Resume virtues vs eulogy virtues

All of us seem to have many virtues like honesty, kindness, curiosity, being responsible, hard working, etc. We may have some virtues more than others, but still majority of us don't look happy! You will find very few people around you who seem to radiate an inner light. Such people make you feel happy and valued. You can see them looking after other people and as they do so, their laughter is infectious and their manner is infused with gratitude.They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. In fact, they are not thinking about themselves at all. When you meet such a person it brightens your whole day. Do you wish to be such a person?

Let's see how we can become such a person who seems deeply good and listens well, and has generosity of spirit. Actually, virtues can be divided into two types, the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues. The resume virtues are the skills you bring to the workplace like leadership, teamwork, diligence, etc. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful, or were you capable of deep love?

Now we all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the resume ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend so much time on teaching the skills and strategies we need for career success that we are hardly left with any time to imbibe the qualities we need to radiate that sort of inner light. Most of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build an inner character.

But if we live for external achievements, years pass and the deepest parts of us go unexplored and unstructured. It becomes easy to slip into a self-satisfying moral mediocrity. We start grading ourselves on a forgiving curve. We start thinking as long as we are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like us, we must be O.K. But we are living with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between our actual self and our desired self, between us and those shining souls we sometimes meet.

So if we want to be a bit more like those people, we will have to work harder to save our own soul. We will have to have the sort of moral adventures that produce that kind of goodness. We will have to be better at balancing our lives. We will have to increase the role of eulogy virtues in daily interactions, while still maintaining the resume virtues we learnt in school and colleges! Then we will also be able to radiate that inner light which comforts everyone whosoever it shines on!