The Key To Long-Life Learning | Jim Kwik & Chip Conley

Welcome back, Kwik Brains, to the Kwik Brain Podcast. I am your host, your brain coach, Jim Kwik, and this is the show all about how to unlock your limitless learning and your life. And today's question is, we're going to talk about the keys to long-life learning instead of lifelong learning, long-life learning. And this is really the keys to growing at any age or stage in your cycle. And, we have a very special guest, Chip Connelly. Now, Chip has been a friend of mine for over a decade. He actually spoke at our annual superhero, the Brain Event, if you will, back in 2011. We go in a lot of the same circles and speak on similar stages, everywhere from Transformational Leadership Council to Summit, to speakers, authors, networking groups, SANG, if you will. I mean, this is going back over a decade.

Yes.

Chip, Thank you so much for being on the show.

Jim, it's great to reconnect. And I love talking about learning. So let's do it.

Yeah. Now, you joined this tiny little startup over a decade ago called Airbnb. Some people may have heard of it. Now, this was after a very successful career at a boutique hotel company. There you were the founder and CEO when you and I initially met. And at the time, you were twice the age the average Airbnb employee. And you had that title of Airbnb's Modern Elder, which I want to talk about this in your Modern Elder Academy. Just given this title because of your curiosity and your wisdom. And that's really what stands out to me. You, warmth and wisdom. I tend to alliterate a lot.

I like alliteration too. And I'll take that warmth and wisdom. That's a good one. And maybe even a little wit occasionally along with some wine.

Yes. The CEO of Modern Elder Academy, which we'll talk about. You've also authored a number of books, some of my favorite ones, Emotional Equations. You wrote the book Peak, and The Rebel Rules, which you wrote with Sir Richard Branson. Your most recent book is Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder. And so you coined this term long-life learning. Let's start there. How is that different from lifelong learning?

So lifelong learning is a great thing, and everybody talks about how wonderful it is. It's an umbrella. An umbrella that could last from the time you graduate from college or graduate school till the time you die. No one can say a bad thing about it. It's like apple pie. But the reality is how you learn at 30 is going to be different than how you learn at 60, not just in terms of how you learn, but why you learn, what you learn, and, um, and, and frankly, what you're interested in. what your level of learning is will change over time. And that's partly because the brain changes. A young— as you know, I mean, I feel weird lecturing you on brains, but—

Yeah.

The young brain tends to be extremely focused, fast. Arthur Brooks' new book, From Strength to Strength, talks about the fluid intelligence versus the crystallized intelligence. And Arthur has been a A faculty member of ours for MEA. So when you're young, you get to be very focused and you tend to be pretty linear in terms of left versus right brain. And as we get older, as Dr. Gene Cohen wrote about in his book, The Mature Brain, we do 4-wheel drive of our brain. It shrinks a little bit, the brain does, and we're more adept at being able to move from left to right brain all in the same sentence or paragraph. Long-life learning speaks to the idea that thinking holistically, systemically, in a crystallized intelligence kind of way means the kind of topics and the way you approach those topics are going to be different as you get older. Also, the topics specifically are different. You know, people in their 50s and 60s might have a growing interest in spirituality, in life stages, In legacy. So those are some of the questions and maybe some of the topics that people are going to look at. And the way I define long-life learning in sum is it's how to live a life that's as deep and meaningful as it is long. We, as a society, are very fixated with the length, and I think we need to be as fixated about the depth. And the depth is what comes, I think, is a big part of how we learn in our 50s, 60s, and 70s.

Now, were these mirrored in your chapters or stages of, let's say, your entrepreneurial career going from the boutique hotel hospitality to this unicorn Airbnb to now Modern Elder Academy? Did you mirror that journey as well?

Yeah, I think my journey back in the early days was quite surgical learning. Like, what can I learn that's going to make me a better leader? And I tended to focus in a can-do-it kind of way. I can do it. I can do it. Very egocentric, I would say, as well. And I think over time I've moved from conduit to conduit. And what do I mean by that is—

Conduit to conduit.

