The order matters because each step supplies what the next one needs. You start with a claim about yourself, test it against five outsiders, compress the agreement into three operating rules, run those rules for a year so they produce real events, and only then record the story. Told in any other order, the recording becomes a résumé or a wish.
Step 1: Start with the eulogy question
This comes first because every later step is a filter run against it: the five people you ask in step 2, the three values you cut in step 3. Write for ten uninterrupted minutes and force the output down to one sentence, not a paragraph. The trap is that most first answers are categories rather than behaviors. 'A good father' or 'someone who built things' cannot be graded by anyone watching you. Test yours by asking whether a stranger who observed your last seven days, knowing nothing of your intentions, would write the same sentence. If not, you have written an aspiration instead of a description. A usable version sounds like 'the person who stayed calm and stayed in the room when things went badly,' because that is a behavior you can choose again tomorrow. Do not polish it yet; step 5 will force you to say it aloud.
Step 2: Ask five people, not one
Two things happen here that self-reflection cannot produce. You get data unshaped by your own self-image, and you learn whether the sentence from step 1 matches what other people actually see, which is the difference between a private hope and a legible reputation. Choose five people across three contexts: work, family, and one friend who has known you more than a decade. Ask a concrete question instead of an open one, something like 'What do you think I am actually best at, and can you name a time you saw it?' The real signal is not the adjective they reuse, it is the situation they keep describing. Three people independently mentioning how you handle a hostile meeting says more than five people calling you kind. Avoid asking what you should do with your life; you will collect career guesses rather than observations.
Step 3: Cut down to three values
By now you have a self-statement from step 1 and five outsider accounts from step 2, which is enough raw material to stop guessing. List every recurring word and behavior from both, then cluster them until only three survive. The critical move is phrasing each one as an action with a cost attached. 'Honesty' is a noun; 'I say the difficult thing within two days instead of letting it sit' is a value, because it tells you what to do on Thursday afternoon when staying quiet would be easier. Three is the ceiling because values earn their keep only as tiebreakers, and a tiebreaker that never forces you to give something up is a preference wearing a nice word. Skip the listicle vocabulary, integrity and excellence and growth, if those terms never conflict with each other. Values that cannot contradict each other cannot decide anything.
Step 4: Run a year-long trial
Naming a value in step 3 changes nothing by itself; it is a hypothesis, and a year is long enough to test it rather than to feel good about it. Attach each value to one weekly check: three dated lines, one instance where you acted on it and one where you did not. Keep the test behavioral. If the value is presence with family, the question is whether the phone went into another room at six, not whether you felt warmly toward them. Twelve months is deliberately longer than motivation lasts, and the useful output is not consistency, it is knowing precisely where each value breaks. Yours might hold at work and collapse around one particular person. That detail is what makes step 5 a story instead of a slogan. A frequent slip is treating the year as a streak to protect, so the first missed week ends the whole experiment.
Step 5: Say it out loud, on record
Save this for last, because the recording is only worth making once you hold all four earlier pieces: the claim, the outside evidence, the three tiebreakers, and a year of watching where they held. Sit with one person, audio only, forty-five to sixty minutes, no script. Give them three questions in order: what did you want to be remembered for, what did you learn about yourself, and what would you tell someone starting now. Ask them not to interrupt or improve your phrasing. Recording rather than writing lets you hear your own evasions; your pace shifts at the one subject you have not finished thinking about, and that is the part worth returning to. A common way this goes wrong is turning it into a polished tribute. If it sounds rehearsed, you have produced a summary and lost the thing that made it worth keeping.
A reminder in a phone app disappears the moment it is dismissed and leaves no trace behind. A paper strip taped where you will actually see it gets visibly shorter each time you cut a step off, and the remaining lines stay in front of you until the work is done.