Chip Conley, Founder, Modern Elder Academy interviewed by Lan Elliott

Chip has an incredibly broad network, but more than that, he’s been described as a Social Alchemist, someone who can engage his network in a way that’s transformative for them.  He shares how he developed this talent and talks about the importance of curiosity and a growth mindset.  He offers specific advice for taking risks and his tips for tackling self-doubt.  Chip describes Process Knowledge, and how companies have a great opportunity to tap into this valuable resource.

Transcript

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Lan Elliott 0:03

Hello and welcome to D E I advisors. My name is Lan Elliot on behalf of D E I advisors, and today I am really excited to have as our guest advisor, chip Conley, who is the founder and c e O of Modern Elder Academy, affectionately known as M e a, which is a midlife. Wisdom School and we're gonna be talking about that and much more. So welcome Chip.

Chip Conley 0:28

Thank you, Lon. I just appreciate being asked to, to join you.

Lan Elliott 0:33

Absolutely. Absolutely. Chip let's start a little bit with your journey to leadership, because before M Mea you founded Ju Aviv Hotels and then you sold it. And I have discovered that you are one of the most connected people in the hospitality industry. Everyone I've talked to about doing this interview, they say hi to Chip for me So it's been really wonderful. But could you share a few of the inflection points in your career and maybe one or two skills that you think are part of the reason for your success?

Chip Conley 1:07

Thank you. So I started Joie de Vivre in the mid 1980s when boutique hotels were not well known, but I could, I saw the future and I saw that like the idea of more personalized design oriented hotels made sense. And so over the course of 24 years of being c e o of that company I founded we created 52 boutique hotels around California. And I would say that my experience there had three different maybe chapters to it. The first chapter was like, I'm a 26 year old guy starting a hotel company with no hotel experience. What the hell was I doing? And I think that during that experience, it was very, learning the hotel business, learning the skills, learning the lingo. At my first hotel was a broken down motel in the Tenderloin. Not a very good neighborhood and it had everything going against it. I persevered but also learned a lot about how do you do creative marketing for niche oriented hotels. So I would say my first five to 10 years was really learning the business, learning how to become a leader, learning how to develop a culture. I learned from Herb Kelleher, the founder at founding c e o of Southwest Airlines, who became my mentor pen pal. Never met the man, but every year I would write him a letter with a few questions around leadership and culture, and he would answer them amazingly. In a letter back. It was, this is way before email. So I, that first era was really learning the business. Learning how important culture is and I learned a lot of that from Herb. And then learning what my leadership style was. That led to maybe the second era of Shua Aiv, which was like fast growth. Because many of our hotels, most of our hotels were in northern California, the latter half of the 1990s, which was around when we were 10 years old as a company. Man, was there a lot of growth available to us because the.com boom was in full crescendo and we grew into being the largest hotelier in the San Francisco Bay area in terms of the number of hotels we operated. So learning how to run a fast growth organization. While focusing on my leadership skills and culture was really important, and I think during that time, I, it was really important for me to be a great recruiter of talent and build a leadership team. So it was less about me as the heroic leader, more about me as the team leader helping to develop a team that would actually all be rowing at the same time. And then the third phase was a really difficult, my last maybe eight years or so of May, eight to nine years of running juju. Now we were a big organization. We had, three dozen hotels, ultimately 52. And we had a large, we had a large payroll and we went through two once a night, lifetime downturns in the same decade in the San Francisco Bay area. The first one was the.com bust after the boom and nine 11 and sars. and just about anything that could go wrong did go wrong. And so we had to get through that time and I wrote a book called Peak How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow based upon that experience. And then the second downturn was even more severe. That was the Great Recession. And it was during that time that I realized as much as I did love and felt the calling of being the founder and c e o of that company, I, I. Gotten so exhausted and no longer felt the sense of creativity and freedom that I was seeking when I started the company. So that was when I realized it was time for me to figure out a way to sell the company so that I no longer was in this heroic role of trying to run a company that had grown that fast. And so I would say that my process has been, part visionary, part vulnerability, the combination of both. Sometimes being very vulnerable and humble, and sometimes being the creative visionary, like imagining the future. And I, as long as I could see what was needed in the moment I could, sometimes I had a little bit more of the humble, vi humble vulnerable ceo. And sometimes I was more like, Hey, I'm confident I have a vision. Let's go for it.