Conduit to conduit. Conduit learner, conduit leader. I can do it. You know, I used to give this book away to all of the 3,500 employees we had at Joie de Vivre, my company, The Little Engine That Could. You know, that little engine that goes up there, you know, I think I can, I think I can. Because I liked the spirit of that book and the idea that we were creating a can-do attitude for our people. But what I've learned over time for me, now that I'm almost 62 years old, is I am more focused on being the conduit. It's not about Chip the hero. It's about Chip the channeler, the person who's channeling what I've learned along the way and helping support others. And I had to learn that at Airbnb after having been CEO of my own company for 24 years. All of a sudden, I am reporting to a guy 21 years younger than me, Brian Chesky, but I'm also mentoring him on what it means to be a CEO. And that required my ego to get off stage and to just be a channel for helping him be better at what he does. And I would say since then with the Modern Elder Academy, I'm just fascinated by the idea that maybe the first half of our life, the primary operating system is our ego. And the second half of our life, the primary operating system is something deeper. Maybe I will call it the soul. And that soul is what energizes my learning. How can I learn for the sake of supporting and servicing others as opposed to just being Mr. Competitive Type A that I clearly was up through my—

Now, I mentioned you were on average maybe twice the age of the average employee at that time. What was your approach besides setting your ego aside mentoring the CEO that you were also— who was also your leader?

Well, the first thing I learned was you've got to intern publicly and mentor privately. If you remember the movie The Intern with Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway, De Niro comes in as a 70-year-old intern for a 34-year-old CEO, Anne Hathaway. away. And so he came in as the intern, but he became the mentor. Well, I came in as the mentor to Brian and I became the intern because, wow, I was 52 years old and I'd never been in a tech company before. And so the lingo I was hearing around me was tech-focused. And frankly, it was a different language. I felt like I was Margaret Mead amongst the millennials. I was a cultural anthropologist and I really needed to like put my fear aside, because that was really what initially came up for me was, wow, what an imposter I am here as the mentor, but I don't understand the language. And as my dad said to me, Chip, can you put your fear aside and replace it with curiosity? And that's really what was my flashlight. That was the flashlight for me is like, I will try to be curious. But what I will try to do is intern publicly. So I don't mind occasionally being the dumbest person in the room, But I was also sometimes the person in the room who asked a question that exposed a blind spot for the company. But I interned publicly and I mentored privately because the last thing that Brian Chesky wanted was Chip Conley, the guy who was mentoring him but also who reported to him, telling him in the middle of a meeting that he's not running the meeting well. So if I had to give Brian some feedback, and Brian was a spectacular student and he taught me as much as I You know, as I taught him, I would tell him things later, not in a public kind of way. So I had over 100 mentees in my 4 years full-time, 3 and a half years as a strategic advisor part-time after that. And it was just amazing. But I think that the future of L&D, learning and development companies, is all about mutual mentorship. How do you create inverses where someone's the yin, the other one's the yang, That person knows this thing but wants to learn that thing. The other person knows that thing and wants to learn the opposite. And the two of them come together and you don't have to spend a whole lot of money as a company to create that matching.

Right. And it's interesting, the human brain, sometimes we learn better through cooperation and co-creativity also as well. Because I was going to ask you the things that— what are some of the things being in that environment, that terrain that you needed to learn quickly and what facilitated that faster learning? And you mentioned 2 critical things, curiosity and mentorship. We don't have that apprenticeship, that kind of system as people did in trade and things in the past.

No, it's that, I think humility as well. I mean, I think that the humility of acknowledging what you don't know, which curiosity can be that, but humility is even a step further. I also think that I think just the idea— one of the questions I suggested we ask at Airbnb to actually uncover wisdom in the company, because we're awash in knowledge. I mean, all the world's knowledge is in this little machine in my pocket.

Right.

