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.

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.

I loved spending nearly 90 minutes on stage with Brian Chesky at the Commonwealth Club almost exactly a year ago. It was a wonderful opportunity to show in public how we’ve operated in private over the past six and a half years. One of the things we discussed was the disadvantage of being a young entrepreneur. Brian suggests that...

Steve Jobs and I share one thing in common beyond our round glasses. We’re both big fans of Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. One of my guiding lessons, when I was an entrepreneur in my mid-twenties, came from Stewart. He suggested a key tenet in starting a business is to “keep it cheap, small, and local” because it allows you to reduce the size of your mistakes and learn from them.

A wailing siren and a soft, reassuring hand. That is all I remember from my ambulance trip in suburban St. Louis in August 2008. My heart had stopped just as the paramedic team arrived right after my giving a speech. “Break a leg,” is what they tell you before going on stage. Well, I’d broken my ankle a month earlier, had a serious bacterial infection in my leg, and was on strong antibiotics (as it turned out, the heart failure was likely an allergic reaction to the medication).

The meme of the moment was accelerated by this New York Times article marking the end of friendly generational relations. Beyond the fact that the old cranky dude preaching in the TikTok video doesn’t vaguely resemble a Modern Elder who is as curious as they are wise, let’s accept that it was Boomers who created the original “generation gap” in the 1960s.

"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.