Death Creates Clarity

0:00Uh, I'm gonna try to not become emotional in the next question. >> Okay. >> But I probably will. Um, >> I can just like say crude comments to like break the ice. >> Yeah, that'll probably help. Um, >> someone close to you passed away recently and um, you're half French. >> Uhhuh. >> My wife is French. >> You signed off on your, you know, post with ML. >> Yeah. >> Um, >> and then you shortly tweeted after it, Death Creates Clarity.

0:27>> Yeah. What are you clearer on today? I think it creates a forcing function around prioritization and I think that like um I mean it's the ultimate razor of like will this matter and I think that writing I think writing my mother's eulogy was really valuable for me because if anyone here has written a eulogy or an obituary or anything like that you get to see what's included and what's not included and a hilarious amount of the things that we stress about in life are not included. Also, I'll harass one of the things that we strive to achieve are also not included.

1:06And so, when I think about and I think Charlie Mer is the first like he's the first person that I know said, I'm sure plenty of people have said it beforehand, but um I love the concept of the reverse obituary or the reverse eulogy of like what would Alex's eulogy be? It's only going to be 500 words to a thousand. That's how long eulogies are. Which, by the way, you're like, "Wow, that's not that long." um because people are there, they're busy, it's, you know, it's rush, it's rush hour, they got places to be and you're not trying to take too much time and so you have to write it out. And so usually like the accomplishments we have, like if I really think about like what the, you know, the Alex funeral is going to be, no one's going to give a [ __ ] about how much money I made or anything like that.

1:51No one, like imagine Titan of Industry, right? Like some people want to be cover of Forbes or whatever it is. It's like when you go to that guy's funeral, you know, they don't start with like he was a titan of industry. Okay, fine. That was one sentence and that was that covers 40 years. Great. Uh but then they're going to transition to two things, which is what I saw as the common theme, which is service and character. And so in thinking about like what what are the things or what are the causes that I that I deem meaningful enough to serve and then what traits uh do I need to exhibit in order to become the person capable of serving them at the highest level. I think everything that we do between now and then or at least for me is in service of that eulogy or that obituary. And I think that's the I think that's the reason that you know death creates clarity at least for me. When you have those nice moments it's like what can I how can I benefit from this?