Lan Elliott 5:09

I think there's so much great information that you packed into that about seeking out a mentor, even someone that you had never met and you sent them a letter. Yeah. And they came back and they wrote you letters every year. But you did, you stayed on it and you were tenacious and got great advice. And then building your company, being fearless and developing your team, really important skills to to learn along the way. And then, and. you figured out when it was the time to step away, which is always an interesting moment to understand when that is. Which, which leads me into my next topic that I wanted to talk about, which is, around mid midlife transitions because I first heard of M MEA after I left a corporate job and I was a bit lost. I was trying to figure out what my next thing was. And it was transformative for me to take an online course during the pandemic with M mea. And then I went down and met you and did a workshop at your, with your team in Baja in January of 22. And I. I was really one of, I learned so much, but one of the things I was really surprised to learn at M MEA was that at 54, which is I was just about 54 when I went to Baja. I'm on. I was only halfway through my adult life. Can you explain that math? Yes.

Chip Conley 6:30

It's a math it's like new math. Remember like some point in the past there was like, oh, Amer, kids are gonna learn new math. This is the new math for adults. The new math for adults is what percentage of your adult life is still ahead of you? And if we start counting at age 18, when we turned. to be, became an adult if you're 54 and you're gonna live till 90 and 54 is in fact the average age of the people who come to mea, the Modern Elder Academy. So if you are 54, you have 36 years of adulthood behind you, 54 minus 18 is 36. The average age of when m MEA alums think they're gonna live till is 90. So fifth from 90 to 54 is 36 years. So at 54 years old, you're only halfway through your adult life. And for many people, that's a shocking statement because the way we think of our lives is, oh, I, my, my life, I must be two-thirds of the way through my life. If you're saying your whole life, yes, you, it won't be two-thirds at that point, but it'll be, it might be 60%. But the truth is that, what really is relevant to us in so many ways is our adult. and it's where our memories are, most clear. It's where our choices that we've made our agency in life is there. So when someone realizes that they have half as mu, they have as much adulthood ahead of them as they do behind them. At age 54, you start to ask the question of what is it that I will regret if I don't learn it or do it now? And how can I become a beginner again? And. What am I curious about in life? And these are really important qualities because curiosity and o and openness to new experience are two of the most important variables for people who happen to live long, healthy, happy lives. And yet for many people at 54, they're not focused on curiosity or trying something new or becoming a beginner again. And so part of what we do at m MEA is to help people move from a fix to a growth mindset and reframe their relationship with aging.

Lan Elliott 8:28

Yeah. I think that's so true. When you think about what your next phase in your life is gonna be, if you think that you have 10 years of work ahead of you, that's a very different proposition of saying, I have another 30 years of active work that I could be doing, and you could really do something different with 30 years than if you're looking at five to 10 years. So I think having that timeline is is so

Chip Conley 8:50

important. It's also why someone might. I'm gonna go back and get my master's in my fifties, or I'm gonna retrain and do something else, or I'm gonna take a gap year. and then rethink about what I want to do and then go out and do it. Because, in, in the old world when we ha the, of the mid 20th century, a lot of people who wanted to retire were factory workers. And they had ma they were doing manual labor and knowledge work, did the term knowledge worker didn't even exist until 1959. And so we live in an era of knowledge workers. Just because you've hit 60 or 62 or 65 doesn't mean that you want to actually stop gaining knowledge or accumulating wisdom and you have something to offer in the workplace. And, for the last few years, other than a big spike up, at this early part of the pandemic, we've had a serious labor shortage. And I think there's gonna be a more and more of a need for people to stay in the workplace longer. For the society benefit, but also for their own benefit. Because in many cases people can't afford to retire. It's hard to finance a 30 year retirement with a 40 year career. Yeah. So more and more people will be working more than 40 years.

