You're Gonna Remember My Name

We think we're chasing success; we're trying to outrun death.

You're driven, I'm driven; we both get it. Business leaders are driven people. You can't help but build and achieve. You're paid to create positive outcomes, expected to succeed. You're driven by a desire to do something good, driven to leave a lasting legacy, and you find it in your work, your leadership, and your accomplishments.

Immortality

Your drive to succeed, however, isn't what it seems on the surface. In the 1970s, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker posited in his seminal work, Denial of Death, that our drive for success and significance is a defense mechanism against our own mortality. Engaging in projects, systems, or work to make an indelible impact on the world, he wrote, is actually our own "immortality project," our attempt to live on beyond our given life span. It's how we defy death.

Google. Jeff Bezos. Peter Thiel. They're all heavily invested in "solving" or "fighting" death and, at very least, extending life expectancy dramatically. Immortality is on their minds, and they're willing to leverage their fortunes to achieve it. But this is not a new venture. We've been searching for the Fountain of Youth, ingesting elixirs, and practicing rituals for millennia, all in the name of thwarting death.

We may not be heavily invested in cryo technology, but we can all relate to Irene Cara's attempt to address her own mortality: "Fame, I'm gonna live forever…"

We have our own versions of "Fame," creating a legacy that, hopefully, outlasts our breath. We try to escape the cyclical nature of life and avoid the pain, war, and death it brings. We struggle for control in an attempt to influence their outcome.

David Gibson, author of Living Life Backward, speaks of this phenomenon differently, labeling it our god project. As creatures, we are without control in a created order. We want to be more than creatures; we want to be god-like and determine the outcomes of our own lives, to defy death. But it's in light of death, Gibson postulates, that life really makes sense:

I am convinced that only a proper perspective on death provides the true perspective on life. Living in the light of your death will help you to live wisely and freely and generously. It will give you a big heart and open hands, and enable you to relish all the small things of life in deeply profound ways. Ecclesiastes teaches us to live life backward. It encourages us to take the one thing in the future that is certain, our death, and work backward from that point into all the details and decisions and heartaches of our lives, and to think about them from the perspective of the end. It is the destination that makes sense of the journey.

Coherence comes from understanding the whole of the story you're in, but our lives are only a small segment. They're a snapshot, too small a sample size to understand the expanse of the whole story. It's why Solomon tells us that eternity is in our hearts. We were made for infinitely more. These bodies and lives and all the best of everything we could have or accomplish feel like a drop in the bucket.

Life Is a Gift

More aptly put, our hearts are too big, cavernous, as Gibson describes them, to be fulfilled by temporal things. We were built for more, for better.

Gibson again:

Neither the world nor your own life is completely within your control. If you spend your whole life refusing to accept that the day of your death is approaching, if you live and work 24/7 thinking that by doing so you can get ahead of the game and have a better life by making money or that you can understand the world by getting the right degrees or reading the right books, or if you think you can really leave a lasting mark on the world through what you do, then you are spending your life trying to punch above your weight. We are creatures, not the Creator. We want to have it all, know it all, and be remembered by all for all time. No, says the Preacher; life is gift, not gain.

Death puts life in perspective. It is fleeting. It is precious. It is a gift, so drink deeply and enjoy. Not because it is vain, but because it is a gift.

So leaders: enjoy your work, your family, good food and drink, a relaxing vacation, and check something off your bucket list. Enjoyment of these gifts is not a nod to vanity. You are free to live to the fullest when you no longer fear what follows your death.

Today is the best day. It's the only day you have.