My name is Albert from Lagos Nigeria. I came across your blog and i really found it very interesting. Good to know people like you are still very much around. If we could keep thinking and enforcing our thoughts, our continent would rise beyond our imaginations.
About writing your obituary, i guess the best way to look at it is what people will say about you when you are no more. its not a scary exercise. it helps in building your own expectations and it guides how you live your daily life.

See you mate.

Cheers,
Nyomi

I watched the whole Steve Jobs video. Had seen it a few months ago but I just understood what he was saying in a different light. Thank you for sharing. If you are reading this and haven’t watched it check it out http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA

I said “Writing your own private obituary is an out of the box way of thinking about your life and what you call success.It is an excellent way to put your life in perspective and I recommend that you try it.”

The reason I recommend that people write an obituary is to avoid being stuck on unimportant details of life. It is to help you nail what really counts in your life over the long term. An example I gave is family and friends. When people are chasing the mighty dollar, they may ignore friends and family. But when looked with the end in mind, many people would make different choices in life.

I am not saying that writing an obituary will make people succeed in life. What I mean is that it will help you choose where to spend your time, energy and focus. To change the meaning of what success is all about over the long term.

You say that you appraise your commitments continually. That is very commendable, more of us should do that.

On the issue of a private and public obituary, it is a personal choice. I find that by writing about my life as I see it helps me be honest with myself about who I really am. I set my own benchmarks, goals for improving myself. This include things like self control, self discipline, the kind of thoughts doing the rounds in my mind. As you say this impacts on how we relate with other people. But these are not issues that other people see. They only see the manifestation of the private me.

You got me thinking when you said that the immediate benefit of writing an obituary is public relations. I am not exactly sure what you meant but I interpret it to mean that writing an obituary will help you relate with people better. The “public” obituary is, when you think about it, a tool for managing how others perceive you a.k.a public relations.

Once again thank you for your input.

You advice on writing my obituary every year, why should I do it? Is this not new year resolutions – resuscitated every year? Is it not pessimistic optimism, why should I imagine my own death and start going through end of life planning? Is that the best approach? I doubt.

If you have read Stephen R. Covey’s 7th Habits of Highly Effective people – Habit 2 is what he calls “Begin with end in mind” – visualising your own death. I would agree to such a long term approach – one year is too short to make commitments (For your info I do make commitments on various aspects of my life and appraise continually). It takes longer than that, besides interplay of so many other external factors not within our control. It’s very easy to sit down and write things (this reminds me the annual rituals of business plan in organisations, budgeting and forecasting – which are done just because they are supposed to be done in most cases).

What, really, is the difference between what you call a private and public obituary? There are personal and interpersonal issues, but should they be separate? Can I respectfully deal with my friends if I do not respect my self? Socrates said we ought to “Know thyself” – and from that perspective deal with others – the same thing Covey calls private victory then public victory – it never means that they are not separate.

I do agree with most of the points you raise – but find it intellectually not convincing and very simplistic that just by annually writing obituaries we are going to change our lives. It takes more than that and its immediate impact may be public relations.

On money – yes that’s a right approach. I wish more people could listen to your voice.

Overall, a nice piece that stimulates thinking.

Keep writing.

Watch this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA
and skip to about the 8th minute or alternative watch the whole thing. I agree with Steve Jobs on a number of things.

And here, http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html is a transcript of his speech (not word for word, but it is close enough).

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away”

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”