Death Can Teach You to Live a Potent Life

How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and, keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most.

I first saw The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in my manager’s cabin when I was twenty-eight. The title hooked me instantly, but the book itself felt like a steep climb. I had grown up on Tamil historical novels, not English nonfiction, so I read Covey with a dictionary parked beside me. Most habits made sense, but the obituary exercise might as well have come from another planet. In my world, nobody used the word obituary. When someone died, we went to Mass, prayed, buried them, and came home. No tributes. No reflections. And at twenty-eight, I couldn’t imagine my own death, forget writing about it.

Years later, during my wife’s fifteen-day stay in the ICU for our first son’s delivery, something shifted. Those days were slow, anxious, and heavy, and for the first time the exercise made emotional sense. So I sat down and wrote my obituary in one sitting. It felt odd that she was the one in the hospital and I was the one writing how I wanted to be remembered, but that mood made honesty easy.

I didn’t write bland lines about being dependable or responsible. I wrote what I wanted my wife to genuinely say:

We built our home not with gold, silver, and dollars but with laughter and love. He never pushed me where I didn’t want to go, yet always encouraged me to explore the worlds just outside my comprehension. When I felt worn out, he stood as a pillar I could lean on.

And I wrote what I hoped my sons would someday say:

Appa was a cistern from which we drank wisdom, discipline, and courage. He prepared us for life. We read widely, stayed fit, and explored different worlds. We ate with kids in slums and kids in bungalows and never felt out of place in either. He trained us to think for ourselves and question our biases.

Slowly, I began living to earn that obituary. My health choices changed. The way I spent time with my boys changed. Even the jobs I took and the money I chased bent toward what I had written in that one sitting. That quiet exercise became a turning point. When you face the end honestly, life becomes sharper, simpler, and far more purposeful.

# About the Book

Stephen Covey’s classic blends timeless wisdom with practical habits that reshape how we live, work, and make choices. His “begin with the end in mind” exercise remains one of the most quietly transformative ideas in modern self-development.

Buy the book: https://jjude.zlynks.me/7-habits

This is part of 100 Ideas That Shaped Me from Books I Read