The Eulogy Intervention
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
A psychology intervention Wiseman covers in 59 Seconds, and a more rigorous version of the gravestone question Ali used to redirect his own career. You imagine a friend standing up at your funeral to deliver your eulogy — and you write it yourself, as they would say it, perhaps ten years from now. The exercise is only partly about goal setting. Its real force comes from the evidence test: for every line in the eulogy, you ask what evidence your friend would actually present for that claim, and whether your current direction produces it. Because eulogies naturally cover both personal and professional life, the output is a rounded view of yourself, which is why it catches career-focused people who are quietly neglecting their relationships.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Set the horizon
Fix the point in time — Wiseman suggests this could be ten years from now. A defined horizon makes the exercise about a trajectory you can still influence rather than an abstract someday.
- 2
Write the eulogy in your friend's voice
Write what a friend would stand up and say about you at your funeral. Writing it yourself, in their words, is what makes it concrete rather than a private wish list.
- 3
Cover both personal and professional life
Eulogies naturally span both, which is precisely why the intervention gives a rounded view of yourself rather than a career plan. Ali's gravestone version produced three items: good father, good husband, inspirational teacher.
- 4
Interrogate the evidence for each line
Take a line like 'he was a wonderful husband' and ask what evidence your friend would present for it — did this, and this, and this. Then ask whether that is true today.
Pro tip If you cannot name the evidence, that line is an aspiration, not a fact.
- 5
Compare against your current direction
Look at what you are actually doing and ask whether it is heading toward the eulogy you wrote, or whether you are so career-focused you are forgetting the relationships that half the eulogy depends on.
- 6
Use it as a barometer, not a destination
Ali's framing, which Wiseman agreed with: rather than fixating on the eulogy as a fixed target, treat it as a periodic check on whether you are currently going in the direction it describes.
Watch out Treating the output as a rigid life plan reintroduces the lock-in problem that costs people opportunities.
In the wild
Taking a break from medicine in 2020, Ali asked himself what he would like written on his gravestone many years in the future. The answer came out as three things: good father, good husband, inspirational teacher. Connecting the dots backwards, he realised almost all the meaningful moments of his life had involved teaching — tutoring maths as a teenager, helping people into med school, teaching medical students. That reframed his work as learning cool things and teaching them, which is cheap to do with the internet, and now most of his days are reading, writing, teaching, podcasting and making videos.
→ A career redirection out of clinical medicine into teaching-shaped work, arrived at from the eulogy end rather than the job-title end.
Common mistakes
Writing only the professional half
The rounded view is the point. A eulogy that lists only achievements skips exactly the personal claims — partner, parent, friend — whose missing evidence the exercise is designed to surface.
Skipping the evidence question
Wiseman notes the intervention is only slightly a goal-setting one. Without asking what evidence a friend would actually present, it collapses into a pleasant fantasy rather than a check on your current trajectory.
Trying to answer 'purpose' in one sitting
Ali found purpose too hard to open a book with at 26 and moved it to the final chapter. The eulogy works as a direction check you revisit, not as a one-off resolution of what your life is for.
From the transcript
“you imagine uh your friend is going to stand up at your funeral and they're going to read out a eulogy and you actually write…”
“Do I want my friend to say, "Oh, he was a wonderful husband." Okay, what's the evidence?”
From the episode
The Sure-Fire Way To Be Luckier In Life - Advice From Psychology Professor Richard Wiseman