Kind: captions
Language: en
i think the more we're possessed by that
little screen in front of our face
and the url experience we're looking for
the irl experience the in real life
experience and
to be in an in real life experience
where you're connecting with other
people with common purpose and mission
and you feel like your sense of
separation which is what an ego does for
you is actually evaporating
you create a sense of oneness with
people
that
frankly social media doesn't offer
[Music]
hey everybody welcome to impact theory
our goal with the show and company is to
introduce you to the people and ideas
that will help you actually execute on
your dreams all right today's guest is a
serial disrupter who the san francisco
business time called the most innovative
ceo starting from a single
pay-by-the-hour motel he bought in the
tenderloin district in san francisco
when he was just 26 he disrupted the
entire hospitality industry and built a
real estate empire that would ultimately
make him the second largest boutique
hotelier in the u.s during his 24-year
reign as ceo of joad aviv he racked up a
series of awards including the
industry's highest honor the pioneer
award and helped his company ascend to
the number one spot in customer
satisfaction his diligent study of
humans and relentless commitment to his
staff and customers also saw him granted
an honorary doctorate in psychology from
saybrook university
after weathering two financial crises
and spending nearly a quarter of a
century at the helm he realized that his
company no longer served his deepest
passions disrupting himself this time he
sold his company but just when he
thought he was out of the hospitality
industry the founders of airbnb
convinced him to come help transform
their promising startup into the world's
leading hospitality brand
and somewhere in all of that he also
managed to write five incredible books
to pass on what he's learned so please
help me in welcoming the man who died
nine times i'm not kidding and live to
tell the tale the new york times
best-selling author of wisdom at work
chip conley
wow yes nine lives huh yeah i'm a cat
it's crazy
so stardust there
what on earth happened
and
how after nine times are you still here
yeah
so it was nine times within a ninety
minute period so it like
it was not multiple experiences though
um
long story short is gavin newsom who's
the governor of california was my first
mentee
i was 35 he was 28 and for a bunch of
years taking him up to becoming mayor of
san francisco i mentored him he had a
bachelor party at uh at d ballpark and
we were playing baseball and i broke my
ankle playing baseball
uh then i got a bacterial infection in
my leg then it went septic and i should
have stayed at home and just said okay
enough but i ended up going to st louis
to give a speech and i was on
antibiotics and on crutches and at the
end of my speech i slumped in my chair
and three minutes later i came to on the
floor and the paramedics showed up and
that's when they put heart monitors on
me and i i died the first of nine times
so on the way the the uh hospital i you
know just kept dying and i kept going to
the other side i was 47 years old at the
time and that's when i realized after 22
years of being ceo of my own company
that i founded
i didn't want to do it anymore
so
when you say that you kept going to the
other side was there something
experiential that you went through at
that point yeah so each time
i went to the other side meaning
i was asystolic i had no heart beat at
all it felt like it lasted
20 minutes
it was more like
maybe 10 to 20 seconds
sometimes as long as a minute
so i when i'd come out of it i'd say to
the people around me here's what i saw
and it was the same time same thing each
time
it was me
this is a weird way to start this whole
conversation hello everybody um this is
how i died uh it was too fascinating no
well so i
so what happened was
everything would go blank and then it's
white and then i'm in this like
mountain chalet
and i'm just observing
there's a skylight with sun coming
through it there's the colors of the
labyrinth or the colors of the rainbow
just everywhere
and there's this really thick
oil going down the stairs the most
beautiful
uh set of stairs you've ever seen
and uh really finely grained and the
the oil has this frangipani like
tropical scent
and it's basically the most beautiful
scene i've ever seen
in the world and it's
going slo-mo
uh i don't know if it's going to you
know if it's going downstairs if i'm
going to hell i don't know
so i think the best thing i can say
about all that experience is it was a
divine intervention they still don't
know what happened other than this was
over 10 years ago
it was an allergic reaction probably to
the antibiotic
but it woke me up it was like a the
hoteliers wake up call
to say you know i've done this boutique
hotel thing for a long time now i'm
ready for what's next
that's really really interesting so
now i want to which i didn't intend to
but when you were talking it really made
me by the way i like your shirt thank
you
especially for you free words of wisdom
yes um
talk to me about burning man sure so
um what i didn't cover in your intro is
you have another passion which is
festivals and you've put together a list
of the 300 most extraordinary festivals
around the world
98 of which i'd never heard of before
but i went on the site and was looking
