Chip Conley

In the summer of 2019, I was invited to Procter & Gamble’s Cincinnati headquarters to give a speech on creating more intergenerational wisdom sharing in the workplace. It was part of their annual Signal conference. I wrote about my visit in this past blog post, and the P&G team wrote about my speech here.

If you’re turning 60 this year, I can relate. I experienced my 60th turn last Halloween. As I wrote about the process of turning 60 in this post dated around my birthday, this is a venerable age as we’ve gotten five auspicious rotations of the Zodiac.

Wisdom understands the perfect alchemy of growth and stability. Yet, development psychologist Erik Erikson suggested one of the big challenges of mid to later adulthood is juxtaposing generativity with stagnation. So, I believe this giant mind of psychology surmised that personal growth is always good.

What a treat it was to have TED speaker Ashton Applewhite (and her colleague Virginia Hamilton and husband Bob Stein) join us in Baja for Sabbatical Sessions the past couple weeks to converse about how we end ageism. Her book “This Chair Rocks” and her online clearinghouse Old School are foundational to our process of creating “cognitive liberation” around the subject of age.

One of my co-founders Jeff Hamaoui is a profound teacher, and I’ve been a fortunate student of his (Like Eddie who was profiled yesterday, Jeff was in our first MEA beta cohort the first week of January 2019). He’s a deep listener and a world-class facilitator.

I’ve known Eddie Dobbins for more than two decades and have admired his evolution from a savvy City Hall politico and activist to becoming a spiritual avatar who loves Bali as much as I do (and, in fact, he’s led and facilitated mindfulness retreats/ trips to Bali for friends and colleagues who are spiritual seekers).

Some of you have asked me, “How can I cultivate and harvest my wisdom beyond what I read here on Wisdom Well?” I’ve heard this question from members of five different generations as young as those in their teens and as old as a few people in their eighties.

It was exactly one year ago when MEA had to close for business. It all happened so abruptly, with the World Health Organization announcing that we’d slid into a global pandemic on March 11, 2020. We had our 50th MEA cohort of 18 mid-lifers on campus at the time, scheduled to leave on March 15, with another cohort scheduled to arrive that same day.

I love this TEDx UCLA talk from brand strategist Pash Pashkow, who humorously helps us see that a company rebrand isn’t all that different from the rebrand we might want to experience in midlife. He reminds us that many companies come out stronger on the other side of a rebrand based upon asking the following three questions:

For the past year, we’ve been pondering how we could take what we’ve created here in southern Baja and scale it within the U.S. as a means of catalyzing a new kind of community for the 21st-century. The message we’ve received from our 1,000 alums from 24 countries has been, “Please do this sooner rather than later as Covid has taught how much we’d like to be part of a community dedicated to regeneration and wisdom.”