Learning

On our final day of our 7-day MEA workshops, we offer two journaling exercises, one of them called “The Box of Unlived Life.” This exercise may be relevant to those of you who are moving into the last act of your play but feel somehow incomplete. Here’s how it goes:

David Whyte is one of my favorite poet/philosophers. In this practical ruminating essay, he outlines 10 questions that have no right to go away including “Do I know how to have a real conversation?” and “Am I too inflexible in my relationship to time?” But, my favorite is his question that defines today’s post and his juicy gems below.

If Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella were still living, she might have uttered this question given all the finger pointing at pundits and pollsters this week who seemed to be hiding behind their “margin of error.” How much margin of error does your profession allow?

On October 4th, in Covid-19 time, typical showers were falling in London but under atypical conditions, a handful of elite runners set off on the rescheduled 2020 London marathon. Between the constraints of social distancing and the new “rule of six,” the normal hordes of cheering crowds and amateur runners were absent on the cordoned off streets. Regardless, some 45,000 diehards across the UK were running in personal, virtual marathons.

When I joined Airbnb in early 2013, the two topics that CEO Brian Chesky was most curious about as he heard me converse about creating organizational culture as a strategic differentiator were: (a) mindset; and (b) moving from the transactional base of the hierarchy of needs pyramid to the transformational peak (which you can read about in my book PEAK). For the sake of this post, I’m just going to focus on mindset.

How many actual books do people read these days? My study wall, which is my backdrop for Zoom calls, is lined with them, but lately I read on my laptop and on my phone more often than I pull a hardback or paperback off the shelf.

Rumi said his life could be summed up in three phases, “I was raw. I became cooked. Then, I burned.” Learn, Earn, Burn. It’s the way many of us see the progression of life. But, what if, instead, it was, “Learn, Earn, Yearn, and then Learn again”?

“Wholly unprepared, they embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young generations to a knowledge of a world and of life? No, there are none. [...] that is not quite true. Our religions were always such schools in the past, but how many people regard them as such today? How many of us older persons have really been brought up in such a school and prepared for the second half of life, for old age, death, and eternity?”

I’m thrilled to have author Diane Cardwell join me today for a 20-minute video interview about her new book about how she learned to surf at gritty, eccentric Rockaway Beach in NYC as she was confronting a midlife crisis that she pivoted into a calling.

The wise author and academic Clayton Christensen coined the phrase “disruptive innovation.” A couple of years ago, right before he passed away, he predicted that half the colleges and universities in the United States would have to close in the next ten years.