As many of you know, I announced in Episode 52 that after one year of consistently putting out the Gold Standard Leadership Lab every week and hearing directly from many of you about the difference this show is making in your lives, I will soon be publishing a book on leadership.
As part of the work on the final chapter and my overall thesis of the book, which is about The Golden Leadership Cycle™ I created, I picked up a few books about the world’s greatest eulogies. Not because I am morbid. But, because the research took me somewhere I did not expect.
The more I read, the more I realized that most of us have the concept of a eulogy completely backward. We think of it as something spoken after the fact. It’s someone else’s job. A retrospective accounting of a finished life. And, all we can hope for is that someone else gets it right.
What’s interesting, though, is that it is not what the word eulogy means. And the gap between what we think it means and what it really means turns out to be a full leadership framework and aligns well with my Golden Leadership Cycle™.
What Does the Word “Eulogy” Actually Mean?
The word “eulogy” comes from the Greek eulogia. Two parts: eu, meaning “good” or “well,” and logos, meaning “word,” “reason,” or “meaning.” At its core, a eulogy is “good words.” More precisely, it is a well-spoken meaning about a person.
Here is what most people do not know. The Greeks did not use eulogia only for the dead. The Romans absorbed it and formalized it into the laudatio funebris, a public civic speech delivered in the Forum when a citizen of standing died. Those speeches were not expressions of grief but rather arguments and public reckonings with what the deceased had actually contributed to the republic.
The question the Roman eulogist was answering was not “how did he feel?”
It was: “What did he build, and does any of it still stand?”
The narrowing to “speech at a funeral” happened gradually, over centuries. The word got stuck in a single context and lost almost everything that made it interesting.
So I want to take it back to the original meaning, because it speaks volumes about leadership.
Eu-logos. Good words. Good reason. Good meaning.
The question I want to put to you today: what is the eu-logos of your leadership right now? Not after you retire. Not at the service. Right now, this week, based on the actual evidence of how you spent your time and attention.
That answer exists whether you look at it or not.
What Are the Two Eulogies Every Leader Can Write?
In Episode 8, I spoke about a post I wrote back in 2013 called “Write Your Own Eulogy.” I was younger, more confident than I had probably earned the right to be, and the idea felt clean: if you want to know what you truly value, think about what you would want said about you when you are gone.
What I did not say clearly enough then is that there are two completely different documents you could write, and most people default to the easier one without realizing it.
The first is an aspirational eulogy. It describes the parent you want to be, the leader who helped others grow, the person who built something worth having. It is clear what you want. It is often much less clear about where you actually are.
The second is an audit eulogy. You write it by looking at last week’s calendar, something I covered in Episode 43. You reconstruct what you actually did, hour by hour, where your attention went, what you chose when you had a choice. Then you ask: if someone who had never met me read only this document, what would they conclude I value?
The audit eulogy is more uncomfortable to write. Most people avoid writing it because they already know what it will say.
The gap between those two documents is not a character flaw. It’s just data. It is the specific, measurable distance between who you are and who you intend to be. The only question that actually matters is whether you have a plan to execute against in order to close it.
That gap has a name in the Golden Leadership Cycle: reinvention.
Where Is Your Leadership Legacy Actually Being Built?
Legacy is not built in milestone moments. It is built on ordinary Tuesdays at 10 am.
It is built on whether you slept, whether you moved your body, whether you were present at dinner, or whether you were physically in the room and mentally somewhere inside the 9 PM email thread.
While those questions feel far removed from leadership, they are not. You cannot hold your composure in a difficult client conversation when your nervous system has been running on cortisol and poor sleep for years. The physical disciplines and the leadership disciplines are on the same track. I learned that finishing my first full marathon earlier this year. Crossing that line did not feel like an arrival. It felt like a new question: what does the data of my daily choices actually say about what I am willing to do?
In Episode 59, I covered the execution gap: the distance between what leaders say they will do and what they actually do when the moment arrives. The eulogy exercise is really the same gap, measured over a longer time horizon. The reason people avoid the audit is fear. Not fear of failure. Fear of the measurement. Because if I start looking, I will see how far I am from the person I said I was building. And that distance can potentially be painful.
