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