Resume Virtues vs. Eulogy Virtues
Your life is not meant to be optimized for LinkedIn, though many people live that way. What's more important is to have a glowing obituary, a full funeral, and a beautiful eulogy at the end of your life.
In an article and book by David Brooks, he illustrates the difference between resume virtues versus eulogy virtues.
"It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest, or faithful. 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."
So what are the tools needed to build inner character, the eulogy virtues Brooks describes?
- Self-awareness
- Self-reflection
- Self-improvement
- Choosing causes bigger than one's ownself
- Curiosity
- Willingness to try new things
- Community
- Love
- Resilience
- Forgiveness
While there's much more to be said about each of these, the journey toward building eulogy virtues starts with recognizing their importance and committing to their development.