at them and um thought it was really
fascinating and you've talked pretty
eloquently about the sort of different
faces of burning man what it can be
depending on what you want but tie that
in so one i don't know if you've ever
had a psychedelic experience um but
if you you say you have so how does that
compare with the
um what you went through with your heart
stopping oh interesting so i'm on the
board of burning man and who yeah who
knew there was a board of burning man
for the anarchistic organization but
i've been on it since the start of the
non-profit which is about eight years
ago and um
and been going for about 20 years
uh what i've loved about burning man is
as brian chesky founder and ceo of
airbnb said the first time he went out
there when i was with him in 2013 he
said this is like what the world would
be if artists rule ruled the world so
it's sort of true it's a bit basically
art is at the center of life there
um
in terms of what goes on at burning man
and let's talk about the psychedelic
piece of it which was which frankly for
everybody who's not gone there before
you don't have to do drugs you don't
have to get naked
you don't you can go to bed at 10
o'clock at night if you want there's a
family camp with 5 000 people and
families there
but psychedelics are there
my personal experience is i have not
done it each every time i've gone but i
have
i think the thing that's true about the
psychedelic experience as well as the
experience of collective effervescence
which is a term that came from emil
durkheim 110 years ago studying
festivals uh mostly religious
pilgrimages
is there's the sense of your
sense of ego separation
almost evaporating and what comes in its
place is this communal joy and that
often happens with psychedelics and in a
place where your
sense of being connected to something
bigger than yourself is there when i had
my dying experience and i had that
vision i felt like i was at one with
nature and everything around me
um so i think that's part of the reason
that you know part of things we thirst
for uh the more digital we get the more
ritual we need and there's an element of
ritual that speaks to the idea of
feeling connected i want to really put a
finger on that for a second because that
really hit me the more digital we get
the more ritual we need why i think the
more we're possessed by that little
screen in front of our face
uh
and the url experience we're looking for
the ir irl experience the in real life
experience and
to be in an in real life experience
where you're connecting with other
people with common purpose and mission
and you feel like your sense of
separation which is what an ego does for
you is actually evaporating
you create a sense of oneness with
people
that frankly social media doesn't offer
so i guess i would just say in summary i
think that what is beautiful about
burning man is it's a bit of a utopian
society it allows people to imagine
something different than their default
world so as you're diving into that
world and i'm assuming thinking about
human connection and human experience
how do we tap into that and is there a
way to tap into that that doesn't
involve
going to a festival or is there
something about the the grandeur of the
ritual that is critical
you don't have to be at a big festival
for that to happen what you really need
to do is figure out what's the process
of helping yourself um let go of your
identity and your mindsets why do you
think that's so important
um the first half of our life is about
accumulating and the second half of our
life i believe is about editing and so
in the first half of your life it's
almost like you have pasted on your
chest
all of these mindsets all of these
identities all of these responsibilities
and i think anything that actually helps
you to peel those off
to get back to something that is more
essential is is good you know i've
created recently this thing called the
modern elder academy it's a week-long
program you know between 12 and 18
people in midlife coming down to a beach
site in baja and the first thing we do
is help people to shift their mindset
primarily by actually getting clear
about what are the mindsets and what are
the identities that that are affixed to
them that they want to take off and we
do this purge on the beach where people
basically let go of whatever it is
that's not serving them anymore
but
normal life is actually making the the
name tag stick a little bit harder
and so you have to sort of go to a place
where you can
have the comfort of letting go of those
mindsets
can you give me examples of things that
people have
one and i was just there
the kind of
uh name tags people wore everything from
uh
my best days are behind me
that's a mindset around aging
uh to
um
i i'm bad with money
two i'm never gonna meet my
potential soul mate uh
to
uh
people don't you know the world is run
by millennials someone who's you know 55
years old might have that point of view
and so the key is to sort of start to
actually as carol dweck teaches us the
growth mindset versus the fixed mindset
the number one thing that people have to
do to understand their mindset is to
first identify it
then imagine a different point of view
for it
then own that new point of view for it
and then actually start talking from
that new point of view that is literally
what we do during the course of our week
together with this collection of people
at the academy that's amazing talk to me
