The Great Midlife Edit

Hello, No Ego Podcast listeners. Very excited to bring you another person whose work I have admired and really enjoyed it for some years. As you know, in this season I'm bringing you some of my best teachers, some of the people I turn to for wisdom and learning. And my guest today, Chip Conley, was someone I discovered long, long ago when he was interrupting the hospitality industry. Right. I, as a bed and breakfast kind of pioneer in those days, watched very closely his work. But he's gone on to be a New York Times bestselling author, has had multiple books out there. 7th book hitting the press in January. Have to preorder because this one goes away from work to how to live a great life, much like my last book. Maybe in midlife we all write books. Less work, Chip, and better lives. But his book is Learning to Live with Life: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age. He's got a great pedigree. You can read about that in the show notes. Welcome, Chip. I'm so glad that you're here.

It's so good to be here, Sai. And when we say here, we are both in Baja, in the Baja, and we're not far from each other.

And I'm thrilled that you're here, Chip. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. It's great. We're both in Baja. I love that. And I look forward to this conversation.

Yeah, that's probably a little-known fact. A lot of my listeners know that I moved to Mexico and they know I love this community. But what is so cool about our community, Todos Santos Pescadero, is there's a gathering of really cool, talented people doing great stuff. So what brought you to Baja?

You know, 12 years ago, 2 friends of mine said, hey, let's spend the holidays down here. And I had been to Cabo before but never to Todos Santos. And we came and I was like, okay, it's, you know, it's a tiny little colonial town. And, you know, the first day I was like, okay, there's some good restaurants here and there's beach, but I was sort of looking for the thing. And what happened for me over the course of a week being down here, I was like, Realized the thing was inside of me. This is a place that sort of unveils itself and allows you to sort of unveil yourself. And we're on the Tropic of Cancer, which is really interesting. And we, in this area, we have mountains, 7,000-foot-tall mountains, ocean, desert, tropical, and farmland. And there aren't many places in the world where you have all of that right there at your doorstep. And Over time, I just said, like, wow, I want to live here. And so about 7 years ago, I bought a home here. And then, you know, soon after— 7 and a half years ago— and then soon after that, said, like, I want to create MEA here, the world's first midlife wisdom school.

Which I think is an amazing concept. So I need you to talk about the Modern Elder Academy because there's so many graduates I meet in town or people attending. And they just rave about the experience. And I think the Baja is such a magical place. It certainly revealed me to me in a way that loved me up and changed me for the better.

Yeah, you know, the whole origin of this, of MEA, the Modern Elder Academy, was that I was a boutique hotelier for 24 years, sold the business during the Great Recession. A couple years later, the 3 founders of Airbnb approached me and said, listen, we have this little tech startup. This was 11 years ago. And we want you to come in and help be our modern elder. And I was like, I don't want to be a modern elder. That sounds like I'm about to die. And they said, well, we think a modern elder is someone who's as curious as they are wise. I was like, okay, I'll own that. Curiosity and wisdom, the alchemy of that sounds pretty good to me. And so I spent 7 and a half years with them, 4 years full-time, 3 and a half years very actively as a part-time strategic advisor and mentoring them. And at the end of my time there, I was writing a book called Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder. And I was writing that here in Pescadero at my beach home. And one day I had a Baja aha. I like it. I know. I was going for a run on the beach and I was like, okay, why don't we have midlife wisdom schools? Why don't we have a place where people come to reimagine and repurpose themselves? by diving deep into what they've learned in their life and exploring who they are and what their gift is. And that's really what we do. And it's based upon social science research. That's pretty much into the program, the curriculum. And soon we'll have a campus opening in Santa Fe, New Mexico as well.

So exciting. And, you know, I coach a lot of folks and I know you've coached a lot of folks. And when people do get to a point in their life, their narrative It can be so personal or so negative. They're like, oh, I feel like maybe I've wasted all this time, or like, I just want to start over. And like, you can just start from where you are and mine what you've collected so far for wisdom and alter course and repackage that and become something different, do something different, contribute differently. And it seems like such a relief to people when they hear that, that it isn't like they've wasted half their life.

