During the next two days, we will explore certain ways that women and men experience their bodies aging in midlife. Ironically, both of the MEA alums being interviewed were in the same beta Baja cohort in April 2018. MEA co-founder Christine Sperber interviews Jeanne Chung in today’s post.

Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m envious of author and professor Adam Grant. The dude is smart as a whip, generous with his advice, responds to emails within minutes, and has written more New York Times bestsellers in the past eight years than I could ever imagine. I was first introduced to him ten years ago when he featured me in his first book, “Give and Take.” No one knew Adam Grant then. He’s not even 40 now, and he has given three TED talks.

Bestselling author Bruce Feiler’s terrific book, “Life is in the Transitions,” came out at a fascinating time: last summer when transition defined all of our lives. One of his insights from his public surveys was the fact that all transitions can be categorized into collective vs. personal and involuntary vs. voluntary. The rarest transitions are collective involuntary, and, yet, that’s what we’ve suffered through with the Covid-19 pandemic. The most common transitions are personal voluntary ones.

My friend Kip Tindell was the co-founder of The Container Store and a leader in the Conscious Capitalism movement. I was recently reminded of something he once told me: “One of my firmest convictions is that our wake—those waves and ripples of consequences that follow our every action—is much bigger than we can ever imagine. Everything you do and everything you don’t do affects the people around you and your business, far, far more than you realize. Even the most self-centered, egotistical person you know wildly underestimates the power of his wake.”

When Dan Steffey, 78, recently went to his boss, Eric Paine, 41, to say that he wanted to retire, Paine didn’t hesitate to politely decline his request. Five years earlier, Paine, CEO of rapidly-growing Community Development Partners (CDP), a mission-driven affordable housing development organization, had hired Steffey, a grizzled veteran of affordable housing in Oregon, to help them expand into the Pacific Northwest.

“Although an infant becomes a child simply by aging, a person cannot become an elder by simply becoming older. Elders fall into the category of things that are made, not born. Becoming an elder is not a “natural occurrence;” the qualities needed don’t simply develop from physical changes brought on by aging. Rather, there is something meta-physical involved; something philosophical and spiritual that is required. Old age alone doesn’t make the elder." - Michael Meade

Recently, I posed the question about whether your truth might be embedded in another language. I’ve long been fascinated by the Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi, partly due to my love of their hot springs (onsen) culture. This led me to buying, renovating, and reopening the Kabuki Springs and Spa in San Francisco’s Japantown nearly two dozen years ago.

As the world opens up, many of you may begin to notice a strange phenomenon. I am starting to call it the “phantom IRL” effect. It goes something like this: After 14 months of lockdown you finally get to meet someone in person you haven’t seen in a really long time, or someone that you have only known through zoom or some other type of video-based communications.

“A funny thing happened on the way to the old-age home,” Maher said on his recent show about Joe Biden stepping up his game and defying skeptics showing how pervasive the problem of ageism is in the U.S. Rather than rattle-on about what he said, feel free to watch this seven-minute clip from the 65-year-old Maher.

In our work at the Academy, there is a lot of big magic. From the moment you walk in, the big magic of the place, Baja, envelops you. The oceanfront home, the empty sand beach feels like an LA lifestyle that is just beyond the means of normal people. Then, whales start breaching, huge eagles fly by, big ideas are shared and you are left thinking 'this shit is crazy.'