But what we're sort of sorely in need of is wisdom. And so one of the things we did at Airbnb is we started asking the question of all of our employees in surveys, beyond your boss, who do you look to for advice and wisdom? And what that allowed us to do was to come up with a top 20 list of the people in the company perceived as wise. Because the world, you know, it was Peter Drucker who coined the term knowledge worker in 1959. But at this point, that's a ubiquitous word. Everybody's a knowledge worker. Not everybody, but most people are. But what we could use is more wisdom workers. And the wisdom workers are not necessarily the older people. They vary. It isn't— wisdom and age are not necessarily directly proportional. So, long story short is part of the reason that I started the Modern Elder Academy at MEA was to create a place where we could mint wisdom workers, people who wanted to come and cultivate and harvest their wisdom while creating more of a growth mindset. Because one of the challenges we have as we get older, or at least in midlife and beyond, since we are a midlife wisdom school, is You sort of shut down the idea of learning new things. A lot of people do because they don't want to look stupid. And that fixed mindset of, you know, as Carol Dweck talks about, of, okay, my fixed mindset says, you know, I define success as winning and I'm trying to prove myself. But the growth mindset is I'm trying to improve myself and I define success as learning. And when we help people make that shift and become a beginner again, It's remarkable what it does for their life in terms of opening up options. My favorite cocktail party question these days, if I meet someone for the first time, is, so, you know, in what parts of your life are you a beginner these days? And people are like, huh? But it's a really great question because it helps us to realize something I mentioned to you before we got on the air here, and that is If you can think about something that you know now, or you've done now, that you wish you'd known or done 10 years ago, just imagine that for a second. And now ask yourself the question: 10 years from now, what will you regret if you don't learn it or do it now? And that's what led me at age 58 to start learning Spanish because I live in Mexico a lot of the time. It's what led me to actually starting to learn to surf at 58 because I knew at 68. that I was going to regret that living near a surf break in Mexico, I didn't know how to surf nor go out on the waves and talk to the local Mexicans in Spanish. So these are the kinds of questions we ask at MEA that make it a place where people open up to the idea of like, I could become a beginner again in something.

In the beginner's mind, this is kind of a like, when's the last time we learned something for the first time? You know, this idea we all have our to-do I don't know how many people are keeping an active to-learn list. It's interesting because this curse of expertise, this idea that we feel like we know it all keeps us from maybe— maybe our teacup is full like the Proverbs talked about with the tea overflowing. We have to empty our cup and our mind is like a parachute, only works when it's open. So, midlife wisdom school as you refer to it, the Modern Elder Academy.

Yes.

So, what are some of the core first principles or core pillars? based on— for your curriculum?

Yes.

Is it humility or—

Well, no, no. I mean, humility is that— yeah, definitely there's character qualities that enhance your ability to be a modern elder. But the curriculum has really— there's one overriding element of the curriculum, which is how do we help people cultivate and harvest wisdom, which we define as metabolized experience that leads to distilled compassion. Because metabolized experience alone without the compassion isn't a social good. And for the history of humankind, wisdom has been perceived as a human good. So it has to be doing something beyond making you wiser just for your own benefit. But metabolized experience is a big piece of it. When I was age 28, I started— I pulled out an old diary that I'd never written in, and I wrote on the COVID my wisdom book. And every weekend for the next 34 years till today, I sit down with it and I say, what did I learn this week? And I put bullet points, like, of what did I learn? It's not a diary. It's not emotional. It's more— It's a journal. Specific to like, what did I learn this week? And usually the thing I learned was the thing that kicked my ass. The thing that I was like, oh shoot, you know what? I now— but to metabolize the experience and accelerate it is key. So that's the key about wisdom and how do we cultivate and harvest wisdom. The 4 pillars underneath that are how do we reframe aging? Because if you can actually shift your mindset on aging from negative To positive, you gain 7.5 years of additional life according to Yale's Becca Levy. The second piece is how do you move from a fixed to a growth mindset, which opens up being a beginner again. The third piece, the third pillar is navigating midlife transitions. Midlife is a long stage of life, especially as longevity kicks in. And we aren't very good at teaching people how to navigate the transitions that happen, whether it's menopause or empty nest or a divorce or changing your career. Parents passing away, having a health diagnosis, having a newfound spiritual interest in something. These are things that happen often in people's 40s, 50s, 60s. So we help with that. And the fourth piece is instead of helping people to learn how to retire, we help them to learn how to regenerate. So how to live a regenerative lifestyle. And we even have created regenerative residential communities where people can live around a regenerative farm or ranch. So that's what our— that's our academy program and that's what our MEA Regenerative Community Program is as well.

Now, you launched MEA how long ago?

About 5 years ago.

Could you share with just one more key learning from maybe that you learned?

Oh, so many.