about talking from that place
well when you actually give a voice
sometimes like a mindset's like water to
a fish you know you don't even know it
exists it's sort of just it's ever
present so much so that you don't even
see it
and so
what we start with is a series of
exercises that help people to get
clearer on their mindset by the end of
the first day have actually identified
some of your mindsets
and you you literally put a name tag on
yourself and then we go through a
process where
one at a time you start taking these
things off but you actually sort of say
what is it that you have to give up
to actually move away from that mindset
because sometimes the mindset served you
at a different time in your life
uh or
serves you as giving you an excuse
uh and so
it's not easy let's let's just be clear
this is not something you do
uh while while driving in traffic and
you know you do it uh in a in a safe
crucible where other people are doing
the same whoa a safe crucible yeah so
what do you mean the there's something
really intense about that moment so let
me just take a step back on this is that
okay yeah of course so the modern elder
so let's think about life for a moment
society has done a really good job
historically of helping people through
transitional times you go through
puberty you have a bar mitzvah bots
mitzvah a quinceanera you go from
adolescence to adulthood you have a
commencement ceremony because you're
graduating from something
you're going to get married you have a
wedding you have a baby you have a baby
shower you get you die and you have a
funeral but between baby shower and
funeral nada nothing there
and it's partly because longevity in the
u.s the average longevity in the year
1900 was 47.
by the year 2000 it was 77.
by the year 1965 we had coined a term
called midlife crisis because midlife
didn't used to exist in 1900 it didn't
exist
so now there's a midlife crisis but 53
years later after midlife crisis has
been coined as a term we haven't done
much to change that other than to make
it frankly a marathon now
a marathon because it used to be 45 to
65 i would say people start feeling
irrelevant around 35 in some places now
especially up in where i live in silicon
valley
and people are going to work to their 75
a lot of people so that's midlife now
so why not realize that midlife is full
of transitions
you're going to get married or you're
getting divorced maybe you're going to
maybe have a spouse pass away have your
parents pass away
you're going to change your job or
career
all of that happens in midlife these are
transitions that are going on
but we haven't created these this safe
crucible this place where people can
come together
and actually talk about these how to
navigate these midlife transitions and
how to repurpose yourself for your
second half of your life
the longevity sites that i go to when i
put in all my information say i'm going
to live until age 98
but today i just turned 58
and if i start counting my life at age
18 because that's when i really became
an adult and had choice more choices in
my life
do the math from 18 to 98 is 80 years i
am exactly at half time at age 58 which
is part of the reason i started surfing
last year i'm not very good but if i
know i'm going to live to like 98 i can
start surfing at age 57 and start
learning spanish and do a bunch of other
things that someone after the age of 50
often wouldn't think of doing because
quite frankly a lot of people think
their life's almost over at age 50 when
they're not even halfway through their
adult life
yeah thinking about life and i
definitely fall into the sort of death
denier camp i am actively pursuing um
living forever i know this science
hasn't caught up so as of right now i'm
on a collision course with death and i
fully you're 85 years old right
exactly doing well looking good for my
age um so that is it's really
fascinating to me that that play and
that's one of the reasons i wanted to
ask about death and one of the reasons
i'm fascinated with the dissolution of
the ego
which i want to go back to in a minute
but um
thinking of that i think a lot of people
have a hard time imagining a brighter
future as they get older and certainly
somebody who's quote unquote in midlife
so how do you help them like what's your
whole notion of wisdom and being an
elder and like where the value is and
all of that well there's a few thoughts
first of all
it's been very well documented the u
curve of happiness so for those who
don't know it the u curve of happiness
is basically from about age 25 or 30 you
start to see your happiness decline
and it goes a slow gradual
drop until your 40s when it drops a
little faster in fact your 40s are your
toughest decade you're not there yet
though 42. oh there you go so you know
40s are your toughest decade generally
and around 45 to 50 it starts to get
better again and people in their 50s are
happier than their 40s 60s happier than
50s 70s happier than 60s and 80s for
women are happier than 70s not for men
so what does that suggest it suggests
that something happens in the second
half of life
that actually helps people to feel
happier
so could aging literally be aspirational
it could uh we haven't really looked at
it that way as a society
but helping people to understand what
what are the the sort of unexpected
pleasures
of the post 58
age 50 era is part of what i'm trying to
do i joined airbnb at age 52.