Yeah. Well, I think the title of your podcast is really well— is appropriate for my answer here, because both Richard Rohr, famous Christian mystic who's actually on our faculty, as well as Carl Jung, the famous psychologist, said that the operating system for the first half of our life is our ego. And for the second half of our life, it's our soul. And so it's midlife where there's an operating system shift. No one gives us the operating instructions for this new operating system. And I really like to think of it this way, is the person you were just describing who said, like, you know, it's almost like the death of the ego. Yeah. It's— or it's the editing of what was your life in anticipation of what will become your life. And for our culture, we've done a very bad job of helping people in midlife understand how to make it through that time. I have a TED Talk coming out soon called The Midlife Chrysalis because I think midlife is a chrysalis, not a crisis. So it's like, when you think about the caterpillar to butterfly journey, midlife for the butterfly is the chrysalis. And that's where it's dark and gooey and solitary, but it's also where the transformation happens. And so midlife can be a challenging time because it's a time when you're You know, letting go of what isn't working and maybe what was, what was working, but it isn't the way you want to be moving forward. And, you know, a lot of people move here to Baja because of that. They're like, you know what, I, I don't want to live the way I've been living. It was fine, but I'm in a new era of my life and I need a new habitat in order to have that new era. So So yeah, we've been doing this for 6 years now. We have 4,000 alumni from 44 countries, 26 regional chapters around the world, and really excited about the campus we'll be also opening in Santa Fe because it's a 2,600-acre regenerative horse ranch with 2 retreat centers there. So it's, it's quite beautiful.

I love it. I love it. And I love Richard Rohr's work, and I love that he's on faculty with you. Because I think, because I think that beginning of life, we do it well. We accumulate identities, we find attachments, we collect things, we, we think externally we can put together kind of this perfect life. Life. And, and we do that well, and we should congratulate ourselves. And then there does come that point. My favorite question in my life has been, what is my soul craving? Because I had all of the The external beautiful trappings of success, and they weren't negative. Like, I didn't want to give up some of my beautiful things.

Correct.

It became a new question that kind of gripped me, like, what's my soul craving? And my question came down to, like, am I willing for people to be wrong about me in order to live the life I want to live? And those are the types of questions I think you really get into at the Modern Elder

Academy. Oh my gosh. You know, to create the space to have, and frankly, the safe container for people to have life-changing conversations is not something that we give ourselves very often. And that's really what we offer at MEA. And we do it with financial aid. So over half the people who've come to Baja have been on some form of financial aid from us. So it's, you know, this is important soul work. I like to think of this as almost like a dance. You know, when I was in 6th grade, I went to ballroom dancing class in Long Beach, California. And, you know, I learned mostly less about the technique of ballroom dancing and more about like what is expected for male roles and female roles. And like the man, or in that case the boy, is leading, the girl is following, etc., etc., etc. And, you know, some of this is so gen— so Seems so ancient gender-wise these days. But the bottom line was, I think that when it comes to the dance of life, for the first half of the life, the ego is leading and the soul is following. It is around midlife that there's a shift in who's leading the dance. And the ego— The ego is meant to actually move into the follower role. It isn't going away. It's just the soul is in charge. And the ego has value. It's what individuates you. It's sometimes what propels you forward. But it's also what separates you. You know, there's a term called collective effervescence that Dacher Keltner, one of our other teachers here who actually lives here in Pescadero part-time, but he's a UC Berkeley professor who started the Greater Good Science Center. He popularized it in his book, Awe, A-W-E. Collective effervescence is when your sense of ego separation dissolves in a group. And what comes in its place is a sense of communal joy. And I'm a founding board member of Burning— the Burning Man nonprofit. So I've seen collective effervescence many, many times on the playa at Burning Man, but I've seen it in all kinds of ways. But you can have it in intimate settings like at MEA, where there's 20 to 30 people in a workshop. And what people feel is like, wow, I feel seen. And I feel like I have sort of stripped away the facade that I've had to live out there. I no longer want to be wearing that identity or that archetype or have that mindset define me. And so we do something called the Great Midlife Edit, which is one of the various rituals that we do during the week that really help people to say like, okay, I'm letting go of that. And yeah, because you said it, you know, the first half of our life is about accumulating. The second half of our life is about editing and discerning. Yeah. So you're in your discernment stage, Cy, although you're a young midlifer. You're a baby.

Thank you. I usually get to developmental stages early, so I'll take it as a compliment that I'm a young midlifer. Yeah. And I think, you know, I do a lot of internal family system work. My background is as a therapist. And

we have Dick Schwartz teaching in Santa Fe in the spring next year.

I saw, I heard about that. I need to apply for a job, Chip. Can I be on faculty?

Someday.

