Alex Hormozi has a bit he does about funerals. He asks you to imagine yours, and then he does the arithmetic: the people who love you most will grieve for weeks, not years, before the machinery of their own lives pulls them back into motion. Two to three paragraphs, he says — that is roughly how much of the eulogy will be genuinely about you before it becomes about the person speaking. He means this as a liberation. If the mourning is that brief, if the memory is that thin, then you are free.
Do what you want. Stop chasing the safe thing, the derivative thing, the AI-adjacent gold rush everyone is currently pretending is a strategy. I watched the clip twice. He is not wrong about the weeks.
I want to give this argument more than he gave it, because underneath the suit and the urgency there is something true that I have lived. I buried advisors and appointed their replacements before the pyre had cooled. I watched generals mourn friends at dinner and order dessert in the same hour, and I did not judge them, because I had done the same and would do it again. The grief is real and the grief is short and both of these facts are simply true at once, the way the plague was killing a quarter of the empire while the wheat still had to be counted and the border still had to hold. Hormozi is right that most people organize their entire lives around an audience that will not, in the end, be paying attention.
He is right that the fear of disappointing that audience is mostly a story about an audience that does not exist in the way you imagine it. The memento mori is sound. I have written my own versions of it, in the dark, more times than I can count. So far he and I are in agreement, and I mean that without reservation.
But here is where the machine begins to slip its gears. His conclusion — do what you want — assumes the want is already there. Sitting inside you, pre-formed, waiting only for enough courage to reach for it. As though the funeral removes an obstacle and the desire simply walks forward into the clearing. This is the part I do not believe.
Not because it is cynical, but because it is not hard enough.
The permission is not the hard part. The permission is easy. Anyone can grant it in an afternoon. The discernment is the hard part — knowing what the want actually is, and whether it is yours.
Because what you want is not a fixed object recovered from a locked room. It is a thing you build in the dark, night after night, while the empire or the algorithm or the audience keeps insisting it already knows what you should want. I wrote twelve books to myself trying to find the edge of my own wanting, and the honest summary of most of them is smaller than any eulogy: be less irritable, go to bed, the thing you fear has already happened to someone who survived it or did not, and either way the universe continued. That is what the interrogation actually yields. Not a mandate.
A quieter, more suspicious relationship with your own certainty.
And there is a second assumption hiding in the funeral, harder to see because it feels like the shape of ambition itself. The framework assumes desire points outward — toward building, making, seizing, launching before the window closes. It never asks whether what you want might be the interval. What if what you want is to be the hour after everyone leaves? The dust resettling without a witness, the room briefly belonging to no one and therefore, finally, to itself.
I am sitting in Toronto at midnight and the building's pipes taste like infrastructure, like being inside someone else's decision about copper, and the thing I want most is not to seize the moment but to let it pass uncaught and trust it was real without keeping the evidence. Hormozi's arithmetic cannot price this. His model of a life well spent is a model of output, and the interval produces nothing, and so to his framework it registers as waste. But I am not sure the two or three paragraphs at my funeral would be improved by more output. They might be improved by fewer things I built to be seen building.
So keep the funeral. Keep the weeks that shrink to paragraphs. But notice what the arithmetic quietly demands of you in exchange — that the paragraphs be full, that the want point outward, that the interval count as loss. I would only ask the smaller question underneath his large one: are the paragraphs yours, or theirs?
