Good Life Project - Chip Conley | How To Reimagine Your Second Act (or third)

Episode Date: December 12, 2022

Chip Conley shares how the early seed of an idea around the deep wisdom and value and sharing, learning and potential for profound, intergenerational contribution led to the creation of what’s now become a global institution call the Modern Elder Academy with campuses in Baja Mexico and New Mexico, and programming that is building community and changing lives in amazing ways. By the way if you’re wondering why Chip's name might sound familiar, beyond earlier appearances on Good Life Project, he’s also a New York Times bestselling author, the hospitality maverick who first built and sold a boutique hotel chain, flatlined on stage while keynoting, then reclaimed and reimagined his life, stepping into help Airbnb's founders turn their fast-growing tech start-up into a global hospitality brand, all before founding the Modern Elder Academy. If you’re in a moment where you’re really thinking about what you want the next season of work and life and contribution to look and feel like, this is a don’t-miss episode.You can find Chip at: Modern Elder Academy | Website | InstagramIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Robert Thurman about life, spirituality and contribution.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount CodesSolo Stove: Make more backyard memories with solo stove's award-winning fire pits, stoves, & grills. Use promo code GLP  at SoloStove.com for an extra $10 off their already great prices.BetterHelp: Good Life Project is sponsored by BetterHelp. Learn more and save 10% off your first month at BetterHelp.com/GoodLifeProjectThe Lazy Genius Podcast: Part systems expert, part permission giver, Kendra Adachi, The Lazy Genius, is here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Check out The Lazy Genius Podcast now wherever you get your podcasts. Air Doctor: The AirDoctor air purifier features patented UltraHEPAR technology that is proven and tested to remove airborne particles as small as 0.003 in size. AirDoctor comes with a no questions asked, 30-day money-back guarantee so if you don’t love it, just send it back for a refund, minus shipping. So head to airdoctorpro.com and use promo code GOODLIFE and, depending on the model, you’ll receive up to 35% off.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In our midlife, we have to learn how to become a beginner again, over and over again. How do we help people learn how to serve? How do we help them learn how to bake bread? How lifestyle. But at the heart of it is helping people to learn how to become a beginner over and over again. And I promise you that that skill of learning to become a beginner over and over again is the skill that's most wedded and clearly attached to the people who turn out to be 100 years old. Hey, so last time I had my friend Chip Connolly on the podcast, it was a different world. And his world personally had just been turned upside down. We were sitting in my studio together. I was living and recording in New York and literally hours before Chip received a phone call telling him he had cancer. He chose to come in and continue with our conversation and even share a

bit about where his heart and head were at that moment, while also being incredibly present in the conversation and sharing his emerging passion and ideas and emotions, his take on the role of what he called modern elders. Since then, so much has changed once again in our world on a very personal level and Chip's. So I invited him to come back and share his journey. And we explore how that day shifted everything, how the years have been for him from a physical and emotional wellbeing standpoint. But then we really shift gears and Chip shares how that early seed of an idea around the

deep wisdom and value and sharing and learning and potential for profound intergenerational contribution led to the creation of what's now become a global institution called the Modern Elder Academy with campuses in Baja, Mexico and New Mexico and programming that is building community and changing lives in amazing ways. And by the way, if you're wondering why Chip's name might sound familiar, beyond earlier appearances on Good Life Project, he's also a New York Times bestselling author, the hospitality maverick

who first built and sold this incredible boutique hotel chain, flatlined on stage while keynoting, then reclaimed and reimagined his life, stepping in to help Airbnb's founders turn their fast-growing tech startup into a global hospitality brand, all before founding the Modern Elder Academy,

becoming a board member of Encore.org and an advisory board member for the Stanford Center for Longevity. If you are in a moment where you're really thinking about what you want the next season of work and life and contribution to look and feel like, this is a don't miss episode. So excited to share it with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot.

Flight risk. Man, last time we were in the same place together physically, your life was profoundly different. My life was profoundly different. The world was profoundly different. We were hanging out actually in my home studio in New York City. As we have this conversation, I'm in Boulder, Colorado. You're not too far.

You're at a six or seven hour drive from me in Santa Fe, but you also kind of bounce around between some different places now and you have been on an adventure to say the least. I think we all have though, but I'm just curious. I mean, before we dive in, I really want to explore some of the stuff you've been working on. How have the last few years been for you? Well, let's start with, actually it was almost exactly four years ago when i was there with you and i had just gotten the diagnosis the night before that i had prostate cancer yeah and i was giving wow let's see i was giving a ted talk at ted headquarters later that day i think it was the morning i was seeing you and then later that day giving a ted talk um it's like and i just found out i had stage three

prostate cancer so long story short is that piece of my life has changed a little bit in that I only have half of a prostate now. We won't go into it. This is not an episode on organ recitals. I'll recite the organs that are no longer working like they used to. But what I will say is that my life in the last four years since I last saw you and we did that episode, it's been profoundly reflective and profoundly generative. What a nice life. What a good life to be able to be both reflective and generative because the reflection has allowed me to be generative at a stage in my life when a lot of people would say, hey, you're about to turn 62, Chip. Why don't you just put your feet up and watch 47 hours of TV like the average retiree in the United States?

But that's not what I want to do. No. So the last four years have been profoundly reflective in general, but you've also been on a journey of discovery for a lot longer than that. I mean, when I think we first connected years before, you were pretty fresh out of exiting a hotel chain that you had built from the ground up. And that also led you tumbling into what seemed like from the outside looking in as a friend, like a series of pretty major crises, but then also some really amazing possibilities and opportunities. And it was almost like this tumbling of like from highs to lows to highs to lows that kept dropping you back into these places of profound reckoning and reflection.

