MEA

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.

Even today, more than a year after our public launch, people still ask me about my motivation for starting the Modern Elder Academy. It’s a question I never get tired of answering. On the contrary, my answers seem to empower my mission more than ever. Below is a short 3-minute video that...

As this video of the Modern Elder Academy campus suggests, we’re blessed with obvious beauty. But, my favorite thing about the campus is the sense of discovery you experience when you find a hidden treasure. If you haven’t been, ask our alums on our Modern Elder Academy Facebook group about their favorite spots. Here are my hidden treasures:

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?

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?

Down in Baja, at the Modern Elder Academy, metaphors and waking dreams spread like wildfire. They’re in sunrises and sunsets, turtles and sticks, guacamole, margaritas, and frijoles. They’re in the dirt, water, and air—all buried into the skin like DNA. It’s an easy place to talk in metaphor—to describe the world in a way that isn’t literally true…where one thing always seems to be symbolic of something else.

"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.

Life used to be so simple. We learned till our early 20s, earned till our mid-60s, and then retired happily to our La-Z Boy. We paid our dues early in our career so we could coast with our three-martini lunches (especially if we were male and pale). Society’s outdated three-stage model (learn, earn, retire) taught us...

Want to see what massive change looks like? Check out the table below, which depicts how economic power has evolved in the U.S. from an industrial to a high-tech economy. No surprise, right? What is a surprise is how little we are prepared for that change. How does learning keep up? More accurately, where do people repurpose themselves to keep up with the changing times? “Life-long learning” may be a trendy phrase, but they’re hollow words without a home.

A wise person can distill down the essence of a business or a person’s mastery. Long ago, we created an exercise in my boutique hotel company, Joie de Vivre, in which we asked management theorist Peter Drucker’s favorite question, “What business are we in?” five times in sets of dyads (you sit two people facing each other). The value of this repeating question meant the answerer, who couldn’t repeat an answer, needed to act like a miner in digging deeper into what’s their core differentiator. This approach led us to discover...