When You're Dying, Who Will You Wish You'd Become?
By Derek Neighbors on November 29, 2025
I watched a man I respected stand at a podium and receive an award for exceptional quarterly performance. The room gave him a standing ovation. He’d delivered numbers that most leaders only dream about. Revenue up. Market share expanding. Millions saved through operational improvements he’d personally driven.
He looked genuinely happy. This was the culmination of years of work.
Eighteen months later, I sat in a church pew at his funeral.
His daughter spoke first. She talked about how he’d taught her to ride a bike, how he never missed her recitals even when work was crushing him, how he always made her feel like she was the most important person in any room. His wife shared stories about their early years, the sacrifices they’d made together, the way he’d held her hand through her mother’s illness. A former employee, now a VP at another company, flew in from across the country just to say that this man had changed his life by believing in him when no one else did.
Not once did anyone mention the quarterly numbers. Not the revenue growth. Not the market share. Not a single metric that had consumed so much of his final years on earth.
The spreadsheet that had defined his professional identity was completely irrelevant the moment it couldn’t define him anymore. What remained was something else entirely.
What We’ve Been Taught to Believe
Somewhere along the way, we built an entire culture around the belief that what can be measured is what matters.
For some of us, that means quarterly performance and annual reviews. Engagement scores and growth percentages. Dashboards and scorecards and elaborate systems to quantify every dimension of professional life.
But the pattern isn’t limited to corner offices. It shows up everywhere. The follower count that defines whether your voice matters. The bank balance that determines whether you’ve “made it.” The possessions that signal success to neighbors who don’t actually care about you. The approval of people whose opinions shouldn’t carry weight but somehow do. We all have our metrics, even if they’re not on a corporate dashboard.
And underneath all of it runs an implicit promise that nobody says out loud but everybody believes: hit these numbers and you’ll matter. Achieve these targets and you’ll be successful. Optimize these metrics and you’ll have built something meaningful with your time on earth.
So we optimize. We arrange our lives around output and sacrifice relationships for results. We fuse our identities with our performance until we can’t tell where the striving ends and the person begins. Something external becomes the final judge of whether we’re worthy, whether we’re enough, whether our lives have meaning.
We make decisions based on what moves our particular numbers. We evaluate the people around us based on their contribution to our metrics. We measure our own worth by how we stack up against targets that someone else defined for reasons we’ve never questioned.
And nobody stops to ask the question that matters: will any of this be remembered once we’re gone?
When the Lie Breaks Open
Then you attend a funeral. Not as an obligation, but as someone who actually knew the person. And you sit there and listen to what gets said about a life.
Nobody talks about the quarterly targets they achieved. Nobody celebrates the efficiency improvements they implemented. Nobody weeps over the strategic initiatives that will now go unfinished.
They talk about who the person was. They talk about how they made people feel. They share stories about small moments of kindness that the deceased probably forgot five minutes after they happened but that the recipient carried for decades. They talk about character. About presence. About the impact this person had on actual human beings, not on spreadsheets.
The eulogies never mention KPIs. The tears aren’t about revenue growth. The loss people feel, the real loss, the ache that will linger for years, has nothing to do with any metric that ever appeared on any dashboard.
That’s the crack. The moment when you realize that the things consuming all your energy, the things keeping you up at night, the things you sacrifice your health and your relationships and your peace of mind to achieve, aren’t the things that will survive you.
Or maybe you discover the crack differently. Maybe it’s 3 AM and you’re lying awake, stripped of the distractions that fill your days, and a question surfaces that you’ve been avoiding for years: Is this actually what I want to be remembered for? Is this the person I want to have become?
The metrics that felt so urgent under fluorescent lights feel hollow when you’re alone in the dark, confronting the simple fact that your time here is finite and running out.
What the Stoics Understood
The ancient Stoics had a practice called memento mori. Remember you will die.
Not as morbid fixation. As a lens for clarity.
Marcus Aurelius, while running the Roman Empire, wrote in his private journal:
You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.
He meditated on death daily. Not because he was depressed. Because mortality stripped away everything unimportant and revealed what actually mattered.
Seneca wrote to his student Lucilius:
Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing.
He understood that treating time as infinite was the surest way to waste it on things that didn’t matter.
The Stoics used death as a filter. Every decision, every priority, every commitment passed through the question: if this were my last day, would this be worth my time?
This wasn’t paralysis. Marcus ran an empire. Seneca advised emperors. They were highly productive. But their productivity was aimed at what endured, not what impressed.
The pattern shows up everywhere you look closely. Bronnie Ware spent years as a palliative care nurse, recording the regrets of the dying. The patterns are consistent: Nobody regrets not working harder. The regrets are about relationships neglected. Authenticity abandoned. Courage avoided. The metrics that seemed so urgent become irrelevant when the only metric left is how you spent your limited time.
