Chip Conley

In a recent MEA workshop titled “The Roadmap to Your Soul’s Expression,” guest faculty member Ken Daigle unleashed this quote that felt like a thousand white doves emerging from a gigantic cage. Ken’s superb point was that naming and claiming your soul’s desire is an essential first step to creating your ideal life. Vagueness doesn’t help.

“A narrow escape from danger or disaster.” That is the definition of a “close call.”

Reading this article in The Atlantic got me thinking. Maybe understanding the future of work is less about studying Gen Z’s fetish for remote work or Millennials’ desire to be digital nomads. What if a window into the future of work could be understanding the motivations of those who are semi-retired? Maybe understanding how they’re curating their lives can help workers of any age.

Writing has been my flashlight. It’s allowed me to be curious. It’s helped me to see my blind spots. It’s provided me with a salve for my wounds. It’s given me permission to feed my inner introvert (who is not all that obvious to you). I once wrote a post “Why I Write” that could have been retitled “Why I Breathe.”

Somedays, I feel like an idiot. On other days, I feel like our MEA shaman, Saul, with his premonitions. For a decade now, I’ve been saying that the organizational world seems to be unprepared for the emergence of the “modern elder,” someone who is as curious as they are wise. Part of the reason we created MEA was to address the need to mint modern elders.

"No one can give away wisdom. A teacher can only lead you to it via words, hoping you will have the courage to look within yourself and find it inside your own consciousness…The wisdom humanity seeks lies within the consciousness of all." - Sydney Banks

“Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom… Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge, though they take for granted that which they cannot teach — the capacity for experience, the capacity for being moved, the Goethean sense of wonderment.” - Poet Hermann Hesse

I had never pondered the difference between these two words until my friend Joaquin Dulitzky told me the following:

In the next decade, we’re going to see a significant surge in the value placed on wisdom. Unlike knowledge, wisdom is one of the key differentiators for humans versus artificial intelligence. With this in mind, I wanted to start capturing my wisdom principles and practices. Of course, this is a work-in-progress so it will evolve with time.

Okay, I’m not going to be a rumor-monger and suggest that these two icons had a thing going on (Chip, did you really write that?!), but they both captured my heart and, yet, I wish I’d gotten to know them a little more deeply.