Writing obituaries is hard work, and most people do not enjoy the process. Writing an obituary is like facing death and facing the finiteness of life, also of your own life. In the process of writing you experience a wide range of emotions, ranging from grief over a loss to the warm smiles of fond memories. It also helps us put life back in perspective, let’s us focus on what’s truly important and what might not be.
This is why writing an obituary for yourself is a very powerful exercise to help you focus on those important things. Stephen Covey asks you to do this exercise in his record-selling book “The 7 habits of highly effective people“, and I’ve added a much more detailed version in my ebook “Personal Core Values“. We want you to focus on the important aspects of your life, and facing the end and looking back on your life is a powerful visualization to help you do that.
The results of this exercise may be that you change some aspects of your life, sometimes just a little and sometimes dramatically. Roz Savage is a woman that shows how this exercise can cause dramatic changes for the better. In the TED video below she tells about how she did this exercise and what the results are.
She used a variation to the obituary exercise that I really like. Instead of only writing the obituary of your life as you envision it, she also wrote the obituary of the life she was currently leading. By doing both of them you’ll get a very clear vision of the difference between them. Roz discovered that she was on the wrong path, and she turned her life around and rowed solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I don’t think I’ve ever written my obituary, but I once did the exercise of writing down what I hope my loved ones would tell me in a speech for my 80th birthday. It was somewhat similar to this, although I suppose an obituary would be even more powerful.
And also, I guess this is something you shouldn’t do just once but over and over again at specific times in your life, maybe once each year, to see if you are on the right track…
Thanks for the reminder, Lodewijk! And how’s your family doing? Your kids have must grown quite a bit since we last talked?
Hi Jarkko!
It pretty much is the same exercise, but a little less scary for a lot of people! Fear of death is definitely a factor that plays a role in the willingness of people to do (or not do) the obituary exercise.
I agree that you should do it every couple of years to re-align. Life changes and so do people, and your results may change over time too.
The family is doing great
The kids sure are growing, Esmee has already had her first birthday. Time flies, but I’m loving it all the way!
I agree with the previous commenter that it would be useful to do this exercise several times over one’s life. I had done it quite a number of years ago in a seminar and ran across it in a notebook recently. I sure was a shallow person back when I wrote that.
People grow and change, Jean. You just found out that you grew a lot
There’s no point in talking yourself down, even a past version of yourself. Your cumulative past has made you into the wonderful person you are today.
Wow, not what I thought your article was about at all. I thought you were going to talk about someone who writes them for a living, but no, it’s about writing our own. I haven’t done it but did once write a letter to myself, as if I were an old woman and talking to my younger self. It was an amazing exercise, very supportive and full of letting go worry. Inhabiting our future, even if it is our death, is a kind of summing up. In that moment we can see if that sum is enough and makes changes if it’s not. It’s almost like getting a second chance. Cool idea.