What I love about that is, you know, parts of me that are expressions of my ego, like my protectors, are so excited and happy when they get unburdened from having to lead the dance all the time. So it's like sometimes we feel like moving from ego to soul is some big loss, like our ego fights for its life. But I have found it's so relieved to not have to overpower and over-present. But I want to hear about this book. So, Learning to Love Life and 12 reasons. You don't have to give me all 12. Yeah. But I think it's a segue into First of all, I just want my listeners to know, if Chip wrote it, go read it. Like, Wisdom at Work. Like, you're a fantastic writer. You write like you speak. Your work is just wise and beautiful. And I love Richard Rohr's work. There's just writers that the writing's delicious. So I love your work.

Well, what I like about this book— this is my 7th book— and what I like about it is it's shorter. It's not trying to, you know, present myself as an academic, which in some of my past books, sometimes there's that. It's got personal story in there, which definitely Wisdom at Work did as well. And it's really written for the mainstream. So, the premise was this, like, we have no roadmap for midlife. We have a roadmap for early life, adolescence. We have a roadmap for later life, retirement communities. But, like, midlife, we don't have much. And so, I was like, how do I create a book that is the companion to what we do at MEA and the public service announcement, the PSA, for Yale's Becca Levy, who has shown that when you shift your perspective on aging from negative to positive, you gain 7.5 years of additional life. Wow. So, the way the book's structured is, you know, there's an intro chapter and an exit chapter, and then there's 12 chapters, all of them short, On the 12 reasons why life gets better with age. So, what are 3 or 4 of those reasons? Well, one is we get better at our emotions. We dance with our emotions better. Emotional intelligence grows with age. Our emotional moderation grows with age, meaning you're less reactive. And that's true social science and true, I know, in my life. So, that's one. Another one, speaking of the soul, is you discover your soul. So, that, you know, that conversation about, like, you know, you move from the ego leading the dance to the soul leading the dance. And there's no— there's so much research on this too, that it's around midlife that a lot of people have this little stirring inside of them that they don't know what to make of it. Often it's a need and a desire for meaning and for understanding the mysteries of life and maybe understanding something deeper about themselves. And so that's something that people That gets better with age. Another thing that gets better with age is we no longer see that we have to play on the playing field of our bodies. Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't, like, take good care of ourselves. That's a good thing to do. But there's a lot of people who in their 30s and 40s are trying so darn hard to keep their body looking like it did in their 20s.

Yeah.

That it becomes an enormous Part of their world, you know, how would they spend their time? And, you know, the reality is we have lots of different playing fields in life. There's the physical body, there's the emotional body, there's the spiritual, there's the relational, there's the intellectual. There's lots of ways we can show up in life. And, you know, the body is one of those ones that actually does get worse with time on average. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't take care of it. So think of your body like a rental car. You know, it's like you got issued a rental car at birth and your job is to like keep it relatively well Yeah. It's going to be maintained on the exterior, but over time it's going to have more dents and dings. What's most important is what it feels like on the inside of that car, you know, and that's the part of your life which is internal, relational, emotional, spiritual. And so, you know, that's something that gets better with time, is seeing what's going on inside yourself. Wisdom is something that can get better with time if you metabolize your experience and you think of your your painful life lessons as the raw material for your future wisdom. So the book is basically an ode to the idea that there— we have a lot of anti-aging messages out there. Yeah. What if there were some pro-aging messages? And this book is really a pro-aging message, and it's one that's an age-fluid message, meaning you don't have to be defined by your age nor your generation. If you're age fluid, you are all of the ages you've ever been or will be. And so you have age fluidity.

I love that concept. And I think it's so important because when I was younger, elders just like showed up in my life and I could feel the impact of them. And just at the right time, they loved me up or asked the right questions or mentored me. But it wasn't clear if they were just like gifted spiritual beings that just appeared on the planet. And to know that if you take the PSA you've written and say, hey, let's change the narrative, then you can start to see the science behind your own curating your life towards eldership and towards— you know, a lot of people grow old, they don't often— I love that— metabolizing experiences for wisdom. And there's not a lot of conversation out there. There's more, but even— It's not— I identify as And for me, the freedom that came with letting my hair go gray and not getting snapped the minute I got on the plane and not having to navigate the business meetings, all the gender stuff, and it just fell off people's radar. And it is fantastic thing to get on the plane and no one tries to take it off. No one's looking for anything from you. A lot of women— I don't know if it's this way for guys— I talk to a lot of women and they love that part of getting older. And I don't think we talk about that enough. We talk about Botox, we don't talk about like how—

Yeah.