Lan Elliott 10:01

I love that. And yeah and it's helpful to know now, right? Because if you're planning for five to 10, but you have 30, it's better to know now that it's 30, you might do something different. Correct. Going back to the growth mindset that you said that you talked about earlier, that question that you asked about, I think the question is what if you were looking back 10 years from now? Yeah. What would you regret? Not learning and for me it was learning to play the drums, which I've been wanting to do since I was six years old. And then I found out how hard they are. But it took me another year. But m me a kind of pushed me to do that thing that I had been putting off because it was scary. And there are definitely days usually the days I go in for my class where I haven't practiced enough where learning to play the drums is really daunting, but I think it's just something that. The time is now right to go ahead and to learn new things. The other thing you had mentioned was curiosity. And that is one of the qualities that as we've asked leaders in these interviews, what do you think is one of the qualities that makes you successful? Curiosity has come up again and again. So could you share a little bit about why having a growth mindset is so important? Not only just when you're younger and you're learning, and you're learning new. School but throughout life.

Chip Conley 11:19

Let's define a fixed mindset and a growth mindset, because these are two, two of the concepts that we really focus on at m mea and they come from a Stanford professor named Carol Dweck. Carol basically popularize the idea that when you have a fixed mindset, you tend to be focusing on proving. and you define success as winning you. You think like you have a fixed amount of skill and your job is to really optimize that, and you tend to be very focused on comparison with others. So again, especially if success is defined by winning, then. Yeah. It's very much about comparing with others. The problem with that concept has some value in life, but there's some, the problem with it is that as you get older, if you only like to play games that you can win. Your sandbox gets smaller and smaller. So a growth mindset is not about proving yourself, it's about improving yourself, and you don't define success as winning. You define success as learning. So a growth mindset opens up possibilities. It means you're willing to try something new and be a beginner and maybe not be very good about edit at first. Like drumming or like for me surfing. But you're willing to try it. And this question of what is it that you'll regret 10 years from now if you don't do it or learn it now is a really important one, especially as we get older. Because for me, learning surf I'm 62 now, but learning to surf at 57 was. Really based upon that question or learning Spanish at 57 I was moving to Mexico. I was living in Mexico. Of course, I need to learn Spanish, but it was easy to actually put it off and to also get into the mindset of I'm not good at Spanish. I'm too old to learn a new language. And, it wasn't gonna be any easier at 67 than it was at 57. Providing yourself the opportunity. To try something new is essential. And I think curiosity is the wellspring from which creativity and innovation come. We, companies and lots of us get excited about creativity and innovation, but at the root of both of those is curiosity. The problem in modern life is curiosity is something that gets bred out of us. At age four we're asking all kinds of questions. Why this, why? By the time we get into college, it's not about why, maybe there's some why questions. It's more what, how, I gotta go optimize my career. And then we go into the workplace and there's not time for curiosity. Curiosity is not the most efficient thing in the world. It opens up questions, it opens up possibilities. And sometimes if you're having a 30 minute meeting, like there's no room for curiosity here. So great leaders and like great companies. Understand that and they look at how do we create the space for curiosity to come into our conversations and our meetings, our retreats, and things like that.

Lan Elliott 14:12

That's fantastic. Thank you. Thank you for that. Switch gears a little bit to taking risks because you've actually taken a number of calculated risks throughout your career, as you've mentioned. Can you share some examples of your success in this regard and how you prepare yourself mentally to take a risk?

