The Eulogy I Wrote For Myself

The piece that has shaped my year.

After returning from my workout on the last Sunday in March, during a 3-week break to reconsider my vision for the year and for the next few years, I sat down and started to write. I typed on my iPhone in the DayOne app, a journaling app that houses every aspect of my life from the mundane details of what I did to the deep knowing of my soul.

Over the course of hours, everything unspooled into a massive 8,000-word journal entry.

No thoughts. Only pure emotion.

In my life, all major moments of change have occurred on the “2” year in every decade: 12, 22, 32. I was 6 weeks away from 42, and I knew this would be a year of epic change.

For as much as I write, I rarely allow myself to write in that way: Unfiltered. Unedited. Unrestrained.

When I finished, I left it there. I didn’t share it with anyone. But it changed me to write it.

In 8,000 words, I covered a lot of ground — superficial things like how I want to plan my grocery shopping better, ideas about what it really means to define a brand, thoughts about how the real estate industry and others are completely missing the point of what they should be doing.

But the heart of it was a reflection on my life. On what really matters.

I reflected back on a decade of work, on changes I was considering in my business and in my life. And somehow, as tends to happen when writing, it evolved into something else.

I veered to that place that can be difficult to face, but that helps us get clear on what is really at stake for us: the eulogy. Specifically, my eulogy.

For all that people talk about legacy, here’s some hard truth: we don’t get to choose our legacy. You can do the greatest work in the history of the world; you have no guarantee that people will remember you for that work. Our legacy is determined by others.

But I wondered what people might say at my funeral. And what would I want them to say?

Suddenly, words poured out of me. It was as if another being took over, writing about me, as if I wasn’t there, tapping my fingers on the small keyboard of my iPhone.