Chip Conley

To our surprise and delight, over the past year, we’ve seen a huge interest in private MEA retreats, often from alums who want to share the MEA curriculum and experience with others. It’s so encouraging to see that our wisdom academy has relevance beyond just our personal worlds, and that there is a hunger to bring MEA's tools and practices to the world of business.

In honor of Kevin Kelly’s new book which has the same name as today’s blog post, I wanted to tell you why this intrepid soul has been a role model for me.

In mid-February, I told y’all about my cancer spreading to my lymphs. I’ve been on hormone depletion therapy since that time which has all of the side effects of a woman’s menopause experience: hot flashes, night sweats, brain fog, testy emotions, fatigue, weight gain, and - for me - occasional anxiety attacks.

According to a study published this year by a pair of British researchers, sunsets are unmatched in their ability to inspire awe among people. They surpass the majesty of storms, the beauty of rainbows, clear blue skies, and even breathtaking nightscapes.

I was recently walking in Beverly Hills and passed a travel agency that's been there for decades. I shuddered as I remembered my first brush with the badass, old broads who ran this agency long ago.

Going back thousands of years, society has celebrated rites of passage as a means to show community support to people going through a pivotal life transition, whether that be puberty, commencing adulthood, marriage, welcoming a baby into the world, or death. Rituals provide a “rest stop for the soul,” recognizing the end of one thing often marks the beginning of an exciting new start.

For the past couple of decades, business magazines have fawned over the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world because, as Zuck suggested, "Young people are just smarter."

"Small talk" is defined as "polite conversation about unimportant or uncontroversial matters, especially as engaged in on social occasions." Sounds rather quaint, right?

At the turn of the century, my academic friends Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton (Stanford Business School) wrote a book, "The Knowing-Doing Gap," which chronicled why there are so many gaps between what companies know they should do and what they actually do. Their terrific book was about turning knowledge into action.

We tend to consider experience our best teacher because it helps our pattern recognition and intuition. However, sometimes experience stands in our way.