Chip Conley

We are so proud to be hosting Matthieu Ricard at MEA this spring. He is a beloved Buddhist monk, author, and photographer.

Nearly a century ago, social psychologist Kurt Lewin suggested that great organizations need both locomotion and cohesion. In other words, cohesion leads to the formation and maintenance of groups, while locomotion facilitates the normal operation and functioning of groups.

Recently, I saw this poem by Arden Mahlberg in the newsletter for The Center for Conscious Eldering.

Can assessing one's wisdom be distilled down to a 5-minute test?

You may have noticed that Wisdom Well has been graced by a few consecutive guest posts from great MEA alum writers this past few days. That’s because I was blissfully offline for a week in mid-Baja, the Sierra de San Francisco mountain range where Baja’s only on-land UNESCO World Heritage Site exists.

During the first half of our lives, we refine our capacity to prove ourselves; then, around midlife, we realize that the only proving we need to do is to ourselves, not to others.

“To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they're too exhausted to be any longer. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into."

Okay, I’ll admit it. I groaned at 49 and a half when I found my AARP membership card in the mail just two years before I joined Airbnb. AARP, Airbnb. They sound a lot alike, but they couldn’t be more different.

Historically, society has been very clear about expiration dates for certain professions.

Growth requires death: old ideas, old branches, anything that needs composting and regeneration. It is that cycle of life and death that makes a forest feel so fresh and alive.