forces you to think about legacy and impact. Your rocking chair reflection was private, between you and yourself. This one is about the mark you leave on the people around you, the ways your life shaped theirs.

The research behind this

Covey's "begin with the end in mind" became one of the most widely adopted self-leadership principles of the last century. The eulogy exercise draws its power from a specific psychological effect: when you picture the end of your life, daily noise falls away, and you get direct access to what you actually care about. You stop performing in ways that don't really matter to you.

Erik Erikson's stages of psychosocial development give this exercise a developmental frame. Erikson identified the central tension of midlife as generativity versus stagnation. Generativity means contributing something that outlasts you, whether that's raising children, mentoring others, building creative work, or serving a community. People who resolve this stage well tend to feel their life mattered. The eulogy exercise pushes you to confront this directly: are you building something that will outlast you?

Dan McAdams' research on generativity at Northwestern deepens this. McAdams found that highly generative adults tend to construct what he calls "redemptive life narratives." They tell their life stories in ways that turn suffering into growth, setbacks into lessons, personal pain into something that helps others. Writing your eulogy is an act of narrative construction. You're choosing the story you want your life to tell, and by doing that, you're shaping the life itself.

The exercise

Access your Notion workbook here.

Write your eulogy from four different perspectives. For each one, imagine that person standing up at a gathering after you've died, speaking honestly about who you were and what you meant to them.

Don't write what they'd say today. Write what you want them to say. This is aspirational. You're defining the person you want to become, seen through the eyes of the people closest to your life.

1. A close friend or partner

What would the person closest to you say about who you were to them? Think about the qualities they'd name, the moments they'd recall, the way you made them feel. Consider:

• What kind of friend or partner were you in the hard moments, not just the easy ones?

• What did you bring to the relationship that no one else could?

• How did you make them feel about themselves?

• What would they miss most?

2. A colleague or collaborator

What would someone you worked with say about how you showed up professionally? Think about the way you worked, what you stood for, and what you helped build. Consider:

• What was it like to work alongside you, day to day?

• What did you care about in your work that went beyond the job description?

• What did you build or contribute that lasted after you left?

3. Someone you mentored or helped

What would someone whose life you changed say about your impact? This could be a mentee, a student, a younger colleague, or someone you helped through a difficult time. Consider:

• What did you give them that they couldn't find elsewhere?

• How did your support change the direction of their life or work?

• What lesson from you do they still carry?

4. Your own honest assessment

Now step back from other people's eyes. What would you say about your own life without performing for anyone? This is the hardest one. You can't hide behind someone else's admiration here. Consider:

• Did you live according to your own values, or did you spend too long following someone else's script?

• What are you proudest of, and does it match what other people would name?

• Where did you fall short of who you wanted to be?

• What would you want to be known for, in one sentence?

The gap

Now comes the uncomfortable part. For each perspective, compare what you want them to say with what they'd probably say today. The distance between those two versions is your gap and shows you where the real work is.

Reflection

Sit with what you wrote. Then work through these prompts:

• Which perspective was hardest to write, and why?

• Where is the biggest gap between your aspirational eulogy and what someone would say about you right now?

• What specific thing could you do in the next 6 months to close one of those gaps?

• Are any of the four eulogies in tension with each other? (For example, does the colleague's eulogy describe someone who conflicts with the friend's eulogy?)

• What word or phrase kept coming up across all four? That repetition probably points to a core value.

• If you could only be remembered for one thing, what would it be?