Is that no one cares about you in that way anymore. Not that we don't have sex lives and have a lot of love, but it's that physical presentation that you're released from. It's so

beautiful. Yeah, it's, um, The research we've done has shown that the number one feeling that a person, a woman has in life is invisibility. And that has an upside and a downside. The downside is, yeah, you know, you can feel disrespected if you feel invisible. On the other hand, you're not a sexual object. Like, at least you're not perceived as a sexual object as much as you used to be and felt sexism in that way. For men, the number one feeling is irrelevance. And there's an upside to invisibility. There's a downside. When it comes to irrelevance, there's not much of an upside other than being a PIP, not a VIP, being a PIP, and the humility that comes with irrelevance. And for a lot of— for when women come into midlife and they might deal with ageism, It's not the first time they're dealing with an ism. They've dealt with sexism or whatever. You know, it could be ethnicity or race or sexual orientation as well. When a straight white man hits their 50s and starts to deal with ageism in certain ways, it is the very first time in their life that they're dealing with an ism. And frankly, one that is socially acceptable. Yeah. Because ageism is the last socially acceptable You know, kind of ism out there. So long story short is we get a lot of men who come to MEA who are really bewildered. And we get a lot of women too. We get a lot of women too, but the women actually have had some social relation and connection. And, you know, they process their emotions more. For a lot of men, it's like, I'm 55 and I got laid off 2 years ago and I can't get a job and I feel lost because my whole Life was my business card. And I feel like, you know, I have no relevance in the world anymore. And there's a loss of confidence. And actually, for women in their 50s, there's workplace, there's growing confidence. For men, on average, it plateaus or actually declines. So I love doing this work because it's not, you know, there's all kinds of people and everybody needs whatever they need. It's not one size fits all. And whether someone is— I'll never forget, we had a 4-foot-11 Black woman from Atlanta who was 62 and a social worker. She had a lot of purpose and not much money. Then we had a 45-year-old retired investment banker who was 6-foot-4, white guy from New York. He had a lot of money but not very much purpose. Man, seeing the two of those people walk down the beach every day, we didn't force it. It was not— we didn't make them mutual mentors, but they became that over the course of a week. And that's when I know that wisdom is not taught, it's shared. And how do we create the space for people to share their wisdom and maybe even discover their wisdom first and then be able to share it?

Love it, love it, which is the biggest commercial for Modern Elder Academy. I can't promote it enough because what I'm trying to create more and more myself is New leadership competencies, since I'm still in the working world, around the ability to hold space or facilitate moments that aren't directed, they aren't brokered, they aren't assigned. Just creating space around people coming together in non-conventional ways to, to share that wisdom. And so I think it's so important for all of you out there that are thinking, gosh, I have some need for this. Check out Modern Elder Academy. How can they find some more information?

Yeah, so the Modern Elder Academy website is meawisdom.com. You can— and you'll find my blog there too. So I have a daily blog called Wisdom Well that is every day of the year, and on weekends it's mostly our alumni blog posts, but Monday through Friday it's me. And It gives you a really great flavor of what MEA is about. It's free. So, if you subscribe, you get an early morning email if you're on the West Coast. It depends on what time zone you're in. And then chipconley.com is also another place you can find stuff out about me personally. And I post all of my blog posts on my LinkedIn site. Okay. So if you want to find out, if you want to get— just go back and look at a lot of old blog posts, you're welcome to go there too.

Perfect. And they're extremely good. You know, I think the pandemic really accelerated some self-reflection and some life inventory and people thinking sometimes in polarized ways, like I need to quit my job and go live on the beach. And what I love about your concept Is it doesn't have to be so polarized. It's like, you know, how can you take inventory, bring some things along, refashion those experiences you have in new ways, and focus in some different directions? So I really hope people take you up on checking out your blog. Fantastic. And your program is amazing. And your book is out in January, right?

That's right. Exactly.

Perfect. And that's called Learning to Love Midlife. So any of you over 40 need to start— if you don't tend to this, if you're over 40, it will come for you. So I'm just warning you, you can really continue to do the work, or we can help you when you are in a crisis. Like, the universe listens and then comes through with the 2x4. So I don't know anyone who's been able to escape some of these This developmental stage of getting to questions.

Oh my gosh, I love you, and I'm just thrilled that we are in the same, in the same zip code. Well, frankly, in a place that doesn't have zip codes.

Which is what's so

nice. Our, you know, our address is Calle Sin Nombre. There's— it's the road with no name. And so I do love that too.

I love that, Chip. I'm so glad to have you on. I look forward to actually seeing you down here when you get back here this winter. And take care in all that is in front of you. I wish you the best.

Thank you, Cy.

You bet.