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- [00:00]
Sarah Lynch
With the Venture X 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@capital1.com Venture X business 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 youe 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 developing the wisdom to be a great leader. Here is Bea's conversation with Chip Conley. Enjoy.
- [01:07]
Bea Dixon
Wow, Chip, I 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.
- [01:41]
Chip Conley
And girlfriend, you've done your homework.
- [01:44]
Bea Dixon
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?
- [02:07]
Chip Conley
Yeah, you know what, it's really interesting to talk about this because when I was young I did, I did enjoy writing. I was, 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, early adolescence I got embarrassed by the fact 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.
- [03:30]
Bea Dixon
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.
- [03:39]
Chip Conley
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.
- [04:09]
Bea Dixon
How long did it take you to get back to your writing?
- [04:11]
Chip Conley
Man? It took. It took me about 25 years or 20, maybe 20 years. I started a boutique hotel company, and once that became successful, people started asking me to give speeches. And then people, A literary. 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 that 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.
- [05:12]
Bea Dixon
But you also ghost wrote some books, didn't you as well?
- [05:15]
Chip Conley
I don't know if I've ever. 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, I love, you know, 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.
- [05:46]
Bea Dixon
So you mentioned Joa du Viv 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.
- [06:04]
Chip Conley
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 and 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 it was. 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.
- [07:24]
Bea Dixon
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. What were some of the hardships that you ran into, especially at that time?
- [07:36]
Chip Conley
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 COVID 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 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, 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.
- [09:26]
Bea Dixon
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?
- [09:42]
Chip Conley
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 organic. Our growth was going to be organic, but we ultimately grew from, you know, me as one employee in a company to 3,500 employees when I sold the company.
- [10:10]
Bea Dixon
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 switch slowly and understanding how you can get from cheap and chic to actually moving and transitioning over to being a luxury, you know, a luxury hotelier.
- [10:33]
Chip Conley
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 love 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's a pyramid. There's 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, you know, 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 employees, it was compensation and money and the benefits. But what they needed that was sort of, that made them feel successful is to feel recognized. And then the transformational need for an employee is the 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 is a whole other story. But it was survival need was transactional, the 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.
- [12:51]
Bea Dixon
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, you know, 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 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?
- [13:37]
Chip Conley
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. Joie de Vivre is now under the name JDV. It's 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? Never, never going to win 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. 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, there's 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 at 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 there. 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, 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, 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, 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, you know, 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 was, 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 resilience buys you time. But if you're just gonna 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 gonna 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 months stays. It was for, you know, 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 changed 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.
- [19:35]
Bea Dixon
But they will always have that. It doesn't matter if it is today or not. They will always have that.
- [19:41]
Chip Conley
That's true. Yeah, it's 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.
- [19:51]
Bea Dixon
No, for sure. 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. In my opinion. You know, I mean, I literally was just in Richmond and stayed at a really amazing place in Richmond. Through Airbnb.
- [20:15]
Chip Conley
Yeah.
- [20:15]
Bea Dixon
You know, and so I, you know, so I love them and adore them, but.
- [20:20]
Chip Conley
Thank you.
- [20:21]
Bea Dixon
So you went on to start Modern. The Modern Elder Academy, which. I love that you kept the name.
- [20:27]
Chip Conley
Thank you.
- [20:28]
Bea Dixon
What was some of the things that you took from your experience being at Airbnb, your experience with jdv, your experience being a writer? What was it the culmination of all of those things that led you to start the Modern Elder Academy? Like, what were some of the tools that you took from that experience?
- [20:48]
Chip Conley
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 is going to be really great. So I've come to realize that, you know, 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've been there for 10 years as a board member, but also as a teacher, occasional teacher. And so I had that. I had my. 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 best, I would say.
- [23:14]
Bea Dixon
I do. I do.
- [23:16]
Chip Conley
Yeah. No, 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. 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, you know, 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 gonna live till 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 is 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.
- [25:09]
Sarah Lynch
We're going to take a quick break and be back with more from Bee and Chip. Here's a little tip for growing your business. Get the Venture X Business Card from Capital One and earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. Plus, the Venture X 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 1300 airport lounges. Just imagine where the Venture X Business Card from Capital One can take your business. Capital One. What's in your wallet? Terms and conditions apply. Find out more@capital1.com Venture X business.
- [25:51]
Bea Dixon
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?
- [26:01]
Chip Conley
Well, it was just a weird, 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 had a. I went for a run one day and I came back with a Baja aha. I had 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 you know, 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 U.S. and create campuses in the U.S. 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.
- [27:24]
Bea Dixon
That's incredible. What's the lowest age that somebody should come into the modern Elder Academy?