Chip Conley 14:32

I like to think of my failures as noble experiments, and. It's a way of actually helping myself to realize that the only way we get better is by taking risks. We do not get better by just, if we were not never gonna take a risk, we would still be crawling So you had to, at some point when you were a kid, a baby, Learn how to get up and say, I'm gonna try to walk. To walk, or I'm gonna stand up and I'm gonna fall down in front of other people. And the child was not self-conscious and didn't care about what it looked like to other people. As we get older, we start to worry about what it looks like to other people and very validly as we get older, we get risk averse because we are, people are reliant upon. We have obligations to others and we don't wanna do something that's gonna mess that up. It's easy to get to a place where we hem ourselves in and we don't give ourselves the opportunity to take, take risks and test something out. I think the best thing that I can say is on this is just two things. Number one is try small things. Make small bets, try something and see how it works in a small way. For us, when we started Modern ELD Academy M mea, we did a six months of beta testing like. trying it out before we said, okay, we're going to open to the public. Because we wanted to see if the curriculum made sense and if there was a, an audience of people who really felt like addressing midlife transitions was important for them. And then secondly, learn how to trust your intuition. Because often in the risk averse mindset that maybe people around you are in, they are not gonna understand how this idea you have. How it is coming through you and I, at some point you have to get to a place where your gut is telling you something or a calling is coming in saying, Hey chip please answer the phone because you, there's a calling, there's an opportunity for you to do this thing. And if you don't answer the call, You end up having to distract yourself from the, from that phone ringing. And that's not good. That's not healthy because when we are distracting ourselves, it means we're looking for addictions or other things to actually distract ourselves. So long story short is I have a very high risk tolerance. Not everybody has to have my risk tolerance, but I, the person who doesn't have a risk tolerance just needs to know, like Helen Keller, the famous, she couldn't speak, she couldn't hear. I'm sorry. She could speak, but she couldn't hear or see, she said life is a daring adventure or nothing at all. And I think that's beautiful because it's coming from somebody who had to be, not so risk averse. It would be easy to be blind and deaf and to be extremely risk averse. But her point of view was like, okay, no, I just have to actually. I need to understand the risks, but I need to be willing to try things. Otherwise, I am just going to be sitting in a room by myself.

Lan Elliott 17:33

Yeah, that's a great point. Sometimes you just need to step up and I like the idea of starting small if it's not something that you're comfortable with. Yeah. So we often talk about networking on this show, and one of the things we talk about is how hospitality is really an industry where you build working relationships that actually turn into friendships in our industry, which is wonderful, but you actually have a d. Gift beyond just Baystate networking because you've been called a social alchemist, Can you share what that means and how you use it to build your network? Which I happen to know is incredible. So would love to learn how you do it.

Chip Conley 18:15

So a friend of mine, Ben said to me after you'd come to my. Birthday party for my 50th seven years ago, for my 50th birthday party, and he'd been to earlier birthday parties every five years. I had a, I used to have a big birthday party and he said, chip, you know what? You're a mixologist of people. You're a social alchemist. You know how to bring the right collection of people to a dinner table or to a big event, and then help to mix those people in a way that is. Just transformative for everybody involved. So I do believe that, yes, there, I think there's two different talents here. One is the talent of building a network and as you said on building a network's important. And because if you don't have the network, you don't really have, you can't get to the second phase. So how do you build a network? Will you do it by, just trying to, I think reciprocation is really important in, in a network. I think it's any anybody who's coming at me to Sell me something or to take something from me my intuition just tells me, take a step back. The process of building a network is really meant to be very reciprocal. And it's also meant to assume best intentions. So that seems at odds with okay, someone who's coming at you. But assuming best intentions really means you show up with a generosity of spirit. and you also have some boundaries. But I think in the process of networking it's also important to know what's missing in your network. I think this is something that a lot of people forget about is when I was running Ard Viv, I was like, okay, I really need to. Tap into the hotel sales, the director of sales world, because we are growing fast and I need a lot of those people. So I would start going as the c e O of a company, which is really unheard of to what's called H S M A, events like these hotel sales and marketing events. Now, those are pretty much populated by salespeople, not by the people who ran the companies, but because I was showing up at those meetings, like I got to know all kinds of men and women. who ended up hiring because they're like, oh, chip's humble enough to come here. And I got to know him a little bit better and ah, I understood the culture of the company because I heard it from him. So the first set's the networking. The second set is then how do you create, you may have a network, but if you're not very good at engaging network in a way that people feel like is transformative, then your relationships with that network maybe feel transac. But how do you create events and how do you build dinner parties that bring the right people to a table? People have this experience that is really transformative for them. I'm a big fan of Priya Parker. She wrote The Art of Gathering. I would highly recommend people look at that book, cuz that book really speaks to this idea of how do you create the magic what is sometimes called collective effervescence in a group. How do you do that such that people feel, come away from it feeling like, wow. Chip just created an event that made me feel like I love life more. And so this is a talent but you have to have the network first to be able to do that.

