Chip Conley

Speaker Jim Rohn says, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” In mathematical terms, you’d say you are the “mean” of these people, which appropriately leads to my two pieces of wisdom on the subject: 1) don’t hang out with mean people or those who don’t appreciate the human spirit; and (2) choose good friends who are wholly different than you.

In the Appendix of “Wisdom@Work: The Making of a Modern Elder,” I list my top 10 books on aging, wisdom and longevity, but I’ve read a bunch more since the book launched a year ago. Here’s my top 5 of the past year:

What do you know now that you wish you’d known ten years ago? That’s a powerful prep question for you to imagine what you might need to know in a decade that you could learn now. For example, given that our MEA beachfront campus is in Mexico and I have a home here, I’m finally learning Spanish (yes, I was that odd kid in LA who studied French, which did have one collateral benefit; 8 years after high school, I chose a sexy, unique French name for my boutique hotel company, Joie de Vivre).

It’s hard to be wise and worried at the same time. Almost all anxiety can be traced to two sources: ambiguity and a perceived lack of influence. I’ve found when anxiety strikes, I create a balance sheet of what I know and what I can influence. Anxiety lurks in the dark, so this balance sheet acts as an illuminating flashlight.

Before you head to Kentucky for your new life as a whiskey connoisseur, I’m talking about distilling wisdom. It’s a simple recipe: Wisdom is knowledge distilled. And as we move from the age of “knowledge workers” to “wisdom workers,” it’s required that we each learn how to mine our own special brand of moonshine.

I was honored to be the finale speaker at the annual TEDxMarin a couple months ago. The video was just published and offers answers to some of the following provocative questions: What are the three 20th century life stage inventions and why hasn’t midlife been given the same public policy attention as the other two?

When America declared its independence, we embraced our inalienable right to pursue happiness. In some dictionaries, “pursuit” is defined as “to chase with hostility.” It describes a shopping mall around Christmas or the energetic, type-A behavior of a newly-minted MBA. Pursuing happiness, often on the hedonic treadmill of life, is what we do during the first half of our lives.

An MEA alum Jeff wrote me this, “When we shift from ‘can do it’ to conduit, we're not working anymore. We're flowing.” Wise words and a good reminder that we need to get out of our own way, and shift our mindset from that “kick down the door and plow through anything” mentality and allow ourselves to become a fluid channel for supporting others. How can you become more of a channel supporting others and less of a rugged “I can do it” individualist?

As I say in this two-minute clip from a speech I gave at the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, I never met my two most profound mentors: Southwest Airlines Founding CEO Herb Kelleher and management theorist Peter Drucker. But, I carried on a pen pal relationship with the former for ten years and tapped into the latter as I was writing my first book.

EQ vs. AI. Is it a battle or a partnership? Is emotional intelligence valuable in a world that is increasingly reliant on machine learning? Those were the questions we faced at our AARP #DisruptAging Salon three nights ago in San Francisco. We had 20 MEA alums and several faculty members to help us find the answers.