This doesn’t seem like a great subject to be building my readership, I grant you, but bear with me for a minute.
To continue a little theme of work of the last couple of days….
When I began my career in the government, I was in my mid-20s and among the youngest employees. There was a significant number of people who were about to retire and within a few years, there was a new influx of younger employees. This was great for building my friendships, but one thing that became apparent to me was that after the retirement parties and the signed picture frames that retiring colleagues received, most of the retirees were never mentioned again. Their work sometimes endured for a while (a computer program, a research paper, a dataset they built or a funding stream they created), but even these quickly evolved or fizzled and very few former colleagues were remembered for what they did or changed.
I didn’t pay much attention to this at the time, but now that I am in a position of more intentionally deciding how my own career will evolve and what I want to work on, or how I want to work, it’s relevant that the people I still remember from those early days are the ones I enjoyed working with - or just talking with in the break room. They were not necessarily (in fact, perhaps none) of the people who made the ‘biggest’ impact for the agency or in traditional terms of success.
Most of us will not make great discoveries, write books that span the centuries, cure a disease, or lead a revolution. And even for those luminaries who did, we still can’t recall most of their names.
And yet, in our jobs, many of us are relentlessly focused on leaving an imprint, a legacy, an impact, a lasting something that we can be remembered for. We spend extra time at the office, or take extra assignments, or write yet another memo or email for the boss to consider. We eschew time with friends or hobbies or fun so that we can do a bit of extra work to ‘get ahead’ or deliver that thing, or make sure the conference or the talk or the project goes super well.
We will likely not be remembered for it. Not for long anyway.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t important to strive for excellence, and to contribute to the greater good, but it is equally important to do something you value, including spending time on the things that matter outside of work, and/or evolving your work so that it becomes better aligned with your changing skills and life goals.
Our happiness depends on strong friendships, but most of us neglect them under the pressures of a long to-do list.
Our health depends on a moderate diet with plenty of activity, but most of us struggle even to fit in a 20 minute walk or a once-a-week yoga class.
Our longevity depends on a sense of value and fulfillment in retirement, but after we leave the workplace, many of us struggle with what to do with ourselves. We have few hobbies of importance.
Although not a new idea of course, the writer David Brooks, in his book The Road to Character, distinguishes between ‘resumé virtues’ and ‘eulogy virtues’. The eulogy virtues are naturally the things that you hope people will say at your funeral. For most of us, these are characteristics like kindness and caring and being a good friend. The resume virtues (‘Her inbox was always at zero when she left the office at 9pm!’) are almost never things that really matter in terms of the true impact on the people closest to us.
So the good news about likely being quickly forgotten is that it takes the pressure off. No need to work yourself to death (oh the irony) to contribute a legacy, when the chances are that your brief imprint will have nothing to do with work anyway.
So what if we focused on our eulogy virtues this week or this year or for as long as we can avoid being distracted? How would it change our work or our friendships or our service/contributions, our spiritual practices, or attention to other interests?
I admit that I am musing on this one too, as mid-life throws up inevitable questions of legacy, impact, and how to be valuable (and make a living!) as well as how to enjoy the next chapter….
Thoughts?
As a boat captain once told me as we glided through the ultra blue waters off the coast of Belize, “Your life is your life.” His is spent in that beautiful place, listening to folks with means extol the virtues of the visit while choosing to return to a life that’s not extolled. He may be one of the smartest people that I’ve ever met.