Lan Elliott 21:26

That's incredible. I would say actually this collective effervescence, I don't know if you purposely did it, but you definitely have infused it into the Modern Elder Academy. Oh yeah, for sure. Campus. And it definitely it's like a little magical spell that weaves itself into the week. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for that. I'm gonna check out that book because that sounds like a great opportu. Let me switch gears a little bit. Yeah. Because after you sold ua, Viv, Brian Chesky, the C E O of Airbnb, reached out to you and asked you to join them, and I think at that point, You were, you had been a hotelier and Airbnb, at least at that point, was really a tech company but you did end up joining them and you've described your role there as being a mentor. Can you explain what a mentor is?

Chip Conley 22:18

Yeah. The founders said, chip, you're our modern elder. I was like, oh, what's that? Someone who's as curious as they are wise. They said, okay, that's great. But within the first few months I realized, oh my God, I'm in a tech company. I've I'm a bricks and mortar hotel guy. I don't know what it's, I don't know this language of tech. And so I really had to realize that while they hired me to be the founder's mentors at times. I was the intern as well. So I, my role was to really try to be as curious about things that I didn't understand and be open to asking questions about it. So to be a mentor and is to be a mentor and an intern at the same time. And I, I think companies that get this right, figure out how do you create mutual matching of mentors. So there could be an older employee who understands leadership. or how to run a meeting. And there could be a younger employee who understands how to use their iPhone really well, and that iPhone user, that younger person really wants to understand leadership and that older person who understands leadership really wants to understand their iPhone a little bit better. And wouldn't it be great if the company actually created a mutual mentor, relat. So that the two of them can learn from each other. And I think that opportunity is growing in an era where we have five generations in the workplace for the first time. And quite frankly, there's so often as much knowledge and wisdom in the younger people on certain topics as there is in the older people. So it used to be that all the wisdom flowed downhill from old to young, and I think it now moves in both direct. Yeah, I think

Lan Elliott 23:49

that's really compelling and I love that you talk about wisdom as being a formula, which is, I believe Knowledge plus experience. If that's right. and, yeah. Yeah, go ahead. And I think about since the pandemic, the number of midlife workers who've chosen to retire or to step back or retiring as not a word at m me a found another path, a next chapter. But that's created a gap at many companies. and you've had a number of people who've shown up at m mea and they're not necessarily going want to go back to what they were doing before, but you had mentioned five generations in the workplace. Like what an opportunity that is for companies to find a way to leverage people who have a, have a. 30, 40 years of experience, but maybe don't have the part that generates, they've got the wisdom, but maybe the younger people have knowledge and they need more. Access to experience and the wisdom of

Chip Conley 24:49

elders. Yeah. I think if I were running a company today guess I am mea, but I, if I was reading a, running a big company today, I would look at my older workers and start to get really clear on what is it that they want that could keep them there. Often companies get very fixated on how do we not lose our millennial? And millennials, and when you're younger in your career, you have a tendency to job hop. That's always been the case. But not always. It's been the case the last few decades and it's certainly the case today. But you have older employees who are less likely to do that. and have a lot of institutional wisdom and maybe don't want to retire. They don't want to go from working five, a full hundred percent job on Friday and working 0% on Monday. So if I were leading a company, I would look at that collection of employees and say, how do. Create some phased retirement processes for them. How do I look at some of those employees as potential internal coaches? How do we train a 62 year old who's been here 20 years and is not gonna grow in the org chart any further? but it doesn't wanna retire and has some really great emotional intelligence skills. How do we actually train them to be an in-house, in-house coach? We spend a fortune on out of house coaches, but what about some in-house coaches that actually could, bring some wisdom around the organization and how to get things done here? So there's a thing called knowledge know. Process knowledge. Process knowledge is knowing how to get things done in an organization. You get much better at that as you're older, because quite frankly, you've seen the pattern recognition of what works and what doesn't in your, twenties or thirties, you don't know that so well. And so that process knowledge is really valuable. And I think there's a lot of opportunities for older employees what I like to call wisdom workers, not just knowledge workers to actually have a growing role in companies. As we see that, people are gonna be living longer, that's a

