1: “I learned the most important lesson of my life as my father’s life came to its end,” Ron Shaich writes in his terrific book Know What Matters: Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations.
The year was 1998. Ron was CEO of Au Bon Pain, a prominent chain of French-inspired bakery-cafés. The following year, the company would change its name to Panera Bread Company.
“Several years after a lung cancer diagnosis, my dad, Joseph Shaich, moved into my apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts,” he writes. “The nearby Dana-Farber Cancer Institute was the best hospital in the country, and having exhausted all other treatment options, we got him enrolled in an experimental clinical trial.
The trial provided only a brief respite from the disease.
“I was my father’s companion through the final year of his life’s journey, Ron reflects. “I cannot tell you whether there is a judgment day ‘up there,’ but after watching my father during his last few months, I can tell you this: There is one down here, if we have time to face it. Barring sudden death or mental incapacitation, the impending final deadline forces each of us to judge the life we have lived.
“Regardless of whether we believe in a God, most of us, in our last months on this Earth, will give ourselves the ultimate performance review,” he notes. “We will ask ourselves some variation of the inevitable questions:
“Did I live the life I wanted to live?
“Did I fulfill my potential?
“Did I live a life I respect?”
Those were the types of questions Ron’s dad grappled with in his final days, weeks, and months.
“By most measures, my dad lived a good life,” Ron writes. “A certified public accountant with his own firm and an adept poker player, he was skilled with numbers and made a good living. Even when he wasn’t feeling secure himself, he provided security for his family and always made each of us feel safe. He was charismatic and he made us laugh. He taught me business and how to walk in the world. He backed me, with his smarts and advice as well as his money, when I launched my very first business.
“But Dad often wasn’t intentional in the way he lived,” he observes. “Too often, he was impulsive, making reactive decisions without thinking through the consequences and then backtracking.
“Indeed, he zigzagged through life, focusing on what felt right to him in the moment.
“In his last year,” Ron writes, “my father had time to confront the choices he had made and not made and the opportunities he missed. By the time the end came, he had reached a difficult, but honest, conclusion—in his own words, ‘I screwed up. And I can’t fix it now.’
“There was nothing that I or anyone else could say to soften this truth,” he says. “The father I had idolized as a kid was a broken man in those final months, and there was no putting him back together.”
2: The morning his dad died, Ron sat alone in a coffee shop.
He remembers feeling “astonished that the sun could still be rising on a day when I had lost my father. I thought about his last year, and I found myself comparing it to my mother, Pearl’s, who had died six years earlier.
“She had less time for reflection,” Ron notes. “But it was clear to me in the last few years of her life that she was at peace with herself. Always a giver, she lived her life with a clear sense of purpose: to care for the people she loved. She knew she’d done the right thing for her. She never hesitated to make the hard choices when it came to the well-being of her family. She turned her house into a nursing home for my grandparents and dedicated herself to taking care of them.”
The difference between these two experiences hit Ron hard and caused him to reflect on his own life: “How could I attain that sense of peace and contentment? How could I ensure I didn’t end up like my father, racked with regret and remorse? Would I have the wisdom and the strength, like my mother, to live a life that I could respect?
“As they departed, my parents gave me a gift,” Ron writes, “the most important lesson of my life: Take the time now, while you still have a runway into the future, to determine whether you are living a life you will respect. Don’t wait until the end. A judgment day is coming for all of us, but it’s up to us to decide when it comes, and whether it comes too late, as it did for my father.
“We can’t rewrite our past,” he notes. “But if we have the courage to challenge ourselves now, we can write our future. Each of us can choose to use the knowledge of our mortality as a forcing mechanism to create a life we respect.
“This universal reality, far from being morbid or depressing,” Ron reflects, “is in fact a powerful tool for accomplishing everything that we want in life and business. I learned from my parents’ passing how to live from the future, back.”
3: One of the tools Ron utilizes to live from the future back is what he calls a “pre-mortem.”
“It’s a visualization exercise or mental simulation in which we imagine ourselves in our old age, looking back at our lives,” he writes. “I project my imagination into the future—hopefully a good long way into it. I imagine my body old and fragile, my breathing shallow, my life energy almost extinguished.
“I try to evoke the feelings I want to have in that moment,” Ron notes, “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?”
“What arises for me in these contemplations is not a list of achievements and accolades, though there are many in which I take great pride,” he reflects. “It’s certainly not my net worth, my company’s stock price, or my possessions.
Ron examines his life on four dimensions:
First, his relationships with his family and friends.
Second, his relationship with his body and its health and vitality.
Third, his relationship with his work and what gives it meaning.
And finally, his relationship with God, or his spirituality.
“Have I lived my life with a sense of integrity in each of these four areas?” he asks himself. “Have I done everything in my power to be a good father to my children, a good husband to my wife, a good steward of my businesses and assets, and a person who has left a positive impact on the world? Have I honored my body and soul?”
Ron shares that the self-respect he seeks isn’t an end in itself; rather, it’s a by-product of realizing what matters to him and then living in alignment with what he most values.
“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. 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.
Ron concludes: “As a result of observing my parents as they passed, I am committed to living more consciously and intentionally during my time on Earth.”
Right on.
More tomorrow.
__________________________
Reflection: Am I living in a way that I’ll respect when I reach the end, or am I only reacting to the pressures and habits of today?
Action: Set aside time this week to imagine myself in old age looking back—identify one change I can make now to align my life more closely with what truly matters.
What did you think of this post?
