Eulogy Versus Resume (Biodata) Virtues - David
Brooks
About once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light. These
people can be in any walk of life. They seem deeply good. They listen well. They
make you feel funny and valued. You often catch them looking after other people
and as they do so their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with
gratitude. They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. They
are not thinking about themselves at all.
When I meet such a person it brightens my whole day. But I confess I often
have a sadder thought: It occurs to me that I’ve achieved a decent level of
career success, but I have not achieved that. I have not achieved that
generosity of spirit, or that depth of character.
A few years ago I realized that I wanted to be a bit more like those
people. I realized that if I wanted to do that I was going to have to work
harder to save my own soul. I was going to have to have the sort of moral
adventures that produce that kind of goodness. I was going to have to be better
at balancing my life.
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.
About the Author: David Brooks is a columnist from NY Times. The above
excerpt is from his article The Moral Bucket List.
