HERE’S A MORBID but meaningful exercise, courtesy of Panera co-founder and former CEO/chairman Ron Shaich: Write your own obit—or, more accurately, a pre-mortem. Envision what you’d like to have accomplished by the end of your life, then work backward to map out how you’d get there.
It’s a practice that Shaich does each year,. “Like most people, I’ve lived too much of my life in reaction to what happened yesterday and in anticipation of what I hope will happen today,” he writes. “The pre-mortem process has helped me shift the fulcrum point. I look toward tomorrow, define what I truly value, and then work backward from there to ensure that those things are happening.” Whether for business endeavors or personal goals, Shaich applies this “future-back principle.”
