Write the obituary you want to earn, then spend the rest of your life closing the gap between that page and your calendar.
Write the obituary you want to earn, then spend the rest of your life closing the gap between that page and your calendar.
The idea comes from Randy Alcorn in The Treasure Principle, and he anchors it in one of history's strangest second chances: "Alfred Nobel read his own obituary and changed his life." A newspaper mistakenly ran Nobel's obituary while he was still alive, and what he read was a portrait of a man remembered for explosives. He disliked the summary enough to rewrite the ending, and today his name means the prize, not the dynamite. Almost nobody gets that preview. Alcorn's point is that you can give it to yourself on purpose.
The exercise works because it flips the direction of planning. Most family planning starts from where you are and projects forward: income, school fees, the next asset. The obituary starts from the end and works backward, and the end has a way of exposing what the forward view hides. Nobody's obituary says they answered email promptly or upgraded the car on schedule. This corpus keeps finding the same thing in families that hold together across generations: they know what they are for, and they can say it in a sentence or two. The written obituary is the fastest route to that sentence. It also converts a vague ambition into a standard you can be measured against, by yourself, once a year. A legacy you have never written down cannot drift, because it was never anywhere to begin with. One you have written down can be checked, and checked things get corrected.
Here is the habit, once a year:
Three sentences, once a year, revised for life. That is the whole discipline, and it is one of the few in this corpus that costs nothing and touches everything.
LegacyPot turns the exercise into an annual appointment. When your revision date comes around, the app prompts you: "Alfred Nobel read his own obituary and changed his life. Write yours in three sentences, then live toward it." Your past versions stay side by side in your legacy record, so your children will one day read not only the final statement but the twenty drafts of a life being steered.
This week, write the three sentences for the first time, even badly, and date them.