Lan Elliott 26:45

great opportunity, I think for a lot of companies and for people who are trying to figure out what's next, right? If they're, if they've already worked a long career. So often we are our own biggest critics, and I always think of you as being. really positive with a smile. What are some of the strategies you use to stay positive to, to overcome maybe that internal narrative? I don't know if Chip has an internal narrative that of self-doubt.

Chip Conley 27:14

I ha I have an internal narrative of fear of failure. And I do, and there can be self-doubt there too. Especially when I really feel like, oh shoot, we are we're not gonna succeed at this. So what I know for sure is that my meditation practice, meditating even just two minutes every morning. I tend to meditate five to 10 minutes every morning. That helps. It helps and if I'm in a particularly stressed out time of the day, I'll sit, I'll close my eyes and find some space to meditate. I can also name the self-doubt, Carol Dweck from Stanford with mindset, her mindset work, and showed that when you actually get triggered, when there's a mindset that gets triggered, and maybe that, let's say the trigger is, oh I'm a failure at this. Then what she says is to actually see the trigger and name. And it's like doubting Chip or Debbie Downer or whatever. There's a, you can name it because the moment you name it, you start to objectify it. So it's not you. It's just that part of you that, that persona that comes up and messes with your serenity. And your job is to actually put that back that, that doubter back into its place. So I do that. I also think it's, you don't have to do this alone. This is really, when you, it's so important to have, what I call emotional insurance which is like a safety net. Whether that's your spouse, your partner, whether it's a business partner, whether it's a coach whether it's a therapist, whether it's your best friend. You have a group of people. Who can provide you? a little bit of a pick me up and a confidence boost when you most need it. And we all need that at times. So yeah, self-doubt is normal. And if you don't have any self-doubt, then you actually could be a bit, you may be actually dangerous. in the sense that you believe all your own BS and you are a narcissist and you are, but sociopath and I could come up with a bunch of other things, because frankly, someone who doesn't have any self-doubt is probably someone who is running roughshod over other people and probably not very good at assessing risk.

Lan Elliott 29:28

I love that and I love the technique of objectifying it and making it into a part of your personality that then helps you control that. Really great advice. I wanted to talk a little bit about inclusive cultures because it's something we cover in these interviews about the importance of creating inclusive cultures so that diverse people can thrive. But I found M Me A when I went there to be a really magical place, and it's partly the beautiful setting, but it's also really about the special people who work there who. Unbelievable individuals. I don't know how you found each and every one of them because they are really lovely people and they clearly have a passion for what they do. How did you build modern Elder academies culture and. what are some of the things that leaders or managers of teams can do to create a more inclusive workplace?