um
being asked by the three founders who
were 21 to 23 years younger than me to
join because i was a long time
you know hospitality pioneer
and they were doing this new little
hospitality thing that six years ago
most people didn't know about
they were seen as a tech company they
wanted to ultimately be a hospitality
brand
but at age 52 i joined a company where i
was twice the age of the average
employee and i realized pretty quickly
that the elder of the past
was regarded with reverence it's almost
like there's an obligatory like okay you
know you bow down to the person who's
older than you that doesn't really exist
anymore
um and the i think the modern elder not
the traditional elder is about not
reverence but relevance and in order to
be relevant as someone who's older you
better be a combination of curious and
wise now wisdom is not just for older
people you can cultivate wisdom at any
age and there's a lot of ways to do that
and i can tell you if you want me to
talk about that um that's why i wrote a
book called wisdom at work the making of
a modern elder
the
but the curiosity piece is the piece
that a lot of older people have a harder
time with it's like really can i be the
dumbest one in the room
yes if i've never been in a tech company
before at age 52
i can be and i was
but what was fascinating is i was
surrounded by young people who are
extremely smart everybody's trying to be
the smartest person in the room by
answering the q the questions or the
looking like they're smartest because
they knew all the answers
so my role there was to start asking
really provocative socratic kind of
questions
and a lot of why and what if questions
and i think that the thing that's
interesting about life is you know
someone said to me recently i don't
think i could ever get a job after age
50 if i had to go look for a job
but a woman who's the best known
executive recruiter in the world said to
me you know when it comes to getting a
job it's all about curiosity and
passionate engagement
if you show curiosity and passionate
engagement
it's almost like your wrinkles
disappear and what people feel is there
is your energy when you're when you're
energetic and you're sort of engaged in
life and you're curious
people forget about your age
but um
to me
this time in my life what i what i love
about it
is to be young enough
to go surfing and old enough to know
what's important in my life
and i think the thing that helps you get
better about what's important in your
life is pattern recognition
which is a component of wisdom
being able to see the patterns in your
life
around people and things and and
experiences
and circumstances to be able to be wise
about knowing what's around that corner
wow
so how did you deal with that phase when
you were a seasoned successful
battle-hardened ceo
and to come in to be basically an intern
at a tech company where you didn't know
anything how did you deal with the ego
at that point right sizing it
you know truly it was the the element of
wow
i used to be the sage on the stage
i was no longer the person who got all
the headlines i was the person who was
sort of helping
support these three founders to to do a
hell of a job and um
that transition required me to
right-size the ego required me to
actually see that what made me feel
proud and great was not so much my own
activities it was to see the progress of
these other folks
again the first half of your life is
about being interesting the second half
of your life is about being interested
and what that means is really interested
in other people
uh
and
i don't know i think the other thing was
i i had to get used to the idea that i
was going to evolve
that my evolution i i needed to first of
all not be scared carol dweck
fixed gross growth set you're trying to
prove yourself growth mindset you're
trying to improve yourself the
definition of success for a fixed
mindset is winning the definition of
success for a growth mindset is learning
i had to move from this place of
trying to win
and my definition of success was chips
wins
to being in a place of like i think i'm
learning
and i was
and if you can be learning in your
mid-50s
a bunch of things you didn't know before
you're living and your that curiosity
becomes sort of an elixir for life it's
like a life-affirming
spirit inside of you how do you get
people to do um to foster their
creativity to push it i'm sure people
come up to you and ask like okay if
creativity is that core thing that's
going to make my wrinkles disappear
how do i what's curiosity so the
curiosity of the elixir for creativity
um so i
creativity and innovation is what we
tend to focus on but i think behind
creativity innovation is this idea of
curiosity
and what's behind curiosity is a
lack of fear to ask um naive questions
you know a four-year-old doesn't like
edit themselves when they say why is
this guy blue
four-year-olds ask a lot of questions
and they don't sort of think am i gonna
sound dumb if i ask this question
well as we get older we start thinking
we're going to sound dumb and we create
our lives so we don't
we don't have the efficiency
to be able to ask big questions big why
and what if questions
but some of my why and what if questions
at airbnb helped us to see blind spots
that the company hadn't seen
so i think creativity and innovation
are fueled
by a curiosity
uh and and
a willingness to be open to failing
