Chip Conley

Those internet gods who know me better than I know myself served up a recent piece of content that seemed well-suited: a CNBC story on a retiree who loves Mexico because everything is so cheap.

Have you ever felt like a P.I.P. -- A Previously Important Person? It’s a common condition around old-school country clubs where people reminisce about their past glories.

I got to know my great-grandmother for a fraction of a second. My mom’s grandmother, Ethel, was a stately woman, a matriarch who believed that “children should be seen but not heard.” Honestly, I can’t say I remember a conversation with her. And then, poof, she was gone.

I loathed two verbs when I was younger: to be content and to be settled. Both of them felt like a compromise. They reminded me of something my radical 10th grade history class taught me: “Comfort breeds apathy.”

Some of you have heard about my struggles with yoga and the ease of my meditation practice.

Ikigai. Joie de Vivre. Raison d'être. Why don’t Americans have concepts like these from the Japanese and the French? I liked the “joy of life” concept enough to name my boutique hotel company Joie de Vivre. And, both Ikigai and Raison d'être speak to why we jump out of bed each morning.

Write a book on wisdom, and the number one question you hear at book signings is “How do you define wisdom?” I tried to answer this on stage at the Commonwealth Club with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky a few years ago. You can see in this video that it took me more than three minutes to answer the question.

In General Electric's 1990 annual report, CEO Jack Welch described a new organizational model, "Our dream…is a boundaryless company…where we knock down the walls that separate us from each other on the inside and from our key constituencies on the outside." Welch proposed a much less rigid, more fluid organizational chart that could nimbly make and execute decisions.

Let’s double click on Arthur Brooks’ recent column on “The Most Successful People are a Little Dissatisfied” since it has such applicability to the workshop that opens our Spring season.

The title of today’s blog is the subtitle of Dr. Becca Levy’s upcoming book, “Breaking the Age Code,” a masterpiece that shatters many commonly held beliefs about aging.