Happy New Year! It's Time to Think About Your Death

Forget about making a resolution. Have you tried writing a premortem?

Ron Shaich likes to do the same thing around this time every year. The billionaire entrepreneur and investor goes somewhere warm for the holidays. He celebrates his birthday on Dec. 30. He recharges for the next year. He reflects on the past year.

And then he's ready for his favorite annual ritual.

"What can I do in the next three to five years," he asks himself, "that I will respect looking back from my deathbed?" Most people give up on their New Year's resolutions after a few weeks. Shaich, 71, has been looking back from his deathbed for a few decades.

And he doesn't call it a New Year's resolution. He calls it writing a "premortem." By now, it's a tradition. He escapes on vacation, clears his mind and takes a break from doing nothing to do the most important thing he does all year.

"I imagine my body old and fragile, my breathing shallow, my life energy almost extinguished," he wrote in "Know What Matters," his 2023 book. "I try to evoke the feelings I want to have in that moment-a sense of peace, completion and, most importantly, self-respect.

Then I ask myself: What am I going to do now to ensure that when I reach that ultimate destination, I've done what I need to do?" By any metric of business success, Shaich has done a whole lot. In his 20s, he opened a cookie shop in Boston, took over a nearly bankrupt group of local bakeries called Au Bon Pain and made it a national brand. Then he became a pioneer of fast-casual dining when he founded Panera Bread, which he led as its chief executive until the company sold in 2017 for more than $7 billion.