would you say that the the sort of
recipe for fueling your um curiosity is
um
lessening your ego not being afraid to
look stupid and asking a whole lot of
questions
yeah let me also say that if you just
ask questions that aren't very
thoughtful and aren't opening things up
if you are in essence at the bat you
know and and basically striking out over
and over again that's probably not going
to work either so um i'd say doing some
research and thoughts you know study
appreciative inquiry it's a it's a it's
a method created by a guy named david
cooper writer and
if you get really good at it
appreciative inquiry is a real thing
there's books written about it and it's
a way of asking questions so here's an
example so let's say a company uh
is struggling right now there's two ways
you could ask a question around that you
could say
we're losing market share who is to
blame
that's one approach the other approach
could be we're using we're losing market
share our competitors are gaining on us
what are they doing that we can learn
from
and how can we brainstorm about this two
very different approaches the first one
sort of gets to like it's efficient but
it's also blame driven and it sort of
shuts people down the second is more
like okay how are we gonna think more
creatively about this
and so you know
i can go sit in a meeting a board
meeting or any kind of meeting with
senior leadership in a company and sit
there for 15 minutes listening to
questions and the kind of questions that
are asked in a leadership meeting tell
me everything about the culture
yeah that's really interesting in terms
of like
what kinds of questions they're asking
are they blame driven are they shutting
people down are they trying to open
people up is it more socratic that kind
of differentiation that kind of
questions and you know the other thing
there's a great old phrase knowledge
speaks and wisdom listens
and um
what i like to look at in meetings is
are people truly listening to each other
or are people speaking over each other
with their knowledge
there's a reason that the owl is the
most perceived wise animal of the forest
or bird of the forest it's because it
has the most attuned listening skills
and so uh
people who listen well to each other
learn from each other
and usually have a little more empathy
toward each other
and
are better at collaborating toward a
common solution
and so most companies are not well
coached for listening
if you were going to coach somebody to
be able to do that do you focus on
making that of value getting them to
understand why it's so powerful or is it
do you come at it more from a baby you
have to start with that i mean i think
you have to start with the point of view
of why is it important
and then you move to the place of like
okay
what what are the ways you can do that
listening not just to the story but for
the story and that that really means
like you're hearing somebody but you're
actually looking for what's the common
thread or theme that the person might
not see themselves when people feel
truly listened to
and you have presence so the difference
between presence and absence
is an iphone
that's interesting and what i mean by
that is like you know when someone's
distracted and not truly listening to
you you know it whether it's they're in
their head or they're on their phone
when you're there and you feel like the
person sitting with you
is truly listening
and not distracted and has that sense of
presence
it's a scarcer commodity today than it
was 20 or 30 years ago and therefore
it's more and more valuable
i want to go back to what you were
talking about with rituals so this is
something that i think it's time to take
you to burning man have you been to
burning man i haven't you're the second
person to ask me that in like three days
the other one being my wife
wow dude i mean that like does she want
to go oh she made it abundantly clear
that either she was going with me or
without me well you know for a few years
i so every five years i do a big
birthday party somewhere in the world my
50th birthday party was eight years ago
tim ferriss was there with me i know
he's been on your show so maybe we'll
have a you know maybe we'll go and we'll
have you hang out in first camp which is
where the board hang you know wow
i'm very interested yeah the notion of
rituals and it's interesting because in
my mind i don't yet see what you see
around burning man as a ritual so i
would love to understand that because i
think this is super powerful so i read
i'm in my early 20s i read a book called
the power of myth by joseph campbell he
talks about how one of the reasons he
thinks that there's such rampant divorce
in the modern era is that the
not that there isn't a ritual around
marriage but that it's lost all of its
there's nothing anymore that really
resonates with people religion is
weakening and so he's like yeah that's
gonna be a problem until somebody solves
that so for my own wedding i ended up
going through a ritualistic
scarification i wanted to be a different
person the day before than the day after
and like that was a big thing for me and
while i won't say that's the only reason
that i've had a you know an 18-year
relationship now with my wife
it didn't hurt that like at least that's
the mentality that i have and that i
wanted to go through some sort of ritual
like that um maybe the easiest way to