Yeah. Well, welcome to midlife. The emotional roller coaster we call midlife, which is the life stage that has the worst brand in the world because the word attached to midlife is crisis. Actually, let me give a little frame for this. I'm going to give an intellectual frame for it and then a personal frame. The intellectual frame is in the 20th century, three new life stages became popularized. It's not like they didn't exist before, but there wasn't sort of a mainstream recognition of the word that described them. The first one was adolescence, 1904, the word actually got coined. The idea of teenage years

being a threshold between childhood and adulthood became a thing because prior to that, once you hit puberty, you were an adult. So that changed all kinds of things. Child labor laws, public junior high schools and high schools going mainstream, etc. The second life stage that was created in the 20th century was retirement, primarily around the 20s and 30s with the Great Depression, with Social Security, with pensions. There was a sense of you're doing backbreaking work either in the fields or in a factory. After 40 years of doing it, you need to retire and relax. Ret world grew by 30 years in the 20th century. It was 47 years old in the year 1900, and then it was 77 years old by the year 2000. So what got created there was midlife. There's this whole new era of like, okay, well, midlife is often in your 40s or 50s, and now actually it's considered 35 to 75 according to sociologists. Midlife is this era that is sort of the black hole of adult development. You go into it and

there's a lot of things going on. So that's the framed and say, I got curious about midlife as a life stage because of my personal experience, but then also because of the sense I had, which is these other two life stages, adolescence and retirement, got a lot of government support, academic research, et cetera. Midlife has gotten so much less. And so my own personal story was this. I was running my boutique hotel company, Joie de Vivre. It was second largest in the US.

It was based in San Francisco. We had 52 boutique hotels around California. I loved it until I hated it. And I was running out of cash during the Great Recession. I had my long-term relationship ending. My foster son, who was an adult at that point, going to prison wrongfully. One of my best friends, whose name is Chip, weirdly enough, commiting committing suicide one of five friends of mine during that time during the great recession that actually took their life so i was like wow everything that could go wrong was going wrong and um i got to the other side of it but i also had this mde in the middle of that i had a an allergic reaction to an antibiotic after breaking my ankle and getting a bacterial infection in my leg. I didn't know how to metabolize all the lifequakes.

That's what Bruce Feiler, life is in the transitions. He's on our MBA faculty. He calls it lifequakes. I was having multiple lifequakes at the same time. All I could do was just rely on one of my best friends who was an executive and life coach, Vanda. She talked me down from literally feeling like I wanted to go jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. I got to the other side because the NDE helped me to reconnect with a book that I'd always

appreciated, which was Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Before we go there, NDE, what is that? NDE means near-death experience. What it actually means in my case was over the course of 90 minutes after giving a speech in St. Louis, I went flatline. So I didn't have a heart rate nine different times in 90 minutes. Some of those times, the heart rate came back after 10 seconds or 60 seconds. Sometimes when the paramedics were there, they had to shock me back to life with the paddles on my chest. So yeah, what an experience to go to the other side at 47 years old.

Little did I know at the time that there's research that's called the U-curve of happiness, which I find pretty fascinating now. And it's pretty conclusive globally that your mileage may vary, but the low point in life satisfaction as an adult is 47.2. And I was, I was not quite 47.2, but I was not, I was like 47.6 when I had the flatline experience. So what happened was that the flatline experience woke me up to, I was in the hospital for a couple of days while they're trying to figure out what was wrong with me. And I had Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning in my backpack. And I read it again. I'd read it many times before, but I never read it right after having an NDE. And I was not in the concentration camp, which is what he writes about so poignantly. But I was in a prison of my own mind. And I really felt in midlife that I didn't have options. And I felt like this company I'd

been running for 22 years that was defining my identity and my self-esteem was something I could not walk away from. And lo and behold, dying wakes you up to how you want to live and that's what happened for me i had that experience and i ultimately sold sold the company for you know not a lot of money bottom of the great recession but i got my get out of jail free card so to speak and then i had the two years and i think when we first started spending some time together uh you know i had two years to write a book called Emotional Equations. Like I was fascinated by festivals and hot springs. So I just said, I want to go and learn everything I can about festivals and hot springs. And so I did. And that was just amazing. And then out of the blue,

I got a call from, you know, the three founders of Airbnb 10 years ago when it was just a tiny little startup that almost nobody had heard of. And they said, we're growing globally. We need somebody like you to ultimately, they called me the modern elder because they said they were looking for someone who's as curious as they are wise. And that's when I had the other experience in midlife. So my first experience in midlife was like, oh man, midlife sucks. And then my second experience in midlife, which lasted from around 52 till around 59 or 60 when I was Airbnb helping them full time. And then as an advisor, I saw the upside of midlife. So that's what's interesting to me today is like, okay, midlife has many shades.