Midlife or—

Yeah. No, I— well, and I write about this. I have a daily blog called Wisdom Well. You can just go Wisdom Well Chip Conley and you'll find it. So, you know, when you write a daily blog, I'm metabolizing my experience. All the time. I would say one of the key lessons I learned from Phil Pizzo, Dr. Phil Pizzo used to run the Stanford Medical School. He created the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute. And he's shown in his research that the 3 most important foundations for a good long life are purpose, community, and wellness. And the thing that's interesting, and that all makes sense, it's not— I don't think anybody would argue with that. Yeah. What's interesting is how do you invest in each of those? And often when people get older, they— and sometimes if they retire or semi-retire, they lose the first 2, the purpose and community, because that was a lot had to do with who they were and who they were working with and what they were doing. The wellness piece sometimes they lose as well because they lose the structure and discipline. But I would say of the 3 of those, the one that is by far the most important And is correlated with the Blue Zones research, with the Harvard Adult Development research, is community. People who live long, good lives have invested in their social relations. This is particularly true after age 50, because before age 50, we tend to be really busy.

Mm-hmm.

And we can still be busy our whole lives, but generally speaking, The reason that U-curve of happiness research shows that 45 to 50 is the low point in life satisfaction is partly because people are overwhelmed with everything. And it is around that time when they need to do what we call at MEA the great midlife edit, to actually say, I've spent the first half of my life accumulating. I need to spend the second half of my life editing and discerning. So long story short is if you don't have a community to help you and support you through all of that. If you're silently trying to do it yourself, you may have a midlife crisis that you think you alone are experiencing when, in fact, lots of other people are going through it. And then the question is, what are the best practices to shift from your 40s to your 50s and maybe your 50s to your 60s such that with each passing decade after about age 50, you get happier and happier? And that's what the U-curve of happiness Research shows across all cultures.

And this is just a testament that our learning and our growth doesn't have to stop when we're out of traditional education.

I love Peter Drucker. I've cited him earlier as the person who coined knowledge worker, but he's also the guy who said that, you know, every 2 years he would study a new topic that had nothing to do with being a business school professor or, you know, author. He wrote 2/3 of his 40 books after the age of 65. And what he would do every 2 years is he would study a new topic. That had nothing to do with his work because he believed that curiosity was the elixir of life and it would lubricate the brain, the soul, the spirit. And so I do the same thing. Whether it is being fascinated by festivals or hot springs or emotions, which actually led to my book Emotional Equations, I like to do like a deep dive. I become a bit of a geek. And sometimes enough so that I can start an MEA, start an academy, or write a book. But I don't do it for that. I don't start that way because actually there's a lot of things I start learning about and a month into it is like, ah, you know what? I don't love this so much. But the fact that I started to learn it is a great indicator that I have a pioneering spirit when it comes to learning still.

Yeah.

And I think if you don't have that, that gray matter up there starts to just do what happens to things when they're not being used properly, which they start to deteriorate.

I love the idea of having a wisdom book and capturing that. And some people could even not have to wait a week. They could do it even daily to keep those lessons fresh.

And put it in a Google Doc. I mean, that's how I do it now. But for— of the 34 years I've been doing it, for 25 of those years it was literally in an actual book.

Like, what did I learn today?

Yeah. I have 7 editions and they, you know, they're all on my shelf. And so I can go back because that's actually— the other thing that's beautiful about doing that is when I went through the dot-com bust as a CEO of a hospitality company, I learned some things. And then, you know, what, 5, 7 years later we had the Great Recession. I went back and, you know, I could have gone to the library and looked for a business book, but I just went onto my bookshelf and said, what did I learn during the dot-com bust and 9/11 that might help me during the Great Recession?

And no matter what our age or stage is in life, like, life is too precious and even short to be able to feel like we know it all already. You know, I believe that there's a person, you know, version of ourselves that's patiently waiting. And, you know, part of the goal is We show up every single day. We play full out. We study. We make those mistakes. We use mistakes as stepping stones where we don't necessarily fail or feel like we're looking bad, but there's only failure to learn something that we— as long as we're getting feedback and we're learning and we're growing.