Chip Conley 30:28

It's e essential. One of the things I learned from Herb Kellerher from Southwest Airlines is the customer comes second. know, We always say the customer comes first. No, actually the customer comes second. The employee comes first, because actually, if you're in a service culture, you better focus first and foremost on creating a culture where your employees feel loved and cared for. Because if you do that really well, you know what they're gonna do it for The your customers. So start with that. Have a clear culture. Have a clear set of values. In our case, at M mea we allowed our employees, our line level employees, the people who wash dishes, the people who you know, serve food, the people who clean rooms and make beds to actually come up with our 10 values. And it was their process of saying, here's our 10 values that helped them to feel like their fingerprints were all over how we invested in those values. And then in, in terms of the inclusivity piece, it's just I'm a big fan. There used to be a band called Bachman Tur Turner Overdrive. Now I'm dating myself on this one. Bachman Turner Overdrive, also known as B T o, Canadian Rock and Roll Band. I think we need a global B t O day, the be the other day. And what a be the other means is like in many cultures, there's a dominant demographic. In many cultures, it's often white, male, straight, white, male and the those people. Both often hold the power, but they also hold what is defined as normal behavior in the organization. So I actually think it's really important that we create a culture where the other, the person who's not dominant has not only the day, a day or a week or a month. Dedicated to them, but every single day. And I think it's really important that senior leaders look at that, not just in how we're developing affinity groups that have some voice, but how do we look at the various. Demographic diversities that we can have and not just look at the global level of a company, but look at them on even teams. There's a company called Atlassian from Australia and they have taken their diversity initiatives to the point where they actually look at what's the diversity on every single team. And they also look at that based upon age, not just race and gender or sexual orientation, but they also look at that age because. One of the things that's been proven is that by Google in their project Aristotle, is the, that you are the number one variable for effective teams is psychological safety. And diversity often helps psychological safety because it allows the diverse other voices to feel like there are other people in the room who are also others.

Lan Elliott 33:15

Really great lessons and research. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. one of our favorite questions on de d e i advisors is what advice would you give to your younger self? And I think it's a great question only because it leads to a bit of self-reflection. And so Chip what advice would you want to offer your younger self?

Chip Conley 33:39

I'll be brief on this one. It's number one piece of advice would be, don't worry so much what other people think about you. and number two is your success in life is, doesn't define yourself, your sense of worth in life. And disconnect your sense of self-worth from the idea of what is traditional success.

Lan Elliott 34:02

That's great advice. And that was one of the things I had to learn when I was at mea, which was the mindsets that you need to burn and get rid of and Exactly. We literally burned them. But yeah. Wonderful. I love that. So we are getting really close on time and keeping in mind that d e i advisor's mission is around empowering personal success. but su success means different things at different points in our lives. What advice would you offer to people who are trying to find new purpose and meaning in their lives?

Chip Conley 34:37

I would, when it comes to purpose it's a, it's, there's a performance anxiety in, at least in the United States, where people feel like, oh, all my friends have purpose. I don't have one. It's it's a possession. It's like the handbag you left at the gas station, in the bathroom. It's oh my God, where'd my purpose go? So I would just say to people, don't get so wrapped up in what your purpose is. Get more focused on what you're purposeful about. Because actually if you do the verb, the noun will come. And what I mean by that is Look at the things that you feel passionately about the things that you do well, the things that that where you lose track of time, you go into a state of flow by doing them or the things that actually really frustrate with you in the world that you want to actually try to help solve something. Look at those things because in those seeds of either something that frustrates you or something that you love are the early stages of a purpose. So go out and be purposeful at something, and you'll find in that process that you may find your purpose and you can have multiple purposes at once. And you can, A purpose can actually have a, an expiration date and the new purpose comes along. So don't get so wrapped up in like a singular purpose, because there's multiple purposes you can have in a. That's

Lan Elliott 35:57

incredible. Thank you so much, chip, for offering your wisdom and offering your perspectives. I'm so excited to have you here. As I said to you before we started recording, if I hadn't gone to M Mea I wouldn't be here at d e i advisor. So I'm really grateful this has been this experience has really filled my cup and it is, I'm really grateful to you for being on this show, and I feel like it's, everything's being brought full circle by you being on. So thank you so

Chip Conley 36:22

much. Thank you Lamb. And for those who are interested in M Me a Modern Elder academy.com, you can come to Baja soon, next year to Santa Fe, but we also have online programs, so you don't have to leave your home even, you can do it at home as Lamb did. That's how she initially got involved in it.

Lan Elliott 36:38

That's how I got addicted to it. And then I had to go down to Baja to follow up It's really great and impactful, so thank you. Thank you. And for our viewers, if you've enjoyed this conversation with Chip, I hope you'll go to our website, d www.deiadvisors.org to see other interviews as well. Thank you.