Learning

What do you wish you'd known ten years ago that you know now? How does that inform what you need to know ten years from now? I live in Mexico but learned French as a kid. So, at 59, I’m taking three one-on-one Spanish classes every week I’m in Baja. I know I will regret it ten years from now if I don’t make the investment now.

It’s not a board game. It’s not a beauty contest. It’s not a costume party. You are a student of life. Choose your subjects wisely. You will receive a pop-quiz on occasion. Don’t prepare or memorize.

Nature is a remarkable teacher, and we use her lessons all the time at the Modern Elder Academy. The fine art of rock balancing can teach us a lot about mentoring. Rocks are precariously sturdy yet fragile, inert yet living, and they have the capacity to fit together if you know how to match-make the stones.

My Spanish teacher, Ivonne, in Todos Santos is pictured with me below. She aptly has a little peace sign sprouting out of her head. My first half-dozen classes were brutal. I felt so stupid on my drive home, constantly replaying that overused tape in my head, “You’re too old to be doing this!”

You can’t be a writer if you don’t write. You can’t be a surfer if you don’t surf. You can’t be a gardener if you don’t garden. Call it cosmic grammar—the magic lies in verbs. All of which begs the question:

In our fast-changing world, it’s no surprise that even death has taken on a whole new reality. You might say death is being reinvented from the ground up—call it Dying 2.0. The facts speak for themselves. Since the 1900’s we have more than doubled our lifespan, adding almost 35 years to our lives. While exciting and re-energizing, it is stunning to watch as society does little to prepare for this new shift in reality.

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).

"Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished.” So says Dan Gilbert in his TED talk video (included below). People—at all ages—vastly underestimate how much change they’ll go through in their next ten years.

We learn in our teens. We earn in our twenties. We yearn in our thirties. We burn in our forties. We discern in our fifties. And, we adjourn in our sixties. But, what if we lived life as a mash-up? Maybe we ought to “unlearn and return” to new subjects and experiences throughout life. Live by the “learn, earn, yearn, burn” rule and I promise you heartburn and a midlife crisis. The Game of Life was created by Milton Bradley in 1860. Isn’t it time you deviated from that linear, one-size-fits-all board game?

Lost and clueless. That’s what I felt six months after I launched my boutique hotel company at age 26. I had quickly renovated the “no-tell motel” we’d bought in a dodgy San Francisco neighborhood—partly due to my putting a beer keg in the courtyard each weekend, so my friends would come over and help paint the place (learned a thing or two from Tom Sawyer).