talk about this is how is burning men a
ritual it is a pilgrimage let me just
say the word pilgrimage speaks to the
idea of a group of people with common
purpose going to a certain place at a
certain time
as
with a certain common intent burning man
has 10 principles that define the
experience and it's a very participative
experience so you're not a
you're not a spectator and as such
it creates the environment where people
are energized and engaged in creating
their experience as opposed to being
having someone create their experience
for them
so uh the ritual part of that is i think
part of the fact that there's certain
things that happen every year
and the fact that it is hard you know
the hero's journey and the rites of
passage has three components to it
there's the seventh from the past
there's the threshold period where
you're in a liminal space in between two
things and then there's the re-entrance
into society in a new way and that's
what you're that's what your wedding was
but that's what burning man is as well
and for many people that's the idea that
they actually take off their default
world life
go for way away for a week
in that period of week it's not easy i
mean there's sand there's sand storms
wind storms dust storms
you know not a lot of sleep too much
noise hanging out with people you don't
know
there's a vulnerability that is created
and then you come out of it you know in
a place where the default world looks
very different to you that to me is a
ritual
and to me that's you know what's
interesting about life is is
yes we have responsibilities and yes we
have habits and but the fact is if you
choose to make some major changes in
your life you can do that starting now
and it's not easy to do it and the
question is how do we create the
the
space and the
i don't know the support to help you do
that
but so many people this is frankly to me
that the biggest challenge with midlife
is people
get into a rut doing the same thing for
many many years marriages are like that
too doing it for the same thing for many
many years without the opportunity to
sort of observe how you could do it
differently
yeah i love your whole concept of phase
one accumulation phase two edit i think
it's really interesting that the elder
academy and burning man both have what
seem like it fits into your notion of
editing where you strip something off or
you put something on the man and it
ultimately gets burned
talk to us what exactly is editing and
why is it so powerful
so to use examples of it there are many
people in like in their 50s or 60s if
they've had kids and they've moved out
that they say let's downsize let's move
from the suburbs back into the city and
get a condo you know sell the four
bedroom house get a two bedroom condo
that's an example of editing another
example of editing would be like getting
clear on who you like spending your time
with or what
organizations you want to support in
terms of maybe being on the board of a
non-profit
so i think editing is really sort of
being able to be thoughtful
and insightful about what's important to
you
and then
re-engineering how you spend your time
and your money
how you invest yourself
accordingly you know steve jobs was
quite famous for saying the most
important thing to to do as as in his
role as a ceo of apple was to say no to
things and you know i think that and i
was very that's one of the things i
worked with brian on at airbnb i joined
airbnb and there were 30 strategic
initiatives in in 2013 when i joined 30
and nobody in the company including
brian could name all of them and so
brian i talked with him about it and he
says chip run i was in charge of all of
our off-site retreats for a while
for a few years and i said let's do an
offset retrieve in new york and we did
it in september of 2013 i joined back in
april and we had 23 different potential
initiatives for the next year that were
going to be our strategic initiatives
and i said to the top 12 people they got
me we're only going to pick four of
these and then we we looked at how do we
edit what's important to us down to
these four and it was i think one of the
best periods of time in airbnb's history
because 2014 15 and 16 i would say it
was a really great period because we got
really focused one of the things is
challenging for young entrepreneurs
especially if they're successful
is and we were a sharing economy darling
and everybody wanted to get in the
sharing economy so you name it everybody
who had a sharing economy company was
coming to us and saying
can we partner with you on this or that
i said i was like no no let's get clear
about like what what are we when we want
to grow up there's a beautiful exercise
that peter drucker popularized that came
from a guy named ted levitt it's a 1960
hbr article harvard business review
article about what business are you in
so i i would offer this to the audience
so
do this exercise you have one of two
choices either what business are you in
or what mastery can or do you offer
so first one is what business are you in
i would say to you uh tom so what
business are you in you would answer
in the most maybe generic way
i'm in so and so and then i would say
tom thank you
what business are you in and you'd have
a second opportunity to answer it but
the way this works is you can't answer
the same way twice
by the time we get to the fifth answer