Curiosity has— its cousins are awe and wonder. And I deeply believe that awe and wonder are just like gratitude. The freeway, the you know the fast lane to joy or happiness. Now I think joy and happiness are two different things, but I'll just say joy because actually I prefer joy to happiness, which is part of the reason I called my company Joie de Vivre. Curiosity, which I think opens up the potential for awe and wonder, is leads to joy, and that joy to me is one of the most profound ephemeral. kinds of emotive states you can be in.

Rumi, the poet, has a phrase that says, sell your cleverness for bewilderment. I mean, when's the last time I listened when we felt that level of awe or bewilderment instead of being clever and just looking good and just validating what we already know? Chip, who did you create this Modern Elder Academy? Who'd you create it for? And what do you think are some of the reasons why people should maybe even explore more about it?

You know, I'm gonna— yeah, I'm gonna tell you a tough story. But I lost 5 friends to suicide during the Great Recession. They were all men aged 42 to 52. 3 of them were entrepreneurs. I had some suicide ideation during that time too. I actually ended up having an NDE, a near-death experience. I had an allergic reaction to an antibiotic. So that was a really rough time for me. And I was between 45 and 50. The U-curve of happiness research hadn't come out yet, but I was experiencing it. I was a case study for it. And then— so that was my bad experience of midlife. And then I had my great experience of midlife during my time seeing that I wasn't youthful anymore, but I was useful at Airbnb. I didn't feel irrelevant as someone in my 50s. So I started MEA. because I wanted to create the opportunity to tell people midlife is not a crisis, it's a chrysalis. If you think about the caterpillar to butterfly journey, what's in the middle? What's midlife for the butterfly? The chrysalis. And the chrysalis is dark and gooey, but it's where the transformation happens. And so I guess for me, I feel like there are 3 life stages that actually got discovered in the 20th century. Adolescence was not a word until 1904. Retirement in the '20s and '30s with Social Security and pensions. And then midlife, because, you know, longevity in the year 1900 was 47, and then it was 77 in the year 2000. So what grew is midlife. The other 2, adolescence and retirement, got a lot of government money and societal support. Midlife, all it got was a bad brand, midlife crisis, which was coined in 1965. And so my part of what I'm looking at is how do we help elevate midlife as a life stage when the transformation happens. And it's partly to help make sure we have not a rampant midlife suicide rate, which is 60% higher than it was 20 years ago, but it's also to help elevate people who are already in a good place in life but could use some more tools and hacks and ways of thinking of their life and some new practices that actually make them wiser and more curious.

And while the beauty is in the butterfly, the growth happens in that, in that chrysalis. Oh yeah. You know, it's that creature wanting to become more and it's willing to shed what it was, you know, and sometimes we get, we have angst because we're holding on to the previous cycle, right? You know, and going against nature. Chip Connelly, how can people find out more? How can people find out more about your academy, about your books? Where can we, where can we direct people to?

modernelderacademy.com. That's one place to go. I wrote a white paper called The Emergence of Long-Life Learning. For those who are geeks who want to understand what is long-life learning, people can learn more about that. My website is chipconley.com as well. I post my WisdomWell daily blogs. You know, people could just go and subscribe for free for those, but I also post those on my LinkedIn profile. So if you want to sort of follow me on LinkedIn, that's not a bad place as well.

Perfect. Wonderful. And we'll make sure we do that. We'll put everything in the show notes at jimkwik.com/notes, the link to the academy, a link to Chip's books and some of his featured talks, as well as links to your social media, the white paper, and so much more. Thank you, Jim. Chip, I want to thank you. Thank you so much for your time, your talent, your friendship for all these years, your wit, your warmth, and Of course, your wisdom.

And where's the wine?

And where's the wine?

I don't have any wine. It's still morning here. Thank you. Thank you, Jim.

Thank you, everybody. Thanks for listening to the Kwik Brain Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it, take a screenshot, post it, tag Chip, tag myself so we get to see it and share. Here's the thing, knowledge by itself is probably not power. It becomes more powerful when we apply it and we share it. with others and we share that wisdom. Share something that you learned, maybe one takeaway, an insight, an idea, some instruction, and I'll repost some of my favorites. I'll gift randomly one person because you tag us in it, Chip's most recent book as a gift to our community. And if you enjoyed it, make sure you leave a review and subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, and everywhere else. Until then, I'm your brain coach, Jim Kwik, and be limitless, everybody.