The Revelation
Here’s what survives your funeral:
The people you developed. Who grew because you invested in them? Who became more capable because you chose to spend time with them when you could have been optimizing something else? That investment compounds in ways nothing else does. It extends decades beyond your last breath through people you’ll never meet.
The relationships you actually showed up for. Not the professional network. Not the LinkedIn connections. The people who genuinely knew you. Who experienced your presence rather than your performance. Who would feel the ache of your absence for years.
The character you cultivated through thousands of small choices. Not what you accomplished. Who you were. When the metrics are stripped away, what remains is the person you built yourself into, one decision at a time.
The courage you exercised when it cost you something. The hard conversations you didn’t avoid. The authentic path you chose even when the popular one was easier. The integrity you maintained when no one would have known if you’d compromised.
Everything else evaporates.
Why do these things endure while the metrics don’t? Because character propagates. Someone you invested in goes on to invest in others. The courage you modeled becomes courage others find in themselves. Metrics are terminal. They end with you. But virtue is generative. It multiplies through everyone it touches, rippling outward long after you’re gone.
This isn’t an argument against achievement. The surgeon who saves thousands of lives, the teacher who transforms generations of students, the builder who creates something beautiful and useful. These matter. But they matter because of who the person became in the process of doing them, and because of the people whose lives they touched along the way. Achievement divorced from becoming is hollow. Achievement as an expression of character is legacy.
The quarterly win disappears the moment you’re gone. But the investment you made in someone’s growth carries forward for decades. We optimize for what we can measure while neglecting what actually endures.
And then there are the stories we tell ourselves: “I’ll focus on relationships after I hit this goal.” “I’ll become who I want to be once I achieve X.” “I’ll invest in people after I’ve built something.”
Sometimes these are legitimate sequencing. The parent working two jobs to provide for their kids IS investing in people through that sacrifice. The founder building something that will employ hundreds IS creating conditions for others to flourish. The pursuit of difficult achievements can itself be character-forming. Pursuing something hard enough to demand everything you have often forges exactly the character that endures.
But most of the time, these are comfortable postponements. Ways to avoid the harder question of who we’re becoming while we’re achieving. The deathbed doesn’t wait for your timeline. There is no someday. There’s only what you’re becoming right now, in the midst of whatever you’re pursuing.
Living the Memento Mori
This isn’t about abandoning ambition. Marcus Aurelius was one of the most effective rulers in Roman history. The question isn’t whether to achieve. It’s what to achieve for.
When you start seeing clearly, certain things shift naturally.
The morning question changes. Before the day consumes you, you find yourself asking: “If this were my last day, would I spend it this way?” Not as paralysis. As filter. Most days, you’ll still do what needs doing. But some mornings, the answer will be no. Those are the moments that matter.
The calendar tells the truth. You start noticing the ratio: how much time invested in metrics that won’t outlive you versus how much time invested in people who will. The ratio reveals your actual priorities. Not your stated priorities. Your actual ones.
The question you ask yourself at the end of the day shifts too. Less “What did I accomplish?” and more “Who did I become?” Every decision is character formation. Every interaction is either building or eroding the person you’re becoming.
And you start noticing where you’ve been postponing what matters. The mentoring that no one will credit you for. The hard conversation you keep putting off. The truth that needs saying even when silence would be easier. Building people instead of just projects. The capacity you develop in others outlasts any system you could create.
The person you’d want to be remembered as. Not someday. Today. In the next interaction. In the next decision. In how you show up right now.
The Test
This week, imagine your funeral.
What would you want said about who you were? Not what you accomplished. Who you were. The character you embodied. The impact you had on actual humans. The person you became.
Now look at how you spent this week. The calendar doesn’t lie. The gap between the eulogy you want and the life you’re living is the only metric that matters.
Close the gap. Today. Not someday.
arete, excellence, isn’t about peak performance. It’s about becoming your highest self. The Greeks understood that developing virtue is the highest function of a human being. Not because of what it produces, but because of what it is.
Character doesn’t matter because people will remember it. Character matters because becoming fully human requires it. Even if no one ever knew what you’d become, even if your funeral was empty and your name forgotten, the person you became would still matter. Virtue is its own reward. The soul that develops itself moves closer to something eternal, regardless of whether anyone witnesses the journey.
The deathbed doesn’t measure achievement. It measures character. Who you’re becoming IS the legacy. Everything else is temporary noise.
The hardest part of memento mori isn’t understanding it. It’s living it when everyone around you is obsessed with metrics that won’t survive their funerals. MasteryLab creates accountability for becoming, not just achieving: daily focus on what actually matters, community support for character development, and a framework for building the legacy that outlasts the spreadsheet. If you’re ready to close the gap between the eulogy you want and the life you’re living, join the community.