we will understand the distillation
of what differentiates what you're doing
for airbnb that process got us to
realize we were in the belong anywhere
business which marriott is not in
or for joao aviv is a boutique hotel
company we realize we're not a boutique
hotelier we're in the identity
refreshment business
the other alternative a person could use
is what mastery
can you or do you offer
and you start from that first point you
go to the fifth
and that's the key i think is learning
getting clearer on what it is who you
are what's the differentiator and then
that allows you to create the editor
which is an essential piece of being
able to be focused
you said that you can learn a lot by the
questions that people ask certainly
about the culture of a company i think
you can also learn a lot by who people
quote who they look up to there's three
people that you two that you really lean
on and then the third one that made a
surprising entrance twice in your book
and that's maslow
victor frankel and lao tzu
so
how did
those three find their way into your
world what do they mean to you what do
you think people should take away from
them so maslow abraham maslow's created
the the hierarchy of needs theory which
is one of the best known psychology
theories out there what i love about
maslow is it's another organizing
principle for actually imagining how you
know what's important what's the high
what's the sort of the fundamental
priorities but then at the end of the
day what's most valuable
frankl when i going back to my dying
experience i had victor frankel's book
man search for meaning
in my
backpack when i had my flatline
experience
because i had had a friend of mine
commit suicide a guy named chip same
name as mine
same age as me one of my closest friends
the person that i relied upon quite
often for advice committed suicide
so i was really struggling myself a
little bit and so when i had my flatline
experience weirdly enough when i finally
started being a little bit more
okay i was in the hospital room that
night
and i went in my in my bag and there was
frankel's book and uh franklin's book is
for those who don't know it is about um
a psychologist in a concentration camp
who believed that meaning was sort of
the fuel of life and then he got to see
whether his theory was correct based
upon what happened in a concentration
camp and his whole family died
but he lived and
i wrote an equation which led to a book
i wrote called emotional equations
and the equation was despair equals
suffering minus meaning and so and the
way that that that equation works is
that when you if if suffering is sort of
a
constant in life if you're a buddhist
it's the first noble truth of buddhism
which is
suffering is ever present so if
suffering is sort of a constant you can
always find it despair and meaning are
inversely proportional so long story
short is i was able to use frankl as a
means of understanding how to create
meaning in my life and that led me to
during a very difficult time
uh
at the end of every week every friday
afternoon i would create my meaning list
for the week what did i learn this week
i'm you know my company may go down in
flames
we survived and actually tripled in
sizes
during a five-year period then which was
amazing but the the truth was i said if
nothing else i want to actually
see what i'm learning so every friday
afternoon i'd spend an hour by myself
and make my list of what i'd learned
that week which was what helped me give
me some sense of meaning and the more i
was giving myself meaning the more the
despair was coming down
and in terms of lots many of the things
that he writes about
really speak to wisdom and the editing
function and the idea of
what's most important in life
um
anything anybody who's going to help me
to understand how my mind and my heart
and my soul work a little bit better is
going to be fascinating to me and then
giving the space to i think it's so
essential to have the space to let it
all sink in as well
so you know bill gates is famous for
going off you know for a week and just
with a bunch of books by himself you
know and just sort of having that time i
don't know if he's still doing it but he
did it for you know a few decades
um
and i've done the same
as a way to just sort of like reflect
and take take stock
so you mentioned the suicide of your
friend if i'm not mistaken i read that
like six people you knew five yeah
committed suicide yeah um
what was that about do you think there
was any tie to meaning was it in
response to
an identity crisis from the recession
like what was that they were all guys
all of them were guys
who were at the bottom of their u-curve
of happiness they were almost all in
their 40s and
many many of them were entrepreneurs or
business people in which the recession
just completely
took them on a roller coaster down
and their sense of who they were as a
person was so tied
to their career or or their
entrepreneurship that when their company
was actually going to go out of business
it was like
they were ready to die
so i think that you know
some of it had a lot of it had to do
with people who just didn't didn't
realize that the u-curve of happiness
was happening
in some cases it's a good evidence of
just how attached we are to our
identities our work identities
um
but so much of it was like
god just like realizing i don't care as
