way of thinking about the Destiination is to imagine…
Page 181 way of thinking about the Destiination is to imagine a short eulogy that your best friend might deliver at your funeral,.
— from The Landing (Death) · 21 letters on life and its challenges by Charles handy
In the book
Sit in that room before you furnish your life, and you will furnish it differently. Write the short eulogy you would want your closest friend to give. Alfred Nobel, the story goes, once read his own obituary by accident — a newspaper had confused him with his brother — and so disliked the man he found described there that he rewrote the rest of his life on purpose; you can do the same deliberately, writing down now what you want to have been and to have done. […] Then the concrete steps — a short checklist to close the teaching: Write your own landing first. Compose the eulogy you would want, draft the obituary you would be proud of, and then fly backward from it. Sit, at least once, in the imagined hospital bed and let it sort the urgent from the trivial. — The Landing (Death)
And don't try to pass on everything; the wisest teachers always pinpointed just a few central values and asked their students to live by those with sincerity. Aim at the right epitaph. Picture, honestly, the eulogy your closest friend would give at your funeral — imagine the four people who might speak, one from your family, one friend, one from your work, one from your community, and ask what they could truthfully say. Be yourself, no matter what anyone says, and love who you really are — the versions of you that you dislike are usually just costumes your ego stitched together. — Legacy / The Logbook (Legacy/Epilogue)