Eulogy Virtues > Resume Virtues
David Brooks makes a distinction that has shifted my core motivations as a person, and leader.
He draws a line between resume virtues and eulogy virtues. Resume virtues are the things you'd list on a professional document — titles earned, results delivered, skills acquired, organizations built, marathons run. Eulogy virtues are what someone would say at your funeral: that you were present, that you were honest, that you loved well, that you showed up when it cost you something.
Both matter. But many of us, spend a disproportionate amount of time checking one list.
This isn't just a philosophical observation. It's a diagnostic. Most of the leaders we work with arrive at some version of the same realization: they've spent decades excelling at performance, and somewhere in the accumulating achievements, they lost track of the person doing the performing. The relationships thinned. The interior life went quiet. The work became load-bearing in ways it was never designed to be.
What's striking is how often strivers frame this as a failure of discipline — as if they simply didn't try hard enough to maintain balance. But the problem isn't effort. It's orientation. A life organized around what you can accomplish will always crowd out a life organized around who you are becoming
The leaders I most admire — and the ones who seem to flourish over time, not just succeed in bursts — share something in common: they've made peace with the fact that meaning isn't manufactured. It's received. It comes through the slow work of being shaped by relationships, by suffering, by honesty about their limits. It comes through the kind of character that gets built in rooms no one else sees, in conversations that don't produce anything, in commitments kept when no one would have noticed if you broke them.
Brooks is right that most of us know this. The hard part isn't understanding it — it's reorganizing a life around it.
That's the work. Not a productivity adjustment. A reorientation of what you're building toward, and who you're becoming in the process.
A good resume may get you in the room. But the eulogy is what the room remembers.
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Terracotta Consulting works with leaders and organizations navigating the space between achievement and meaning. If you're in a season of reorientation, we'd love to talk.
