Resume Virtues vs Eulogy Virtues: Which List Are You Living For?

One list is about what you did. The other is about who you were.

David Brooks, the columnist, drew a line between two kinds of virtues. Resume virtues are the ones you list on your CV: skills, accomplishments, credentials, the market value you bring. Eulogy virtues are the ones people name at your funeral: kindness, courage, honesty, whether you showed up when someone needed you. The gap between them is the gap between ambition and character.

The problem isn’t that we pursue resume virtues. The problem is that we pursue only them.

The Culture We Inherited

From early childhood, we are trained in resume virtues. Get good grades. Build a resume. Gain credentials. Climb. The system rewards these. Schools rank students. Employers screen by qualification. Society tells you: optimize your market value.

Eulogy virtues are harder to teach in an institution. You can’t give a grade for kindness. You can’t certify courage. No university diploma says “This person was faithful.” So the education system, by default, teaches what it can measure. Resume building. Skill accumulation.

By the time you’re 25, you’ve spent decades learning to optimize one half of the human equation. The other half—the qualities that make a life coherent instead of just successful—has been left to chance.

The Tension in Real Life

The tension emerges when you realize they can pull in opposite directions.

To build a strong resume, you might say yes to every opportunity: take the promotion, chase the title, build the network, accumulate credentials. You work late. You miss dinners. You prioritize the impressive over the present.

To build character, you sometimes say no: no to the promotion if it compromises your values, no to the opportunity if it means being unavailable for the people you love, no to the climb if the next rung requires you to become someone you don’t want to be.

Both matter. But the system incentivizes only one. A paycheck rewards resume building. Nothing in your bank account comes from being the person your child remembers. Nothing on your LinkedIn reflects the Tuesday afternoon you sat with a grieving friend. So if you’re not deliberate about it, the graph naturally slopes toward accomplishment and away from character.

What Character Investment Actually Looks Like

Investing in eulogy virtues isn’t about rejecting achievement. It’s about redirecting your attention toward a different metric: How do I want to be remembered? Not “What should my title be?” but “What kind of person do I want to become?”

This shifts everything. You might still work hard—but on projects that matter, alongside people who bring out your better self. You might still be ambitious—but about becoming wiser, steadier, more generous, more truthful. You might still climb—but only if the climb doesn’t require you to betray your word or abandon the people who depend on you.

Some of the most accomplished people in any field are also the ones known for loyalty, humility, or integrity. Not despite their success, but sometimes because of it. They could have cheated, cut corners, stepped on people. Instead, they chose the harder path. The resume and the eulogy don’t have to be at war.

The Gap Between Your Two Lists

Here’s a useful exercise: Write both lists. Not formally. Just think through them.

What’s on your resume? Your degrees, your titles, your accomplishments, the things you could describe to a stranger at a professional event and they’d nod, impressed.

What would be on your eulogy? The patience you showed. The promise you kept when it was hard. The person you were to your sibling or friend. The way you made people feel seen.

If you’re like most people, the two lists barely overlap. One is full of nouns and achievements. The other is full of verbs and character. One is about what you did. The other is about who you were.

The gap is where the real work of a life happens.

One Small Way to Close It

You don’t have to overhaul your life. You don’t have to resign and become a monk. But you can make small redirections that compound.

Pick one person—someone who matters to you, someone you’ve been meaning to prioritize, someone who probably feels the weight of your absence. This month, show up for them differently. Not a grand gesture. Something steady: a regular call, a standing coffee, whatever it is that says “I’m here, you’re not forgotten.”

Or pick one value—honesty, maybe, or patience, or courage—and decide that you’re going to take a small risk for it. Tell the truth in a situation where you’ve been quiet. Step back from an opportunity that doesn’t align with who you want to be. Show up as the version of yourself that, on a Tuesday afternoon at your deathbed, you’d be proud to have been.

One small redirection. This month. Then watch how it expands.

FAQ

Doesn’t this mean sacrificing career success? Not necessarily. Many of the most successful people prioritize character. But it does mean not sacrificing everything for career success. You might pass on a promotion. You might leave work early. You might turn down the bigger paycheck. The question is whether you’ve decided these tradeoffs consciously or you’re just defaulting to the system that trains you to climb. What if my job requires me to be someone I don’t want to be? That’s the signal to change something. Not necessarily the job—though sometimes yes. But at minimum, the arrangement. Set boundaries. Find a way to be yourself within the constraints. Or get out. You have one life. Spending most of your waking hours becoming someone you aren’t is a high price, even if the paycheck is steady. How do I know which virtues matter most? Look to the people you actually admire—not the famous ones, but the real ones in your life. What qualities do you respect? Who do you want your children to become like? Whose funeral would you attend not from obligation, but from genuine loss? Those are your clues. Your eulogy virtues are already in you somewhere. The question is whether you’re going to invest in them. Isn’t some of this just luck and circumstance? Yes. You need a certain stability to even have this choice. But notice: you’re thinking about it, which means at some level you have it. And for the parts you do control—what you say yes to, how you show up, whether you keep your word—those are entirely yours.