There's so many things to peel away there also. What you described in the earlier transition was what from the outside looking in, so many people would probably have looked at you and said, oh, what a life he's built. He's checking the box of success, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. He's doing all these incredible things. And it's just such a powerful reminder, I think also, that we don't know what somebody's own unique internal lived experience is, even if from the outside looking in, it seems like they've got all the indicia of success and happiness and contentment. And I think we tend to carry around so much of our own sense of self-judgment and shame

because like, oh, we haven't gotten or achieved or done what, you done what X, Y, and Z person or group or community has done. It's like, which just layers on even more unhappiness. And I feel like that tends to happen the further we march into life also. Comparison is the recipe for suffering. I think that's a very apt Buddhist phrase. And I think that there's an element of, one of the things I think is an upside of midlife and beyond is it is an era when we move from the accumulation part of our life to the editing part. And we,

and as Carl Jung and Richard Rohr, Richard's become a really good friend now that I live in New Mexico, part-time famous Christian mystic. They both have famously said that the primary operating system for the first half of our life is the ego for all kinds of good reasons. And then the primary operating system around midlife shifts to the soul. And yet no one gives us operating instructions about how to go from automatic to manual transmission in this car that we're driving. And yet, in moving to that place of focusing on the soul a little bit more, going interior,

what happens is we are less focused on comparison. And that brings us some relief. Brene Brown has become a good friend. And she talks about the great midlife unraveling. And when you hear that, you hear like unraveling. Wow, that sounds bad. Like something that unravels, like falling apart. But actually, when I looked at the word ravel,

the word ravel means something that's tightly wound. So unravel just actually allows you to start creating some space in your life and maybe making some edits with discernment of what you don't need anymore. You know, the archetype that defines you, the identity that defines you, the mindset that doesn't serve you, the people in your life that, you know, frankly aren't nourishing. And maybe you're not nourishing to them either. These are the changes we make in midlife if we're healthy, because what that allows us to do is to look at the second half of our adulthood as an opportunity to start to be a beginner again and try something new. I'm curious at the reason that we don't start this re-examination or make those changes. And I actually want to dive into some of the unique changes and ideas, but you described earlier that midlife is commonly known now

as this window from 35 to, what'd you say, 75, 77? 75, yeah. 75. So that's a 40-year window, which- It's the midlife marathon. Right. So that is very likely larger than the span of like those two other stages that you described. And I'm curious about the role of rituals in kickstarting a process of re-examination. Because when we hit adolescence, we have rituals for that, right? Oh, for sure. We have a lot of them are faith-based rituals or just like sweet 16s or- Commencement.

Yeah, your Bartmits for communion. Right. You've got all this stuff, which kind of says like, there's a big change happening when we like quote retire, which like, who knows what that means anymore. Right. I remember being in a large government job in a past life. And every time somebody retired, a memo went around and everyone would gather and there was a plaque at like ceremony and a presentation. Like we had these rituals, you know, but the way that you're describing midlife, there's, unless I'm missing something, there's no moment, there's no ritual that says, okay, so let's acknowledge the fact that we're actually making this transition and let's take a moment to really understand what this means. Am I missing something there? No, you're not missing anything at all. Here's

another frame. You know, I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to social sciences. So a word that has recently been popularized is middle-essence. So again, adolescence as a word didn't exist in 1904. And then actually helping to give it a word, this idea of your teen years when you're going through identity and physical and emotional and hormonal changes, helped people to see, hey, adolescence is the threshold between childhood and adulthood. Thank God, you know, 100 years later, we now have a word called middle essence. Because when you're going through middle essence, which often happens between about age 45 and 60, you're going through physical, emotional, hormonal and identity transitions,

sometimes between the what you could call adulthood and elderhood. Now, to be clear on elderhood, I'm not talking about elderly. That's maybe the last five years of your life. But to be an elder basically means you're generally older than the people who surround you. So what if we were to actually realize that adolescents needed lots of rituals and rites of passage and schools and tools to help people through a transitional phase in one's life? Similarly, midlife needs that as well. And honestly, Jonathan, that's why I felt having

lost five friends in midlife, all men, 42 to 52 years old, during the Great Recession and having suicide ideation myself during that time, because I just felt like I was stuck in a jail. I decided five years ago to create the world's first midlife wisdom school and call it the Modern Elder Academy, MEA, because that's literally what they called me at Airbnb in a loving way. Because we do need rites of passage and rituals. And if you can create a midlife wisdom school that allows people to have time to reflect on how they can cultivate and harvest their wisdom and maybe repurpose it in new ways

and reframe their relationship with aging. There's a woman named Becca Levy from Yale, and her research is fascinating. She's been able to show over the last 20 years that when people can actually shift their relationship with aging or their mindset on aging from a negative to a positive, you gain seven and a half years of additional life. Now that is more life in her research shows with all variables being equal. That's more life than a person gains if they stop smoking at 50 or if they start exercising at 50. So this is a public health question of like, wow, how could we help people live longer and generally happier? Because if you have a better perspective on aging,

you often feel better about your aging process because there's a lot of unexpected pleasures of aging and things that get better as you get older. So long story short is that's why we created MEA, to create the school, the tool, the tools, the rituals, and the rites of passage that help people to understand if I'm going through midlife, I'm not the only one who's feeling X, Y, or Z. And we basically believe that wisdom is not taught, it's shared. So how do you create 20 to 24 people coming together and having life-changing conversations around this era of their life? Yeah.

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Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him! We need him! Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. I mean, it's interesting. You brought up this one sort of like pretty powerful piece of research. As you were sharing that, my mind flitted back to, I think it was Helen Langer did this like original research where she basically took people and transported them into an environment that was rebuilt to physically mimic what they had in there. I think it was their 20s and 30s.

And they measured all the vital statistics and the cognitive function, everything beforehand. And then after spending time in that environment after, and with no other shift than just like changing the physical environment and having them exist, they're not telling them anything or having them practice anything. There was a profound change in all the things that we would measure to signify mental and physical health. Yeah. It is fascinating. And so much, we've done so little work in this area, partly because historically people didn't live this long. So there was an element, element of three stages in life. You learn until you're 20 or 25.

You earn until you're 60 or 65. And then you retire until you die. And frankly, retirement accelerated mortality by two years for a variety of reasons. So as people are living longer – now, of course, COVID has affected longevity in all kinds of profound ways. But coming out of COVID, longevity is going to continue to go back up again. And in the rest of the world, actually, it's interesting. Our longevity in the US is much more rest of the developed world has actually, it's like five, we die five to six years younger

than most of the rest of the developed world, interestingly. So long story short is, it's something we need to tap into because we spend billions of dollars, multi-billions of dollars a year on PSAs, public service announcements, to stop smoking for good reason

and to start exercising for good reason and to start exercising for good reason. But we have no PSAs around the unexpected pleasures of aging or what gets better with age or why you should maybe aspirationally imagine that elderhood could be a good thing. And it's for all kinds of reasons because we have a structural ageism in society in all kinds of ways. So that's partly what I feel like I'm earth to do now, is the meaning of life is to find your gift and the purpose of your life is to give it away. And I found my gift during midlife because I had the worst of times and the best of times. I saw my relevance. The elder of the past was all about reverence. I think the elder of today, the modern elder, is about relevance. That's why that curiosity is really essential

because you can't be relevant if you're not up to date on what's happening in the world. How do you take that wisdom you may have in you and apply it in new environments as I had to at Airbnb? At 52, I was joining a tech company where the average age in the company was 26. and apply it in new environments as I had to at Airbnb. Because at 52, I was joining a tech company where the average age in the company was 26. And Brian Chesky, the CEO, I was mentoring him. I loved it. Seven and a half years, I did that. But I was also reporting to him.

And he was 31 and I was 52. So what's it like to report to your mentee? So it's a fascinating journey. And one that we're going to see more of. Because Jonathan, over 40% of Americans today have a younger boss. And by the year 2025, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, the majority of Americans will have a younger boss. So this idea of the dynamics in the workplace of who's mentoring who and what does it mean to be a mentor and an intern at the same time? All of that's fascinating and new, a new dynamic, but it does require those of us who are getting

older to be open and have a growth mindset around how could I improve and learn in this new environment? I mean, I think it requires those of us who are getting older, but also at the same time, not but, and at the same time, every generation, you know, just sort of like look up and down the chain, like in age and say like, like if I start from the fundamental assumption that every person has value, like how does that weave into like where I am in my life, what I'm doing, what I'm trying to create? Like how can we understand what is that? And somehow integrate, like tap it, unlock it, create utility around it. You know, it's interesting.

There's years ago, we used to run this year long intensive training program. We would bring, you know, like 20, 30, 40 people together from around the world and work on conscious business. And we used to have retreats. I remember this one retreat, everyone was together and we were up in this big old log cabin in the mountains in Utah. And we're on a lunch break and I kind of look out in the back and I see this one guy who's in this group and he's like around 20 years old. Another guy who's sort of like in his late fifties,

probably around 60 years. And they're sitting side by side, they have a vanilla folder open and, or just on their lap. And they're in this deep conversation. And so I automatically assume, oh, what a lovely moment of mentoring that, you know, like this, like, you know, the younger guy felt comfortable turning to a guy in his fifties and he was sharing some insights and wisdom, maybe some guidance. And I shared that moment when we came back into group. I said, like, I was noticing this and I thought it was really lovely. And the only guy said, not actually, you got it wrong. I have a kid about his age and I had some questions

and I thought I would love his point of view, his perspective. And he was guiding me, he was mentoring me. So I think there's this feedback loop that sometimes we get close to in just the inherent value of people living their lives and how much we can help each other, regardless of age, that maybe there's a need to awaken to. No doubt. And I would say that one of the beautiful things I loved about my Airbnb time,

where I mentored more than a hundred people in the company was it was often mutual mentorship. Sometimes it was EQ for DQ. That's what we used to call it. I supposedly had the emotional intelligence because actually IQ doesn't grow as you age, but EQ can. And so I brought to the table EQ and a lot of my younger mentees who also were mentoring me, they brought DQ, digital intelligence to the table, and we were both better off for it. And I think, you know, it is time with five generations in the workplace for the first time. And with, again, by 2025, the majority of Americans having a younger boss, it's time for us to create a new generational compact that is dedicated to the idea of creating

like an intergenerational potluck. In fact, one of the things I'm working on right now with MEA, with Modern Elderly Academy, is something called Generations Over Dinner. And the whole premise, we were doing it with a guy named Michael Hebb, who created something called Death Over Dinner, which became a global movement with over a million people. Going to a dinner with a sort of a Jeffersonian style dinner where people were conversing about topics around death, sort of a taboo topic. Well, what we're doing is we're putting generations over dinner, premise being, what if we brought three, four,

five, six generations to the table together to talk about some of societal problems, as well as the life stages that we go through and what we can learn from each other based upon sharing our wisdom. And the wisdom is shared in both directions from old to young and young to old. So we did an exercise, we did a survey of our 3000 alumni in MEA, who have average age 54, people as young as 28, as old as 88. And we asked what percentage or how many of your five closest friends who are not family members are either at least 10 years older than you or at least 10 years younger than you. And what we found amongst 3,000 people from 40 countries is that 80% of the friends we have in our life, people who we consider our confidants, are people who are within 10 years older or younger than us. So they're not necessarily

generationally in a different generation. That's a real wake-up call to say, how do we start to close that generation gap? Because it's important. Politically, it's important. Socially, it's important. In fact, from a problem-solving gap because it's important. You know, politically, it's important. Socially, it's important. In fact, from a problem-solving perspective, it's important. There's these great studies out of Europe because intergenerational teams are even more important in Europe than the US because there is an older population there. And what they've been able to show is that when you put different generations on a team together in the workplace, you actually have better results because the young brain tends to be focused and fast. And the older brain, as Arthur Brooks wrote

about in his most recent book, From Strength to Strength, tends to be more holistic in its thinking. And so you've got fast and furious for the young person and a little bit more methodical and maybe holistic and systemic connecting the dots from the older person and a little bit more methodical and maybe holistic and systemic connecting the dots from the older person, you get a team together that has that kind of cognitive diversity and you might get the best results out of them. Yeah. It's interesting. It's sort of like you're taking Daniel Kahneman's two thinking systems and spreading out the burden of being able to function optimally with both of those across a team or a group of people so you can try and get the optimal result.

It occurs to me also, I mean, the notion of creating intergenerational gatherings is so appealing to me. And I wonder if in part we've lost a lot of that just on a family basis because it used to be a couple of generations ago, it was typical to have three generations of a family living together under the same roof. That's just kind of the way it is. That is so much rarer these days, especially in Western culture. So you don't have the opportunity for the energy, the stories, the wisdom to move between those generations the way you used to. What's interesting in the United States is that a recent survey that Encore.org

came out with some academics showed that you're absolutely right in the Caucasian community. But in the BIPOC community, what you see is actually there's more generational living together. Actually, COVID did accelerate generational living together, co-generating, because of just COVID, all the reasons you could expect. Yet, in the people of color community and in their neighborhoods, you do see it more often. The problem we've gotten to really is there's an element of age segregation. And even if you think about what retirement communities or nursing homes are, they're just putting people out to pasture. They're like warehouses for old people.

And that's probably the reason we've looked at that and said, okay, well, MEA is doing something for midlifers. But what happens is you get a little older and you want to live in community. And what if you don't want a retirement community, but you want a regenerative community, a place where you feel like you're constantly regenerating yourself? Because retirement, the technical term retirement basically means to withdraw into seclusion. And a lot of people don't want to do that when they're at that age. create something? How do you actually, to be generative is actually often to be able to give to another generation. Eric Erickson, the developmental psychologist said that the stage of life that is really midlife and later midlife is defined by the challenge of generativity

versus stagnation. And generativity is really about I am what survives me. And I am what survives me, those five words Erickson spoke, speaks to this idea that at some point in your life, you get to the point where it is no longer about the ego. It is about being in service. And frankly, let's be clear that parents should not be that way from an early age in adulthood sometimes. But there's also an era in your late 40s, your 50s, your 60s and beyond where there's an element of purpose and legacy that becomes even more profound as a North Star for people. So how do we help create that, especially generationally? If people are

no longer, because of mobility, living near where they grew up and with their families, then how do we do that in the community where they live? I don't think they do it by living in an age-segregated 55-plus retirement. So that's one of the other things I'm really focused on right now is how do you create these new regenerative communities that are basically the 21st century alternative to what was the 1960s innovation of retirement communities? Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting. The idea of just really very intentionally bringing together different generations for the benefit of all. But I don't want to skip over what you just shared. The notion of as you move further into life, it becomes more about what you just shared. You know, the notion of, you know, like as you move further

into life, it becomes more about what you leave behind. And maybe I'm hearing that wrong because I tend to have a knee jerk reaction when I hear things like that. On the one hand, I understand it. You know, like we, significance becomes more important to us. Like that's where a lot of the energy is. At the same time, I'm just going to reflect my own experience here. You know, like I'm 56, I'm thinking about a lot of the same things. I don't think about that. And, you know, I am fiercely in building mode. I run two businesses now with my wife and like amazing teams.

And we're like, we are building stuff that, you know, hopefully is impacting a lot of people. There is no place in my mind where the question of, I'm doing this because I want to leave something behind that shows that I was here, that leaves a legacy, where there's an enduring sense of significance after I'm no longer here, that doesn't enter my day-to-day thought in any meaningful or conscious way. Maybe there's a script running that I'm not aware of, but to me, it's about just how can I be fully engaged and curious and alive and creative and of service in the moment right here and right now. And I just assume that if I can do that, the future will take care of itself.

Am I the weirdo in that or like, am I the outlier or is that more common? Listen, I definitely appreciate your candor on this because I actually don't think you're the weirdo, but I also think you're in the generative phase. And to generate something is often to create something, not even to recreate it. And when you're in the generative phase, you're in the moment and you're in the flow of what you're doing right now. You're not thinking about the future. I think what happens is I've had two brushes with death, the NDE that we talked

about earlier, that was related to an allergic reaction to an antibiotic, and then prostate cancer, which we also talked about earlier, and stage three. And so, and I have lost a number of friends, you know, in the last few years. And so I think mortality, you know, I've come face to face with it more recently than I did. We're about six years age difference earlier. And I think the mortality has helped me to recognize that what you just said, which is you're focused on this, and you don't really focus on legacy or the future, once you get to a point where you have less life ahead of you, you do start to spend more time thinking about what are you going to do with that life? And you do focus more on what you're leaving behind. I think you will.

If you don't, I don't think it's the end of the world. Because what I hear and what I know about you, Jonathan, is you're so engaged. When someone's curious and passionately engaged, what you notice is not their wrinkles, but their energy. And what I notice is there's the energy. There's the energy and the presence of the thing that you're doing. And even just being curious and present as someone at age 56 or 57 or 65 or 75. When a younger person or any person sees someone who is curious, passionate, engaged, full of energy and presence, what you may be leaving behind is just the role model that you are on a daily basis. So it's not about having your name on a building or writing a book that people will remember 100 years from now or having kids who go off and do great things.

It literally may be the character qualities. One of the things that we really focus on at MEA is who are the people who you most admire in your life that you've had some contact with? What were their character qualities that you most admired? What are the character qualities you would like to be remembered for? Not so much the eulogy. I mean, eulogy is interesting, but more just like, you know, the thing that people will say about you when you're no longer here. And like, how are you investing in those character qualities?

I'm sounding very much like David Brooks right now. The Road to Character was one of his books, as well as The Second Mountain. And, you know, his work weaves very much with our MEA curriculum and what we do. But I do think that's a really profound question that we don't really ask a lot, that is one of the questions I ask them as a leader. What are the five adjectives you want your people to use to describe you? And let's go out and then ask your top 12 people that you work with, what are the five adjectives they think would describe you? And then let's compare. And of course, that comparison is usually a painful one. And then the next question we ask is, okay, what are the habits or behaviors you could actually start to just imbue yourself with that will actually allow you to be seen as

an encouraging leader, if that's one of your five words? And yet nobody said encouraging. So one of them might be just literally coming up with the idea of like twice a day, out of the blue, you give recognition or appreciation to someone who works with you. And that's something you just build into your habits. And so this idea of starting to invest in your character is something that I think is a relevant one in midlife. And for you as a leader of the two companies that you're leading, Jonathan, that might be much more relevant to you as a legacy than the idea of like, well, what am I giving to the world 20 years from now? It's definitely interesting. And as you're

framing it in the context of a leader, my brain is translating that in the context of family. Yeah, for sure. You know, because those same questions that you asked, questions that you asked, what are the five qualities that you want to be known for? You could pose that for a leader and a team, but you could also pose it as a parent or a caretaker and their kids or their brother or their sister. What if you went out to your nuclear or extended family or chosen family and posed that exact same thing. I'm guessing we would all have some level of disconnect no matter who we pose that to, whether it's in a business context or a deeply personal one. Yeah. It's a little scary to even imagine it because like,

but it's a great question because it actually is so much life is about what what we're intentional or conscious about and you know there's so much that's important that we are not very intentional or conscious about and just you know i'm a big carl jung fan taking what's unconscious and making it conscious is part of the process of i think of adult maturity and frankly part of the process of, I think, of adult maturity and frankly part of the process of building that character. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

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The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot.

Flight risk. As we have this conversation, clearly you're a geek. You study a lot of different philosophers, scientists, fields of study. At the same time, you're now sitting like five years into your own endeavor. You're sitting on the commonalities or patterns that you're seeing that maybe we weren't even aware of, maybe you weren't even aware of or surprised by before this whole thing started? Dr. Phil Pizzo, who used to run Stanford Medical Center and created Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute, which is sort of like – we're like the Volkswagen. They're like the Mercedes in terms of they have a much smaller number of people they touch, and they do a year-long program, and it's a lot more expensive. He's actually now at 77, a Catholic guy. He's a rabbinical student and learning to become a rabbi, studying to become a rabbi. So long story short is what Phil Pizzo's work has shown is the three most important foundational qualities for people after age 50 are the following. Their purpose, community, and wellness.

And Dan Buechner, who's a teacher, actually Phil's a teacher on our online program. Dan Buechner is teaching MEA next year in March. The guy who started the Blue Zones or conceived of the concept of the Blue Zones, the idea of longevity pockets in the world and what are the qualities of those places. He says the same thing. So let's unpack that for a second.

Purpose, community, and wellness. Because I've seen this face-to-face at MEA. So when a person retires or they're in the later part of their career and they sort of feel like they're bored or they don't know what's next for them, especially when you retire, you lose purpose. I mean, there's no doubt about it.

The average person is retiring from something, not retiring to something. And therefore, that's why they end up sitting on a couch 47 hours a week watching TV. So one of the most important qualities is to look at, not to get so wrapped up on what's my purpose, because actually it sounds like a possession that you might have left in the bathroom at the gas station. So purpose is not a possession. It is a verb. How to be purposeful. Asking the question of what are you passionate about? To what end might you be purposeful is a helpful one. Because a lot of people actually as they get older are feeling the need for that. Because especially if they've been a parent and they're now an empty nester, that also can lead to a sense of, oh, well, purpose was all about, you know, raising my kids. and now they're okay. And now they have kids and

have grandkids. And, you know, there's an element of purposefulness is important. Community is the most important of the three. It's obvious if you retire that, you know, a lot of your social life and a lot of your relational life was built around the people you work with. And if you're no longer in a workplace or frankly in COVID, if you're not seeing people as much, community becomes, and the loss of community becomes really profound. I've used profound way too many times on this podcast, but I guess it's like, you know, hanging out with you makes me feel like it's an important word. And what happens is people feel lonely. They feel disconnected. I would say it's probably the number one thing we've seen at MEA. And it's probably the reason we have 26 regional chapters around the world. That was not MEA's idea. That was our alumni in various parts of the world just saying, we want to connect with other alums. Could you create some regional chapters? Because we want that community connection, what I like to call a social wellness.

