Chip Conley

Most ancient religious traditions offer rituals that can help you imagine death before you have your turn. I also believe that some of the current psychedelic fascinations may be partly due to this desire to experience "el otro lado" (the other side).

Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and the Google founders all had the same mentor, the late Bill Campbell, who was taken too early, as chronicled in a book called "Trillion Dollar Coach." And then you find Jobs mentoring Mark Zuckerberg, and Zuck mentoring Brian Chesky, all in a pay it forward, Silicon Valley ecosystem kind of way.

“It’s not that we have a short time to live, but we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it’s been given to us in generous measure for accomplishing the greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when life is squandered through soft and careless living, and when it’s spent on no worthwhile pursuit, death finally presses on and we realize that the life of which we didn’t notice has passed away.” - Seneca

I was sitting in the Green Room with filmmaker James Cameron ("The Terminator," "Titanic," "Aliens," etc.…), who was about to go on stage before me. He seemed calm and light-hearted. I was anything but.

As MEA alum Douglas Tsoi told me recently, “Loneliness may kill, but solitude does not.” His prompt led me to create a poll on the MEA Facebook group with the following question:

An old Chinese proverb says, "the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. And the second-best time is now."

If you have to ask that question, you might ask about whether you have an adolescent relationship with the idea of permission. Let me be your “permissionary” and say, “dear friend, you can create personal resolutions any time of the year.” However, the real question is, what will you do with these resolutions?

To be “pent-up” is to feel “closely confined or held back.” Perfect pandemic prose! We are pent-up, aren’t we? To “ascent-up” is “the act of rising or mounting upward.” That describes our post-pandemic aspirations.

The best present I received for my 55th birthday party extravaganza (six and half years ago) was when my friend Ben Davis called me a "social alchemist." To be seen and articulated for who I was sent a jolt of lightning through my body and created a raison d’etre (a reason for being) ever since.

I’m looking forward to reading David Robson’s new book, “The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life,” that he excerpted in a recent The Guardian article. This book follows ample research done by well-respected academics like Ellen Langer and Becca Levy, demonstrating how reframing from a negative to a positive can add more than a half-dozen years to your life. For the record, those are happy years, given the mindset shift.