Graduation season invites a familiar question: What are you going to do with your life? But perhaps a better question is: Who are you going to become while you do it?
In “The Road to Character,” David Brooks draws a distinction between “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.” Résumé virtues are the skills and achievements that build a career: earning promotions, gaining recognition, building success. Eulogy virtues are different. They are the qualities people remember at the end of a life: integrity, courage, faithfulness, and love. Most of us say the latter matter more, yet we spend far more time pursuing the former.
That imbalance is not accidental. Our culture rewards achievement and teaches us how to climb, but offers far less guidance on how to cultivate character. Left unchecked, a life devoted only to résumé virtues risks becoming outwardly impressive but inwardly shallow.
Similarly, in “The Meaning of Your Life,” Arthur Brooks reminds us that a calling is not about rare talent or the perfect job. It is about how and why we do our work. The same job can feel empty or meaningful depending on whether it is driven by external rewards like money, status, and admiration, or by internal purpose and service.
I have seen this firsthand in my own career as a personal injury trial attorney. The work is demanding and, at times, exhausting. We age in dog years. But I learned early on that if I approach each client not just as a case, but as a person entrusted to my care, the work changes. Many of the people I represent are vulnerable and carry burdens far beyond the legal issues they face. When I view each case as an opportunity to improve a life and, in some small way, the human condition, the practice of law becomes more than a profession. It becomes a calling.
This insight is both freeing and demanding. It means you do not have to find the perfect job to live a meaningful life. But it also means you cannot depend on the job itself to provide that meaning.
When success becomes the ultimate goal, it can crowd out the very things that make life whole: relationships, faith, and purpose. So the challenge is not to choose between achievement and meaning, but to live in the tension between the two, and hold them together. That is, to pursue excellence without losing humility, and to build a career while also building a life.
In the end, résumé virtues may shape your opportunities, but eulogy virtues will define your legacy.
And to those graduating, the years ahead will offer many opportunities to achieve, advance, and succeed. But the more important work will be quieter: becoming the kind of person others trust, depend upon, and remember with gratitude. Because long after the accolades fade, it will not be what you accomplished that matters most, but who you became along the way.
Kurt Larson is an adjunct professor of law at Mizzou, and the founder of Safe & Sober, a nonprofit that for more than 21 years has provided substance-misuse prevention education to youth across Missouri and the United States.