much as i used to about what other
people think
my definition of success is more clearly
my own as opposed to my parents my
friends
whatever
um
i'm much better about editing the things
i don't want to do in my life
and and having them out of my life
um
and i think i'm more more and more clear
on my legacy of what i want for the
future
and i'm probably a little bit less ego
and invested
and so um
i think at some point in your life you
have to realize you know there's a
couple different modes you can be and
you can be in the attain mode or the
attune mode and there's and there's i
think they're both good
i've spent most of my life in the attain
mode
i'm achieving i'm achieving i'm
attaining
there's certain things in life like
surfing surfing is not an attain sport
it's in the tuned sport you tune
yourself to that wave yoga is not an
attain sport it's in a tuned sport or
exercise
other things may be an attained sport
but the understanding of when do you
live your life in the attain mode and
then when do you live your life in the
attune mode is to me one of the
fascinating
sort of tai chi
of life experiences that helps you to
understand
uh when do you
retreat versus when do you come forward
no that makes all the sense in the world
i could
literally talk to you all day this is so
fascinating to me hopefully we will get
a chance to do something at burning man
that would be incredible yeah before i
ask my last question though where can
these guys find you online
chip conley dot com c-o-n-l-e-y and if
you go there you'll see a little bit of
information on the book wisdom at work
the making of a modern elder as well as
the modern elder academy which is a
social enterprise so 50 of the people
aged 35 to 75 who come to the program
are on scholarship uh because for me
it's my way to give back to people in
midlife who sometimes don't feel like
midlife has much hope attached to it
so and then i'm i write a lot of
articles on linkedin on my profile there
too and i'm on facebook twitter etc
nice
all right final question yeah what is
the impact that you want to have on the
world
i guess i'd love to make aging
aspirational again
[Laughter]
good luck in the la doing that right i
mean like come on so um
wouldn't it be interesting if people
looked forward to elderhood we look
forward from
childhood to adulthood
um
but we don't necessarily look forward to
elderhood uh partly because it sounds
like elderly and it sounds like you know
the decrepit period of your life
and and yet wouldn't it be fascinating
if we started to value wisdom
like we do genius
you know young geniuses
especially technologically
savvy geniuses
get a lot of attention in this society
wise sages don't get as much
and my whole premise in terms of what
how i'd like to change the world is to
realize
these do not have to be either or
i mean why not you know brian and i
you know from two generations of parties
a millennial i'm a boomer um could
create a relationship
that proved that across generations we
have a whole lot to teach each other and
to bring to the table
so yeah i think that's what i'd like to
prove and i'd like to help people to
realize
maybe
the next decade ahead of them is going
to actually be better than the last one
love that yeah awesome thank you thank
you yeah
all right
guys
what i hope that you got out of the
interview is exactly how much wisdom
somebody can accumulate over time from
having a near-death experience to having
spent years pursuing rituals and
festivals and how much he learns from
that there was one year where like i
don't know two-thirds of the way through
we'd already done 30 festivals in that
year and travel to god only knows how
many countries it's pretty extraordinary
when you feed that curiosity when you
put yourself in those situations when
you find those crucibles when you're
looking for the things you can edit out
of your life when you're actively trying
to shape yourself and not allowing
yourself to look at the years that
should be perceived as wisdom as the
years of decrepitude when you're making
that your default position truly
extraordinary things happen and seeing
what's happened at airbnb and seeing his
ability to contribute there to bring
wisdom to see himself as an intern to
say that the 50s are going to be my year
of the most learning whereas people
think of that traditionally as their
teens and 20s but to completely flip
that to see what he's been able to build
with his life is utterly extraordinary
and so looking at that book from that
lens of what you can do
not only when you're an elder but how
you can take that wisdom now and apply
it to your life now to see that
transformation is something that is
ongoing and continual and i think that
the book delivers that in spades i
highly recommend that you guys check it
out i highly recommend that you follow
him on social i think literally he is
dripping with wisdom and there's so much
that he has to offer every generation
and for us to all aspire to be that as
we grow older to use the wisdom that
only comes with time on this earth in a
way that is positive and uplifting not
only to ourselves but to others is
really a benchmark to behold for all of
us
all right so i highly encourage you guys
to dive in alright if you haven't
already be sure to subscribe and until
next time my friends be legendary take
care
[Applause]
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