Why Panera's founder says you should 'focus on your obituary, not your resume' as a tool for success

• Panera founder Ron Shaich uses an exercise he calls a "pre-mortem" to define his values and goals.
• Shaich used the exercise in his personal life first before bringing it to his businesses too.

Every year, for the past 30 years, Panera founder Ron Shaich sits down and writes his own obituary.

He imagines himself far into the future looking back at a fulfilled life. Then he asks himself in the present what he can do to ensure he reaches that place.

Shaich credits the exercise, which he calls a "pre-mortem" or "future-back" thinking, with helping him define big goals, plan how to achieve them in an actionable way, and figuring out what he values most in his life — and in his businesses.

"I'd pull out a yellow legal pad and I'd start to divide that yellow legal pad into the areas of my life that I cared about," Shaich told Business Insider. "And to me, that's my relationship with my body and my health, my core relationships — my wife, my family, my kids — my relationship with my work, what I wanted out of my work, and what gave me joy, and then my relationship with my own spirituality. And then based on that, I literally would say, 'What is it I want to have accomplished in each of these spheres of my life?'"

While Shaich started off just using the exercise in his personal life, he started using it in his businesses too.

"That process came from life to business, and that's how I ran my companies," Shaich told BI. "A business is just a little organism."

Shaich developed the exercise after his parents died, he writes in his new book, "Know What Matters." He saw a contrast between his parents at the end of their lives — he said his father voiced regrets, while his mother was more at peace with her life — that motivated him to do everything he could to "live a life that [he could] respect."

"As a result of observing my parents as they passed, I am committed to living more consciously and intentionally during my time on Earth," Shaich writes in the book.

Sometimes the big goals change, but that's okay, Shaich says. It's less about planning out your life, and more about figuring out your direction.