- [27:31]
Chip Conley
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's comes 28 for one of our one week programs. The oldest person's been 88. So basically 28 to 88. So we in a workshop, we could have as many as four generations in one workshop. Yeah. 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 Buettner, Michael Franti, amazing musician. These are all people who've taught at MEA and are part of our faculty.
- [28:23]
Bea Dixon
That's dope. Learning how to age well is important. I just turned 40. My birthday was on the 19th.
- [28:32]
Chip Conley
Black dumb crack girlfriend. You look good.
- [28:35]
Bea Dixon
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, turn 90 at some point, you know, God willing, right? But I'm so interested, like, I'm gonna 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?
- [29:17]
Chip Conley
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. I'm going to come to your honey pot girl.
- [29:24]
Bea Dixon
I'm coming. I'm coming out with you.
- [29:27]
Chip Conley
Yeah. You know, here's a, here's a statistic that's a lot of people don't know about that comes from Yale, from Becca Levy, 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 stopped smoking at 50 or if you started 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 onto something big here and 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.
- [30:31]
Bea Dixon
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?
- [30:47]
Chip Conley
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. I'm, you know, Richard Branson wrote, wrote the forward 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 A, it 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 in and join his company full time? So creating that space and having the seeds that I had, same seed, different soil, allowed me to create the stage, an empty stage for an amazing play to show up. And, you know, Airbnb was an amazing play.
- [32:58]
Bea Dixon
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?
- [33:49]
Chip Conley
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, you know, 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, you know, in my backpack, my little day pack called Man 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. 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 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 more than 14 years ago, and from that point forward, I really let my soul be the primary driver of my life. 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's in the back seat. And occasionally the soul's driving is like the ego saying. And it's like, okay, some of what you just said makes sense, but most of what you said just this junk. And, like, we're gonna put that away and, you know, go have a drink in the backseat and take a nap. So it's like my driving miss. Driving Miss ego.
- [36:39]
Bea Dixon
I love it.
- [36:40]
Chip Conley
Driving Miss ego.
- [36:42]
Bea Dixon
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, honey pot, 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.
- [37:42]
Chip Conley
I want to say one thing, though. First, B.
- [37:44]
Bea Dixon
Yes.
- [37:44]
Chip Conley
I think you need to write a book. And it's just the name of the book is called Just Being B. Being B.
- [37:52]
Bea Dixon
That's so funny that you say that, because I am writing a book.
- [37:57]
Chip Conley
And.
- [37:57]
Bea Dixon
The title is not far off from that. So look at you. Look at you, Chip the Intuitive. Let's add that to you.
- [38:05]
Chip Conley
I think, you know, I'm a Scorpio. I just wanna jot that intuitive thing down.
- [38:11]
Bea Dixon
I love it. So saying everything that we just Said, right?
- [38:15]
Chip Conley
Yep.
- [38:16]
Bea Dixon
How do you advise other founders who may look to you to be a mentor or just somebody that they wanna talk to? What is your, what's your advice for them?
- [38:26]
Chip Conley
I have a couple 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 are. Have nothing to do with your business and frankly don't really care, in fact, in some ways or 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 spouse or kids, make sure you're spending time with them. Make sure you have a hobby or two. I mean, like, 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.
- [39:39]
Bea Dixon
I love all your equations. They're fantastic.
- [39:41]
Chip Conley
Yeah, you know, I mean, it's. I guess I'm just sort of a very, very masculine men that 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 the. There are 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 powerless about? What do I have no influence over? And when you do that with something that's making you anxious, I gotta 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, you know, there's something to that, and I've used that in my companies since the early days of joie de vivre.
- [41:22]
Bea Dixon
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.
- [41:37]
Chip Conley
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.
- [41:54]
Bea Dixon
I have another audience question. What are your tools for ending the second guessing of one's decisions that are disruptive?
- [42:03]
Chip Conley
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's 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.
- [43:17]
Bea Dixon
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 Kberlene from Matchline Interiors asks, what's been the best way you 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?
- [43:50]
Chip Conley
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 AB 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. There are a lot of people who 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, it's 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 that's you. Or you see success somewhere else, and how do you apply that to yourself? For me, when I saw, when I started Boutique Hotel by 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 was 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.
- [46:54]
Bea Dixon
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.
- [47:06]
Chip Conley
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.
- [47:37]
Bea Dixon
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, Chip, that's all in the culture. That has to be the foundation, because at the end of the day, you're serving humans.
- [48:23]
Chip Conley
Yep.
- [48:24]
Bea Dixon
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 gosh. I can't wait to come and spend some time with you. I'm kind of like, for sure, for sure, for sure.
- [48:45]
Chip Conley
I can't wait. I'm looking forward to seeing you.
- [48:51]
Sarah Lynch
That's all for this episode of youf 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.