Chip Conley

“What makes the desert so beautiful,” said the little prince, “is that, somewhere, it hides a well…” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Can you feel like you've taken an extended sabbatical in just a week's vacation?

“Midlife chrysalis” is a term we enjoy at MEA and it’s one I unleashed to the world at the TED conference this week in Vancouver. We’ll share the video of the speech when it’s available.

This image above may look like the scary part of a kidnapper’s ransom note. In reality, it’s the MEA logo (thanks, Michael Martin), reconfigured to spell a word that is deeply part of the MEA lexicon. Special shout out and thanks to our guest faculty member, Dr. Dacher Keltner, whose new book “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life” has become a foundational part of our curriculum.

Imagine that Steven Spielberg walks up to you and says, “I want to capture your life story as a means of providing an inspiring meditation to people all over the world.” Implausible, right? Scary, possibly?

Dr. Bill Thomas has been a thought partner of mine since before I wrote “Wisdom@Work.” For those who know his story, he was appointed the medical director of a nursing home in upstate New York more than 30 years ago, which he described as “a repository for old people whose minds and bodies seemed dull and dispirited.”

I love wordplay. I'm particularly fascinated by words that have a relationship with each other if you just switch two letters. For example, if you switch the "l" and "t" in "latent," it becomes "talent." Just saying the phrase "latent talent" sounds like a poem.

Last year, I wrote a blog post, “Longevity is Becoming Shortevity.” It was 1,000 words and had lots of stats pointing to the steep decline in longevity in the U.S. However, a picture is sometimes worth a thousand words, as the graph below shows. Take a second look, and you’ll see how one of the wealthiest countries in the world (and the one that spends the most per capita on health care costs) has a full-blown system failure with longevity in freefall, and all at a time when the rest of the world is seeing a post-pandemic recovery.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported an encouraging trend: the top-earning 10% of men in the U.S. labor market logged 77 fewer work hours in 2022, on average a 3% reduction than those in the same earnings group in 2019. This diminishing workload comes after years of seeing these often-workaholic men grow their hours.

“It is essential to remember that the pursuit of wisdom, and its deployment, thrive on joy. The best recipe for the spread of wisdom is the encouragement of curiosity, respect for the best accomplishments of the past, coupled with a burning desire for improving on them; and all of this within a conception of self that extends to other people, the planet and beyond. When these elements are in place, a joyful immersion in the complexity of life is likely to ensue - an openness to experience, a willingness to dive deep into issues of concern to self and others. If such an attitude develops far enough, then understanding life becomes increasingly rewarding in itself. The person will be seen as wise, and his or her actions also will be considered wise.” - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi