Your Next Move - How to Remain Resilient and Relevant Through Challenging Times

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

Today’s episode comes from the Your Next Move vault and is a conversation between host Bea Dixon, CEO and Founder of the Honey Pot Company, and Chip Conley, founder of Modern Elder Academy -- a concept that inspires people to re-think time and aging so they can be in the best frame of mind as founders. In their conversation, they dig deep on near-death experiences, the psychological precepts that underlie being a founder and developing the wisdom to be a great leader.

With the VentureX Business Card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. And with no preset spending limit, your purchasing power adapts to meet your business needs. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Find out more at capitalone.com slash VentureXBusiness. Terms and conditions apply. I'm Sarah Lynch, and you are listening to Your Next Move,

audio edition, produced by Inc. and Capital One Business. Today's episode comes from the Your Next Move vault and is a conversation between host Bea Dixon, CEO and founder of The Honeypot Company, and Chip Conley, founder of Modern Elder Academy, a concept that inspires people to rethink time and aging so they can be in the best frame of mind as founders. In their conversation, they dig deep on near-death experiences, the psychological precepts that underlie being a founder, and am super excited to have this conversation because you have lived a lot of lives, man. You've been a writer. You've been a hospitality founder. You've sold your company. You've been a mentor to one of the largest, most influential hospitality companies of our, you know, of this decade, right? You have died nine times in 90 minutes. And girlfriend, you've done your homework. Yes, which blew my mind because I know that a lot had to come from that.

But I think that it's best for us to start at the beginning. So when you were young, that's when you realized that you really had a love for writing. And when you realized that you had a love for entrepreneurship. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah. You know what? It's really interesting to talk about this because when I was young, I did enjoy writing. There was a part of me that was pretty introverted and I was very at a wild imagination. And writing is when I felt most creative and maybe most in my flow. But I have to say that in early adolescence, I got embarrassed by the fact that I liked writing.

I was the head of the creative writing magazine in junior high school, and it didn't feel like a very masculine thing. And so I was like, okay, better stay away from that. But entrepreneurship felt very masculine, felt very much like, okay, that's what the macho boys do. And I was good at that. I really enjoyed. So I took my creativity energy and put it toward business. And junior high school, I had a little restaurant in my parents' dining room. I had a neighborhood newspaper. I also had an Olympics. I didn't get sued by the Olympics, but I had an Olympics for kids in the neighborhood. And none of these businesses ever really made any money, but they were opportunities for me to create products that people would like. And so I learned that at, you know, frankly,

from age about 12 to 17. Wow. So you've always been seeking to serve humanity in some way, when you look at all the businesses that you did, you know? Yeah. I mean, now I can look back and maybe have that frame for it. I don't think I, at age 14, I would have said that. I would have said I wanted to create a newspaper. Actually, creating a neighborhood newspaper allowed me to use my writing also, which was nice. So I was doing entrepreneurship and writing. But I can look at now and look back at what I'm doing today and very much say that I try to serve humanity in what I do. How long did it take you to get back to your writing?

Man, it took me about 25 years, maybe 20 years. I started a boutique hotel company. And once that became successful, people started asking me to give speeches. And then a literary agent heard me give a speech one time, and she came to me after the speech, and she said, have you ever thought about writing a book? And I just laughed at her because my dad said to me when I was young, he said, Chip, writers are either poor or psychotic, and most are both. And I didn't really understand what psychotic meant, but bottom line is it didn't sound very good.

So when she said to me, Chip, have you ever thought about being a writer? I was like, yeah, I thought about it. And I thought it was probably not a very good idea. And she said, you have a book inside of you around entrepreneurship. And lo and behold, that book came out called The Rebel Rules, Daring to Be Yourself in Business.

And Richard Branson from Virgin wrote the foreword to the book, and it became a very big success. Which is incredible. But you also ghost wrote some books, didn't you, as well? I don't know if I've ever ghost. I've written five books that have been published. I have also written some books that have been self-published. And I have helped write articles. I've helped write articles

and I've helped co-author books with people. But yeah, weirdly enough, the kid who felt like he couldn't write when he was growing up now has a daily blog called Wisdom Well. And I'm working on two books right now while I am CEO of the company. So you mentioned Joie de Vivre and you did that after college, but before you started that company,

you actually had some really compelling offers that you actually walked away from, which was huge. Yeah. So I went to Stanford University undergrad and I graduated in 1982 at a terrible economy. I think the unemployment rate was over 10%. So I applied as a senior in college to Stanford Business School, which is really unusual. But I had taken three Stanford Business School classes as an undergrad. I'd petitioned and they let me in and I had done well. So I applied to Stanford Business School and at age 21, I was accepted. And I had taken a year off from undergrad and worked. So I had some work experience. I spent two years at Stanford Business School. Between the first and second year, I went to Morgan Stanley and their real estate division in New York. And that was really interesting, but I wanted to be an entrepreneur

when I grew up. And being at Morgan Stanley wasn't necessarily going to satisfy that. So they were going to pay me a fortune. And I instead took a job with a tiny little real estate development company in San Francisco that was going to teach me the entrepreneurship side of real estate development. And that's what I did for two and a half years until I started Joie de Vivre, my boutique hotel company. And that was in the mid-1980s when most people had never heard of a boutique hotel. So I was one of the first boutique hoteliers. And over the course of the 24 years that I was running that company, we created 52 boutique

hotels in California. That's crazy. So what were some of the things that you learned? Like you were a founder at a very, very, very young age, right? What were some of the hardships that you ran into, especially at that time? So I was 26 when I started. I bought an old pay-by-the-hour motel in the Tenderloin of San Francisco. It was in bankruptcy. I mean, I had everything going against it, but I knew I wanted it to be a rock and roll hotel. And that was 36 years ago when I

bought it and turned it into the Phoenix. I would say the lessons I had those first three or four years when I just had one hotel related to just, I think my biggest lesson was I have a lot of lessons to learn. I had to get used to the idea that I was not a wise elder who knew what I was doing. So my number one trick for figuring this out was I took an old diary that somebody had given me that I never had used. And I wrote on the cover of it, my wisdom book. And every weekend, I would sit down for 20 to 30 minutes, and I would write in bullet points, four to eight different bullet points about what I'd learned that week. Not just in my work life or in my entrepreneurship life as the CEO of a small company, but also in my personal life. And so what I was doing at age 20, I started doing

that at age 28. So two years after I started the company, what I was doing is I was developing wisdom. I was cultivating wisdom in the form of metabolizing my experience. So what I say to people is like, you know, you can be wise at any age. It just depends on how are you metabolizing the lessons and experiences you're having in a way that you can understand them and use that wisdom in your life moving forward. So I would say my number one lesson as a young buck, as a CEO, was to know that I'm supposed to metabolize my experience as quickly as possible because that will make me wiser. Absolutely. And man, did you get wise. I mean, your way of creating your hospitality company was really dope. You know, your motto was what? Cheap and chic, right?

Yeah, cheap, chic. I mean, I was taking motels and turning them into boutique hotels. So they were definitely cheap, chic. And over time, we became popular and successful enough. So we started creating luxury hotels. But that took a while. And I had to be open to the fact that our growth was going to be organic. But we ultimately grew from me as one employee in a company to 3,500 employees when I sold the company. Wow. And for somebody that's watching this that may actually want to do that one day, what are a couple of pieces of advice that you would give them for building that slowly and understanding how you can get from cheap and chic to actually moving and transitioning over to being a luxury hotelier? Yeah. I would say number one is I'm a

huge fan of psychology. I took one psychology class in college. Once again, against my intuition, I stepped away from psychology saying not very practical, sort of soft. And so I was an economics major as an undergrad. But I loved psychology because I love this guy named Abraham Maslow, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And I just thought, this guy had it down. He knew there was like a pyramid, like there's sort of these physiological needs, safety needs, social belonging needs, esteem needs, and at the top, this thing called self-actualization or being all you can be. So I took that psychology learning and I started applying it in my company. As we grew, what I said is, what is the hierarchy of needs in the form of a pyramid

for our employees, for our customers, and for our investors? And in so doing, I was able to understand what are the basics that we needed to do for our employees that was compensation and money and the benefits. But what they needed that made them feel successful was to feel recognized. And then the transformational need for an employee is to feeling a sense of purpose and meaning in the work that they're doing and what the company is doing. So we did the same for our customers. The basic survival need was meet their expectations. But the success need that a customer has is meet my desires. But what makes a company transformative is when you actually can mind read your customer well enough such that you understand their unrecognized needs. So that was the pyramid for our customers.

And then for our investors, a whole other story. But it was survival need was transactional. The success need was relational. And the transformational need was mission-led and success need was relational, and the transformational need was mission-led and creating a legacy that an investor feels the pride of ownership. So that's a short version of my book, Peak, How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. But I think the number one thing any young CEO or founder could learn is the psychology of what makes their employees, their customers, and their investors tick. Right. Which made sense because you wanted to make it

something that was beautiful and a beautiful experience, but that people could afford and that could actually make money. So that's excellent, excellent advice. So it absolutely makes sense that the founders of Airbnb reach out to you to be a mentor for them. COVID-19 was hard for all of us, I think. And, you know, them turning to you makes complete sense because of the way that you think about how to serve a customer, how to build a business, how to be strategic, and also how to serve shareholders, because all those things have to work at the same time in order for everything to tick. So what was that experience like?

Well, you know, I sold my company when I was almost 50 years old. And so I'd run it from age 26 to 50. Joana Viva is now under the name JDV as a Hyatt brand. So I wasn't really sure what was next. There's a quote from the movie, The Intern with Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway. De Niro said, don't you love that movie? It's never going to be in the Academy Awards, but everybody loves it. It's a feel-good movie. And De Niro, who became the senior intern for this CEO who was half his age, he says, musicians don't retire.

They quit when there's no more music left inside of them. He was not a musician. He was a business person. But he was going back to be an intern, helping out a young CEO. Well, I knew I had music inside of me, I guess in the form of wisdom, but I wasn't sure who to share it with. And it was about 10 years ago that I got a call from Brian Chesky, who's one of the co-founders of Airbnb and the CEO. And he said, Chip, how would you like to help us democratize hospitality? And I was like, okay, well, tell me a little bit more.

And then he told me the Airbnb business plan because I didn't really know that much about it. This was like a time where most people had never heard of Airbnb. It was a small tech startup in San Francisco. And he told me the business plan. I said, oh, that's a terrible idea. I was like, okay, I don't know that that's going to succeed, but I'd love to

help you. And so I started spending time with him and his two co-founders, Joe and Nate. And lo and behold, I got in the belly of the beast of this small company that was growing quickly. And I saw that the idea does have some validity, but part of my role was to help them take an idea that had really just been for budget-minded millennials going to a place like New York or Paris and take it to the mainstream, to people of all ages, all price points. And yeah, I didn't do this alone. Let's be really clear that I certainly was part of a team, but I was the only one who had a hospitality and travel background and really the only person who'd ever, you know, in the senior leadership team who had ever been an entrepreneur running a company that was focused on hospitality and travel. And so what a journey.

I mean, I loved it. They started calling me the modern elder. I didn't like that a whole lot. I said, you know, yes, I'm twice the age of the average employee here, but don't go calling me ageist names. And they said, no, a modern elder. They said a modern elder is someone who's as curious as they are wise. And when they told me that, I said, oh, okay, well, if that's what a modern elder is, I'll be a modern elder because I am curious and I hope I'm wise. And I spent four years full-time by the side of the founders helping to steer the rocket ship with them. And then three and a half years after that, as a strategic advisor,

that took us up to the COVID times, which you alluded to, because the company grew very, very, very fast. And then all of a sudden, COVID hit. And not just Airbnb, but all travel industry companies were in trouble. So I think what I learned from that period then, and what I tried to emphasize to Brian as the CEO was just white-knuckling it alone isn't enough. Yes, the company had to cut 25% of the employees. It had to get rid of all the contractors. So it had to get the operation down to a size that could handle a huge reduction in revenues. But white-knuckling it, just being resilient alone, wasn't the solution. Resilience buys you time, and adaptability buys you a future. And that's really what we did. And that's what we did there.

We also, at that point, I had my company, Modern Elder Academy, which we'll talk about in a few minutes. Both of them, I learned the same thing, which is, you know, resilience buys you time. But if you're just going to then try to stick around and grit your way through it, you're not having the opportunity to see how you can adapt the business in ways that are going to make it stronger in the long term. And the way Airbnb did that was by moving from just nightly stays internationally, because over half of Airbnb's business at that point was people traveling over a border and often staying for about a week or five days to a week in an Airbnb home. Well, after COVID came along, the big opportunity for Airbnb was no longer international travel because people were not traveling internationally. It was domestic travel

and it wasn't for five-day stays. It was for five-month stays. It was for people staying long periods of time, often moving from the city, New York, San Francisco, and saying, I want to go live in a rural place where it feels safer and where I can be outdoors. So that adaptability of our platform, our Airbnb platform, to be able to adapt to the ongoing needs. So back to the needs of the customer, what's the hierarchy of needs? The needs of the customer change overnight. And Airbnb, as a tech platform, could change what it was offering to meet that. And that's why Airbnb, by the end of 2020, was able to do its IPO, and it became the most valuable hospitality company in the world. At one point, it was worth more than Marriott, Hilton, Intercontinental, Hyatt, and Four Seasons combined.

No longer the case today, but it's still, I believe, the most valuable hospitality company in the world. But they will always have that. It doesn't matter if it is today or not. They will always have that. That is true. Yeah, it is true, but they still want to, they want to be relevant. So, you know, if you just, if you live upon your past laurels, you will become blockbuster or you'll become borders. Yeah, for sure. For sure. But I'm saying there's still, I mean, Airbnb, Airbnb is one of the most revolutionary ways to think about the hospitality industry in my opinion.

I mean, I literally was just in Richmond and stayed at a really amazing place in Richmond through Airbnb. And so I love them and adore them. Thank you. So you went on to start the Modern Elder Academy, which I love that you kept the name. Thank you. What was some of the things that you took from your experience being at Airbnb, your experience with JDV, your experience being a writer? Was it the culmination of all of those things that led you to start the Modern Elder Academy? What were some of the tools that you took from that experience?

Back when I was going through my flatline experience, when I died nine times and after giving a speech, that was during the Great Recession. And I was going through a lot of hard times at that time myself. But I also lost five friends, all men, to suicide. They were aged 42 to 52.

So my impression of going through that difficult time myself and then seeing these five friends take their own lives was like, wow, midlife sucks. The midlife crisis brand is accurate. And then I went through my 50s and I had the best decade of my life. And I saw like, oh, midlife can be really great. So I've come to realize that I've had the tale of two midlifes. And what I wanted to do was create the world's first midlife wisdom school, a place where people could reimagine and repurpose themselves in midlife, obviously. And I realized there was nothing like that. And I was lucky enough to have been on the board of

the Esalen Institute, which is the most famous personal growth retreat center in the United States. And I'd been there for 10 years as a board member, but also as a teacher, occasional teacher. And so I had that. I had my hospitality background to know how to create an amazing boutique experience here. And I had my Airbnb experience of like, okay, what does it mean to become a wisdom worker? Not just a knowledge worker, but a wisdom worker who can actually take your wisdom and apply it in new ways. And so I like to call this same seed, different soil. There's a seed that you've learned along the way.

The seed of, for me, it was emotional intelligence applied to leadership. It was strategic thinking from an entrepreneurial and merchant perspective. It was how to build a great culture. Those are things that I built in my own company. And now here I was in a tech company, the head of global hospitality and strategy and the mentor to the CEO. And I was applying what I'd learned from a bricks and mortar business,

but it was all still very relevant. And I wanted to take that experience and say, how can I help other people who may be hitting midlife and having a tough time and help them to feel relevant again. So that they are, you know, we don't have reverence for elders much anymore, although we do in the African-American community

much more than in the rest of the world. That's the thing I do. Yeah. Listen, we just had a Modern Elder Academy Black Week, a Black Modern Elder Week. Oh my God, I loved it. 24 people of African descent and me. I was lucky. I was a curious white boy and we had the best time. But in that community, elderhood is still

revered, but not so much in the broader population or in the Western society. So it's not about reverence so much anymore. It's about relevance. And how do you help people 45, 55, 65 feel relevant again? And if you're going to live to 100 or 90, listen, if you're going to live to 90, and I think most of us may live to 90, at age 54, which is the average age of the people who come to the Modern Elder Academy, and I'm actually here at MEA right now,

and those are past cohorts on the wall behind me. If you're 54 and you're going to live to 90, you're exactly halfway through your adult life. If you start counting at age 18, at 54 years old, you have 36 years of adulthood ahead of you and 36 behind. No one thinks that way. No one thinks like, wow, at 54, I still have as much adulthood ahead of me as I have behind me. And so helping people to get curious about that, we call it long life learning, how to live a life that's as deep and meaningful as long,

how to reframe our relationship with aging, how to move from a fixed to a growth mindset, how to navigate midlife transitions, and how to live a regenerative lifestyle as opposed to retirement lifestyle. These are some of the principles that we have worked on with professors from Stanford and Harvard and Yale and UC Berkeley to develop this program. And we have a beachfront campus here in Baja, where I am right now, soon to be two campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico,

but we also have online programs that are focused on transitions and purpose. We're going to take a quick break and be back with more from Bea and Chip. Here's a little tip for growing your business. Get the VentureX Business Card from Capital One and earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. Plus, the VentureX Business Card has no preset spending limit, so your purchasing power can adapt to meet your business needs. And when you travel, you'll have access to over 1,300 airport lounges. Just imagine where the VentureX Business Card from Capital One can take your business. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Terms and conditions apply. Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash VentureXBusiness.

So I have a question that's actually going to lead us into the next part of our conversation beautifully. Can you tell us more about the Modern Elder Academy? Okay, well, it was just a weird idea. I was writing a book called Wisdom at Work, The Making of a Modern Elder here at my beachfront home in Baja. And I went for a run one day and I came back with a Baja aha, an epiphany. And my epiphany was, why do we not have midlife wisdom schools, transition schools for people to imagine what's next for themselves.

And like within six months after that, we opened on a beta basis. So we tried beta testing some things and we had 13 different cohorts go through it and it seemed to be working. And so we opened to the public in the fall of 2018. And from there, it just accelerated. But we also had COVID and COVID was not good for a business like ours. But what we did, our pivot during COVID, the pandemic pivot was to say, okay, how do we take it and create online programs? How do we create regenerative residential communities where people can live? How do we go to the US and create campuses in the US?

How do we create something called sabbatical sessions where people can come for longer stays with lighter programming? So ultimately, we became a much better company as a result of COVID, but we had to do the resilience first, cut our costs, and then the adaptability second. And that's how we've grown today. That's incredible. What's the lowest age that somebody should come into the Modern Elder Academy? What a great question, because one of the biggest surprises is over 16% of the people who've come to MEA are millennials. Who would have guessed that a millennial would come and say, I want to go to the Modern Elder Academy. But what they really

are attracted to is the idea of cultivating and harvesting wisdom. So the youngest person who comes 28 for one of our one-week programs, the oldest person's been 88. So basically 28 to 88. So in a workshop, we could have as many as four generations in one workshop. And the workshops are usually about 20 to 24 people. And we have all kinds of great teachers here. So lots of people, famous people, Esther Perel, Matthew Ricard,

the happiest man in the world, Dan Buechner, Michael Franti, amazing musician. These are all people who've taught at MEA and are part of our faculty. That's dope. Learning how to age well is important. I just turned 40. My birthday was on the 19th. Black dumb crank, girlfriend. You look good. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate that. But, you know, I remember when I was young, like I remember my mother not wanting to turn 40, you know, like it was a thing for her, you know? And I'm very grateful that at this point in my life, like I'm excited to turn 41. I'm excited to turn 50. I'm excited to turn 90 at some point, you know, God willing, right?

But I'm so interested. Like, I'm going to come and take some classes because I want to learn how to age better and better because it's not just about what you eat. It's not just about what you take on your skin. It's about how you think, right? It's how you think and how your heart, you know, it's like, man, B, I want to hang out with you. I'm going to come to your honeypot. Bro, I'm coming. I'm coming to hang out with you. I'm going to come to your honeypot. Well, I'm coming. I'm coming to hang out with you. Yeah. Here's a statistic that a lot of people don't know about. It comes from Yale, from Dr. Becca Levy there. She showed that when people actually shift their mindset

from a negative perspective on aging to a positive, they gain seven and a half years of additional life, which is more life than if you actually stop smoking at 50 or if you start exercising at 50. So reframing your relationship with aging and your mindset is incredibly important. And so I've loved the experience. We've had over 3,000 alumni from 42 countries come down to our campus to experience what MEA is all about. I think we're on to something big here. And I, you know, I'm looking forward to helping to disrupt higher education a little bit, as well as retirement communities.

We're getting rid of retirement communities and replacing them with regenerative communities built around regenerative farms and regenerative principles of living. Making blue zones. I love it. You have pivoted in so, so, so many ways, so many ways across all the experiences that you've had in your life. What would you say is your defining moment of your life? I think the defining moment in my life was when I realized, and this is so hard for an entrepreneur, for a founder, that after 22 years of running that company, Joie de Vivre, and having it be my identity, it was, you know, my business card was my identity. To be able to actually have my Flatline experience,

which was sort of like a wake-up call for a hotelier and to say, for anybody, for sure, to be able to say, I don't have to do this anymore. I loved it for 20 years. And then from 20 to 22 years, I didn't love it. And then I sold it after 24. Took me two years to sell it in the bottom of the Great Recession. But I think that I'm really proud of that because what it helped me to see was I got a get out of jail free card, meaning I was no longer with invisible handcuffs of like, I have to run this business. I'm the founder, I'm the CEO.

Richard Branson wrote the foreword for my first book, but he was also my idol. And so I was like the Richard Branson of my company. Imagine if Richard Branson had nothing to do with Virgin anymore. That doesn't make sense. I had that same mindset. So to be able to get to the other side where I could say, I am open to creating some space in my life, letting that identity no longer define me and see what shows up, that took some cojones, as they say here in Mexico. But what was beautiful about it, B, was it actually opened up the fact that Airbnb came along. Brian Chesky would never have called me at Joie de Vivre as the CEO of Joie de Vivre if he knew I was running a company still. Why would he think that I could come same seed, different soil, allowed me to create the stage, an empty stage for an amazing play to show up. And Airbnb was an amazing play.

So within stoicism, one of the tenets of stoicism is really having a very deep respect for your mortality, because at the end of the day, like, for sure, we're going to die. Right. When you had your near your divine intervention, it doesn't even feel right to call it a near-death experience. It's almost a miracle. Not almost. It is a miracle that you transitioned nine times in 90 minutes. I don't know if you believe in numerology, but that's a very interesting set of numbers. But what happened after that? Were you a completely different person? So I was in the hospital for two days because they were doing tests on me. They didn't know what happened. They knew I had a broken ankle at the time and a bacterial infection in my leg.

And I was taking a very strong antibiotic. But they ultimately came to the conclusion that I had an allergic reaction, a strong allergic reaction to the antibiotic, but they didn't know. And I was peaceful. I had a book in my backpack, my little day pack called Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl's book about being a psychologist who ended up in a concentration camp. And that book, I distilled it down to an equation while I was there in the hospital. And it was despair equals suffering minus meaning. Despair equals suffering minus meaning. And what that equation really means is that when you're in a difficult time, suffering is sort of ever-present. It's always

there if you want it. But despair and meaning are inversely proportional. The more despair you have, the less meaning you might have. And the more meaning you have, the less despair you have. So from that point forward, my mantra in life was, what's the meaning in this? And even if it was something terrible happening, where's the meaning? What am I supposed to learn from this? And it was less about the wisdom piece, which I was doing earlier at age 28 with my wisdom book. It was really more from the place of, from a spiritual perspective. I mean, one of the things that is, I think, so true is that the primary operating system for the first half of our life is our ego, and it serves us well until it doesn't. And then the primary operating system for the second half of our life, which some of us

are introduced to earlier in life, but some of us don't come into contact with it until midlife, often when it's difficult circumstances, is our soul. And I would just say that from that point forward, when I came back to life and had my visions of what the other side felt like and looked like, I was in a place where I was soul-directed from that point forward. And that was, well, more than 14 years ago. And from that point forward, I really let my soul be the primary driver of my life. It doesn't mean my ego is still not around. It's still there for sure. It just means it's no longer in the driver's seat.

It's like the ego is in the back seat and occasionally the soul is driving. It's like the ego is saying, ah! And it's like, okay, some of what you just said makes sense, but most of you said just this junk and like we're going to put that away and, you know, go have a drink in the backseat and take a nap. So it's like driving Miss Ego. I love it. I love it. But, you know, but you're right. I mean, I'm a founder and I realized a few years ago that I needed to get myself together because Honeypot, while I am intensely grateful for it, my grandmother essentially gifted it to me in a dream. Right.

You know, back to the ancestor thing. It's my life's work, but it's still what I do. It's not who I am. And so I had a moment where I had to wake up and be like, B, okay, what do you like to do? Where do you want to go? What, you know, how do you want to be? You know, so I completely understand when you say you have that moment where you really have to figure it out because we're not taught that as founders. Nobody teaches you that, that you have got to figure yourself out, you know? And so my next question for you and, you know, just- I want to say one thing though, first B. I think you need to write a book and it's just, the name of the book's called

just Being B. Being B. That's so funny that you say that because I am writing a book. And the title is not far off from that. So, look at you. Look at you chip the intuitive.

Let's add that to you. I'm a Scorpio. Cut that intuitive thing down. I love it. So saying everything that we just said, right? Yeah. How do you advise other founders who may look to you to be a mentor or just somebody that they want to talk to? What's your advice for them?

I have a couple of pieces. Number one is be careful of attaching your sense of self-worth and identity too much to the fortunes of your company. I had those five friends who took their own lives in the Great Recession, and three of the five were entrepreneurs. I was on my own roller coaster journey during that time. So yeah, how do you do that? Well, one of the ways you solve for that is you have more in your life than just your business. You make sure you have friends who have nothing to do with your business, and frankly, don't really care. In fact, in some ways, resent that you have the business because you put all your time into the business. So have people in your life that are quite varied. Have interests in your life beyond your business. If you have a spouse or kids, make sure you're spending time with them. Make sure you have a hobby or two. I mean,

it's hard to imagine a founder with a hobby, but a hobby can actually get you through some of the rough times. And the second thing I would say as a piece of advice is it comes from my book, Emotional Equations. And that is anxiety equals uncertainty times powerlessness. So let me unpack that for a second. I love all your equations. They're fantastic. Yeah. I. You know, I mean, it's, I guess I'm just sort of very masculine. Men have to have their logical, you know, equations. So I wrote this book, and it became a New York Times bestseller, Emotional Equations. And one of the 18 equations in the book is anxiety equals uncertainty times powerlessness.

And about 95 or 98% of anxiety comes from two ingredients. It's what we don't know, uncertainty, and what we can't control, powerlessness. And so the key is to be able to take a step back and say, when I'm feeling anxious, how do I put on paper, or why don't I do like an anxiety balance sheet? And I'll write in, there the four columns. The first column is what is it that I know about this thing that's making me anxious? What is it that I know? Second column is what is I don't know? Third column is what can I control or influence? And the fourth column is what do I have no, what do I have a power list about? What do I have no

influence over? And when you do that with something that's making you anxious, I got to tell you, number one, the act of just putting it on paper takes some of the anxiety away. Number two is you look on that piece of paper and you say, wow, I know a few things. I have some certainty and I have some power. So if anxiety equals uncertainty times powerlessness, learning how to find a little bit of certainty on some things that you do know and looking at where you can have an influence or you can make a difference and you can control something, there's something to that. And I've used that in my companies since the early days of Joie de Vivre. That's incredible. Yeah. Die to the control part because you find that out very quickly when being a business leader, you're not in control of a lot of stuff.

There's a few things, but not a lot. You're not in control, but you can influence for sure. And I think the question is what can you influence? I love the serenity prayers. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I have another audience question.

What are your tools for ending the second guessing of one's decisions that are disruptive? Two thoughts. Number one is have a great leadership team around you that you can count on and that are going to tell the truth. And so if you're pursuing something that doesn't feel right to them and they're speaking up, listen to them. Doesn't mean you have to agree. You're the founder, you're the CEO potentially. And so like you can do whatever you want, but make sure you have a culture where people speak up. And then secondly, just know that the regret of not doing something is more than twice

as painful as the regret of doing something that you wish you hadn't done. And the regret of not doing something, anticipated regret, because you had an idea but you didn't do it is more painful because you can't do it over again. I mean, sometimes you can, but rarely can you do it over again. You lose that opportunity. So if your intuition is telling you this is the right path, and yes, there's some initial challenges, remember that the anticipated regret is much worse than the regret of doing something you shouldn't have done. But also don't bet the whole company on it. You know, if you're doing a disruption and you've got an existing company, it's a new thing you're doing, be careful about betting the whole company. Absolutely. Because all that can happen is that it doesn't work out,

but you'll probably learn something from it, right? Which is one of the most important things about being in business on your own is the learnings. So I would completely agree with you. Stephanie K. Berling from Matchline Interiors asks, what's been the best way you've found to test your ideas before actually implementing or spending money on them? And how do you know when you've hit on the right thing based on the feedback or responses? So I'm a big fan of beta testing. And of course, in the computer world, you can do that pretty well.