We tend to think of – and that brings me to the third one, the third quality, which is wellness. The thing that's interesting about retirement is that when people are retiring, understand purpose and community might go away, but you'd think wellness would just get better because you have more hours of the day to work on yourself, to go for a hike or play golf or or you know go swim or be careful if you learn how to cook so you can be a better nutrition but in fact because you lose structure and discipline when you retire a lot of people actually lose their wellness because they did the structure and discipline of going to the gym was sort of fit into a normal schedule of like i got to do it before or after work.

And when you lose the discipline and structure, people lose the wellness. And I like to just say social wellness, because that's where community and wellness come together. We tend to think of wellness as a personal endeavor, you know, my nutrition, my sleep, my exercise. But you know, the word illness starts with an I and wellness starts with a we. And it's interesting that we speaks to wellness on a very important level, which is, if you live in a community of healthy and well people, you are more likely to do well. And some of that social connection that you're having is creating heart and mind relational wellness. And it's something you got to invest in.

And so I would just say one of the big lessons of our five years at MEA is those are three important qualities. I think another key lesson is this, is one of the challenges for people after about age 45 or 50 is for a lot of us, it's hard to become a beginner again. And the reason for that is because somehow we feel like, you know, you don't look very good as a 57 year old, as I was five years ago, going out, learning to surf for the first time because MEA in Southern Baja in Mexico is right near a famous surf break. And it's like, okay, well, I asked myself the question, what is it that I know now or have

done now at 57 that I wish I'd learned or done 10 years ago? So once I got that in my brain, then I asked the question at age 57, what is it that I will regret 10 years from now if I don't go and learn it or do it now? And that is how five years ago I started learning. And I started learning Spanish because I'd never learned Spanish. I learned French in high school. And I would regret if I'm living half-time in Mexico that I don't understand Spanish. I would regret living near a surf break that I'm not able to go and at least learn how to surf, even if I'm not pretty good. We, in our midlife, have to learn how to become a beginner again, over and over again. And that is a real

subtext of our MEA program. How do we help people learn how to serve? How do we help them learn how to bake bread? How do we help them learn to do improv? How do we help them in circle speak from a vulnerable place, write a piece of poetry? I mean, the program has a lot of elements to it. It's about reframing aging, about moving to a growth mindset, learning how to navigate midlife transitions, cultivate wisdom, learn how to live a regenerative lifestyle. But at the heart of it is helping people to learn how to become a beginner over and over again. And I promise you that that skill of learning to become a beginner over and over again is the skill that's most wedded and clearly attached to the people who turn out to be a hundred years old. And that actually makes a lot of sense to me. And I'm going to ask the obvious question then,

which is what, what stops us? Because the thing that jumps out to me immediately is ego. Like you reach a certain point in your life and you're like, I don't want to be seen as that person struggling, not knowing like everybody. And there's got to be like this element of social, like I imagine if you knew that you could learn to surf and there would not be another surfer in the world, it'd be you and a teacher. Nobody would ever see you until you were like an average, okay, surfer, you'd be totally cool with that. Right.

But the thought of going out there, like with like a hundred other people trying to catch waves, like from, you catch waves from 10 years old to 30 years old. There's got to be a huge social context to this fear of being a beginner as well. Yes, exactly. I thought everybody on the beach was looking at me. Of course, the other surfers too. Of course, they were for a moment, but they were dealing with their own stuff. So yoga, I've always loved meditation. It came to me very easily. Yoga did not.

I'm tightly wound and my hamstrings are really tight. And again, because I'm sort of this guy who's hung out in the wellness world to some degree, I've also felt like I'm a little bit of an imposter. I'm a poser and I can't do the yoga poses, but I can pretend like a yoga enthusiast. Well, what I finally realized is that I had to look at the triggers. So what are the triggers that are stopping us from becoming a beginner? In my case, the trigger was how does it look to other people in the yoga class? And so what I learned with our mindfulness teacher at MEA, his name is Teddy Dean and

famous former pro skateboarder. I was like, Teddy, can we do a one-on-one yoga class three times a week at my place? As soon as I did that for about three to six months, I realized that my problem in yoga class was I kept my eyes open all the time. I was not going inside my body. I was staring at everybody else. And so what I came to realize is like, I can go into yoga class now and close my eyes and don't see anybody else. When I'm meditating, I have my eyes closed. I'm not comparing. And so I feel a lot more comfortable in yoga classes now because I feel like I have gotten more confident in my yoga, but also more clear that the purpose

of yoga is to go inside, not to be looking around outside. But I had to do a little bit of training and know that my trigger of what does it look like to others was going to be hard to solve. And so I had to look for the workaround. And the workaround was doing a one-on-one series of one-on-one classes. So looking at the trigger, the trigger could be, I feel like I'm going to get hurt. Surfing could be one of those. So you just figure out, okay, well, what can I do to actually address the trigger? Because the trigger is where we shut down. Yeah. It's sort of like the place where we stumble. And I feel like this also loops into Arthur Brooksworth, who you brought up earlier, like what he describes as the winner's curse, because it's almost like if you have had a really

high level of success in any domain in life before this, you like to see yourself as that person who has had this high level of success. Like I am no longer, I'm so far from being a beginner. I am the one that everybody turns to when they want to know how to do this particular type of thing. And then to go back to that place, you know, like to your point, even if social context, social judgment, like even if that fear isn't the central trigger for you, the way you see yourself, like we hold ourselves very often to brutalizing standards. And it's almost like the more that you have achieved in your eyes, at least beforehand, I'm guessing the harder it is, you know, without even regard to social context for you to allow yourself to go back to that place. Cause you've got to basically

go to a place where you're saying, I am complete neophyte. Like I am, I know nothing. And in terms of our own just sense of self and how we have formed identity often for decades, it's kind of like dismantling that a little bit in the name of creating a more spacious and forgiving future identity. Let me tell you about a ritual we do at MEA within the first 24 hours that someone's in the workshop. Workshops are usually five or seven nights. And it's a beachfront campus, about five acres. First 24 hours is pretty intense. And we end the first 24 hours with this thing called the Great Midlife Edit. And it's after having done an exercise in the afternoon where people go and look at about 200 to 300 name tags, each of which some of them are blank.