Here is what I want to say to that: the distance is already there. It exists whether you measure it or not. You are choosing whether to work with accurate information or a comfortable approximation.
What Do Six Traditions Say About What a Leader Leaves Behind?
As I was doing research for the book, I started tracing what different traditions across history have said about the eulogy, and about what a life well-led actually leaves behind. What I found was utterly fascinating.
Every major religious tradition arrives at the same place from a completely different entry point.
The Jewish tradition has a word for the eulogy: hesped. And in Jewish law, the hesped is not primarily about grief. Its purpose, codified in the Talmud, is to redirect the living. The eulogy is legally required to be delivered in a way that moves the people in the room toward their own better choices. That is not sentiment. That is the ripple effect built into the law of mourning. The deceased is gone. The people sitting in the chairs are not. And the hesped exists to set them in motion.
It appears throughout the New Testament as a word for blessing, for praise offered to someone present.
The Islamic tradition takes a different angle. There is a concept from the hadith, the recorded teachings of the Prophet, called sadaqa jariya, meaning continuous or ongoing charity. The teaching is precise: when a person dies, their deeds come to an end except for three: 1) structures they built that keep serving others; 2) knowledge they transmitted that keeps being used; and 3) people they developed who carry the work forward.
Read that again slowly: 1) Structures that keep serving; 2) knowledge that keeps being used; and 3) people who carry the work forward.
That is a 1,400-year-old description of what leadership empowerment looks like when it actually works.
In the book I’m writing, I go into five additional traditions on this, including the Stoics and what Ryan Holiday’s work on Marcus Aurelius and Seneca reveals about why ego is the single largest barrier to all of it. I trace the etymology of the word “empowerment” itself, back through Latin potere to the Proto-Indo-European root poti, meaning “powerful lord,” to show that the em prefix, to put power into someone, is not a motivational concept. It is a legally binding transfer. And the gap between performed empowerment and real empowerment is one of the central arguments of the Golden Leadership Cycle chapter on legacy.
Today is the opening argument. The full case is in the book.
How Does the Golden Leadership Cycle Apply to Legacy?
Here is where the Golden Leadership Cycle becomes specific.
Reinvention is what happens when you look at the gap between the aspirational eulogy and the audit eulogy and decide it does not have to stay that size. That moment when you stop defending the gap and start closing it is when reinvention begins. It does not require a dramatic overhaul. It requires one clear look and one adjusted choice.
Resilience is what allows you to stay in the work after the first real look. Because the gap is almost always larger than you expected. Resilience, as I covered in Episode 45, is not softening the distance. It is staying anyway. One guardrail. One thing you will not compromise on, starting now.
Empowerment lives on the other side of that work. When your daily choices start aligning with the person described in the aspirational eulogy, something changes in how you lead others. You stop needing to be needed. You start creating conditions where people operate without your constant presence or approval. The empowerment architecture is not available as a strategy until it is first a personal practice. You cannot give away what you have not built.
Reinvention closes the gap. Resilience keeps you in the work of closing it. Empowerment is what becomes possible on the other side.
The Islamic test is the measure: when you are gone, what keeps running?
How Do You Start Closing the Gap Between Your Eulogy and Your Daily Work?
Here is where to start. Not a framework. Not a journal prompt. Just this.
After this episode ends, take five minutes and reconstruct yesterday. Hour by hour, where did your attention actually go? The answer should include topics such as meditation, gratitude journaling, exercise, family life, what you did at work, and more. What story does that day tell about what you value?
If that story matches the eulogy you would want written, you are closer than most people get. If it does not, that gap is not a judgment. It is a starting point.
Write the eulogy. Read it. Then create a plan with measurable outcomes that helps you close the gap.
The leaders worth following are not the ones who wait to be eulogized. They are the ones who author the eu-logos of their leadership while they still can, because that is the work.