If you're a tech company, you can do A-B testing of things. In the bricks and mortar world that we live in, often you can't do that. You got to go out and try something. So I like to try, you know, if I was creating a new restaurant, try out the cuisine, like literally in a private dining room in one of my other restaurants and just check it out, see what people think about it. So you can sort of like test it a little bit first. For Modern Elder Academy, we spent six months doing workshops in a beta format where

people did not pay. And there were people sort of in our realm who we knew, and they came and gave us a lot of feedback. At Airbnb, we did all kinds of things that were in a beta testing kind of mode. So I would say that's number one. Secondly, here's another idea that comes from my experience as a boutique hotelier, having created 52 boutique hotels. Every time we created a boutique hotel, it was based upon a magazine and five adjectives. So my first hotel, the Phoenix, was a rock and roll hotel, so it was based upon Rolling Stone. And we came up with five adjectives that defined Rolling Stone that we believed would be the personality fit for this hotel. And those five adjectives 36 years ago were funky, irreverent, adventurous, cool,

and young at heart. And everything we did in creating that hotel had to come back to those five adjectives. So why is that sort of a way to test something out? Well, at that time, 36 years ago, Rolling Stone was a hot magazine. A lot of people aspirationally saw it as their identity. And I started to realize that, hey, boutique hotels are not, you are where you sleep. It's you are what, I'm sorry, it's not where you are what you eat. You are where you sleep. And so a boutique hotel is an aspirational identity for someone. So I came to the conclusion of like, okay, every time we create a hotel, it'll be based

upon the personality of a very successful magazine that seems to be on trend. And that proved to be very successful for us to create each hotel with its own soulful identity. So I guess I would say there is like, okay, how can you look at that and say, how would you apply that in your business? Look at what's happening in the world, and you see success somewhere else, and how do you apply that to yourself? For me, when I started Boutique Hotel, I bought Boutique Hotels and they were motels. The idea of cheap chic was Gap. I mean, back then Gap was a big deal, no longer,

but Gap was a huge deal back then and they were cheap chic. And what I was thinking in my mind was, well, who's the cheap chic hotelier? If cheap chic is working in retail with clothes, why couldn't it work with hotels? And so that's another way to think of beta testing by seeing how it's worked in a different industry. So Chip, give me one last piece of advice for the humans that are listening to this and who may already be a founder or who are just thinking about starting a business. So my last piece of advice would be sort of based on something that Peter Drucker said long ago.

He said, culture each strategy for breakfast. And what he was really meaning is that you could have a great strategy, but if you don't have the culture to execute it, it ain't going to work too well. And so the question I think all founders should be asking or CEOs should be asking is, how am I technically and tangibly investing in the culture of our business? And I think that's one of the most important things you can be asking. Especially in a time like this, man. We've seen all the things that have happened with diversity, equity, and inclusion over the past couple of years just because of some of the terrible things that have happened in the Black community with police brutality, right? But there's been some companies that it's been real. They've really meant it.

And then there's been some companies where it was just theater. And either way, you have to understand it's going to communicate. If it's not real, it's going to communicate. So just make it real, you know? And like you said, Shiv, that's all in the culture. That has to be the foundation because at the end of the day, you're serving humans. Yep. And humans have souls and intuitions and they know what's real and they know what's not. And so that was said beautifully. Chip, thank you so much for our time today. Oh my God.

I can't wait to come and spend some time with you. I'm kind of like for sure, for sure, for sure. I can't wait. I'm looking forward to seeing you. That's all for this episode of Your Next Move. Our producer is Matt Toder. Editing and sound design by Nick Torres. Executive producer is Josh Christensen. If you haven't already, subscribe to Your Next Move on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Your Next Move is a production of Inc. and Capital One Business.