So you could write whatever you want on them, but most of them, what they are, are their mindsets or identities or archetypes of how you see yourself. I am the hero, or I have to be perfect, or I'm too old to learn technology, or I'm too old to find my soulmate, et cetera. And we do this exercise where people actually own the name tags, you know, and they put them on their chest. And then we go through an exercise where they actually get to know each other really well by what's on their chest and, you know, being in alignment with each other and seeing,

seeing what are these archetypes and mindsets that aren't serving them anymore. And then we all ultimately end up at a fire pit on the beach right around sunset, just before we do a restorative yoga class. And people have written on a piece of paper, what are the mindsets, the identities, the success curse, identity of like, I always have to be successful. I always have to do it right. I always have to be successful. I always have to do it right. I always have to look good. Whatever they've put on the paper, they get up.

They say to the group, this is what I'm letting go of. No one's reserving me. They put it in the fire, in the bonfire. And then they turn around and say, here's what I'm replacing it with. So that's an example. And it's a really powerful experience, especially at sunset. Because what it really says to people, like, you know what, I will remember this day. And this is a ritual is important, because it creates a threshold, it helps to say before and after it also in a community kind of ritual thing,

environment, it provides the social support. And in this case, the fact that you're not the only one who's actually being vulnerable enough to actually put it out there. There's a lot of reciprocation going on. So we need more of that. As a society, we need more of that for people in adulthood. And we come across as if like, I've got to look like I've got my life right. Everything's going perfectly, or etc. Going back to what we talked about at the very start of this conversation is like, man, that feeling that I have to portray something to the world, that it creates this weird compartmentalization. This is often a first half of

life kind of thing. And that is why sometimes it is that damn midlife crisis, or what I like to call the midlife chrysalis, because between caterpillar and butterfly, there's a chrysalis, just like there's a midlife. It is that gooey transformative chrysalis that's going on often with circumstances that just feel they're screwing you, that you just say, ah, I was able to get on the other side of constantly trying to compare myself. And sometimes, you know, it's those circumstances that actually help you to make the change you need to make in your life. Yeah. I mean, so powerful. And, you know, the idea of, you know, the, the chrysalis,

so often we don't sort of like, we don't come to the point where, you know, like we step into that chrysalis willfully until we're brought to our knees. Yeah. And like the notion of actually creating an intentional experience that you opt into either before you're there or maybe like shortly after. But I'm such a fan of just this sort of like saying there is process for this moment in life too. Like we haven't talked about it. There's actually, you know,

you seem like there's growing research around it. But the things that if we look back and if we look forward, you know, like the rituals, the shedding, the re-examination, the centering of purpose and wellness and community and the questions and the prompts and the exercises around it, like these things really, really matter. They signal to us, like I'm stepping into the next season. And they also probably signal to those around us. And if we can invite a community to come into it with us, then we don't have to travel alone. And I think it's just, as we have this conversation at the tail end of two and a half or so years where everybody's world, no matter who you are, no matter what age you are, no matter

where you are in the world has been utterly turned upside down. There is so much re-imagining going on. And there are so many folks in that 35 to 75 window who are probably saying, huh, I've been shaken really, really, really, really hard enough to know that what's got me here is not what I want to get me there, but I don't know. I don't know how to handle this moment. So, which is why I love the ideas and the prompts that you're offering, because I think so many of us are in that moment, then we realize or we acknowledge. And the notion that there is guidance, I just think it brings hope to this moment. There's guidance and there's time. And the thing about time is the average age of people coming to MEA is 54.

When we surveyed them, the average age they think they're going to live till is 90. Jonathan, 54 is exactly halfway between 18 and 90. So in essence, at 54, you're halfway through your adult life. But generally speaking, the way we think of our lives, we don't think of like okay at 54 i have i have just as much adulthood ahead of me as i did behind me it's like no we don't think that way and that's why this is helpful because frankly if we don't get this right you end up in this weird downward cycle that you know leads to people being cranky and, you know, getting hooked on opioids and, you know, all

the kind of social ills, the, the suicide rate for people 45 to 65 today is about 60% higher than it was in the year 2000. So there's a problem. And there's support and solutions. And there's support. Exactly. Thank you. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To me, a good life is a meaningful life. You know, I learned from Viktor Frankl that in my emotional equations, despair equals suffering minus meaning.

And so if suffering is somewhat ever-present, it's the first noble truth of Buddhism. So what that would mean mathematically is that despair and meaning are universally proportional. So I think a good life is a life where you can see the through line of your life. You can understand, you know, it's easy with 20-20 vision to look at, with hindsight, how it all wove together. But when you can actually see, even in the worst of times, the through line of how your life has meaning and how it has meaning for other people, both in terms of how you show up with your character, but also how you serve, to me, that's a good life. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, say that you'll also love the conversation we had

with Robert Thurman about life and spirituality and Buddhism and contribution. You'll find a link to the episode in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable,

and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it? Maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person. Just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those you know, those you love, those you wanna help navigate this thing called life

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Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project. also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. Tennis are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.