Huffington Magazine Issue 89 | Page 61

HUFFINGTON 02.23.14 THRIVE Jobs was a lot more than just the guy who invented the iPhone. He was a brother and a husband and a father who knew the true value of what technology can so easily distract us from. Even if you build an iconic product, one that lives on in our lives, what is foremost in the minds of the people you care about most are the prioritizing the things that really matter. Anyone with a smartphone and a full email in-box knows that it’s easy to be busy while not being aware that we’re actually living. A life that embraces the Third Metric is one lived in a way that’s mindful of our eventual eulogy. “I’m always relieved when someone is delivering a eulogy and I realize I’m The last time my mother got angry with me before she died was when she saw me reading my email and talking to my children at the same time. memories you built in their lives. In her 1951 novel Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar has the Roman emperor meditating on his death: “It seems to me as I write this hardly important to have been emperor.” Thomas Jefferson’s epitaph describes him as “author of the Declaration of American Independence . . . and father of the University of Virginia.” There is no mention of his presidency. The old adage that we should live every day as if it were our last usually means that we shouldn’t wait until death is imminent to begin listening to it,” joked George Carlin. We may not be able to witness our own eulogy, but we’re actually writing it all the time, every day. The question is how much we’re giving the eulogizer to work with. In the summer of 2013, an obituary of a Seattle woman named Jane Lotter, who died of cancer at sixty, went viral. The author of the obit was Lotter herself. “One of the few advantages of dying from Grade 3, Stage IIIC endometrial cancer, recurrent and metastasized to the liver and abdomen,” she wrote, “is that you have time to write your own obituary.” After giving a lovely and lively account of her life, she showed that