Chip Conley

Recently, MEA community member Brant Huddleston sent me a poignant email,

A recent Wall Street Journal article: https://on.wsj.com/4a1O87Q (apologize for the paywall) went viral focused on how we need to start fighting dementia in our 40s. Geez, what a buzz-kill. I bet this journalist has an ample ration of pork and beans in her basement in the case of our upcoming Armageddon. Most of us don’t want to think about dementia in midlife.

Once a year, MEA offers an experience of unadulterated joy that suggests we’re the tip of the iceberg for a global movement.

In one of the most famous fairy tales, the fairy godmother casts a spell that offers Cinderella a beautiful gown, carriage and horses so she can go to the Prince’s ball, but she’s told she has to leave by midnight before all of this fantasy returns to rags, a pumpkin, and rats.

Korea is a fascinating country, not just because they have a vibrant artistic culture (think K-Pop and Academy of Awards Best Picture “Parasites” and many other films), but it also has the lowest birth rate of any modern country in the world (just 0.74 children per woman when the replacement rate for a country is 2.1) and it also has one of the highest life expectancies in the world, just behind Japan. If you want to get a window into our aging global future, you’d want to look at Korea and Japan.

I love being a myth-buster. And, one of our biggest myths is that younger entrepreneurs are more successful than older entrepreneurs.

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright completed one-third of his most famous work between the ages of 80 and 92. Business author Peter Drucker wrote two-thirds of his forty books after the age of 65. Morris Chang started the influential Taiwanese chip company, TSMC, at 55 and ran it for thirty-five years.

“Authenticity is not something we have or don't have. It's a practice—a conscious choice of how we want to live. Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It's about the choice to show up and be real.” - Brené Brown

I’ve spent most of my career as a crossing guard at the congested, complicated intersection of psychology and business. My books and blog posts have profiled psychology wizards from Carl Jung to Viktor Frankl to Esther Perel.

I thought I graduated from Cancer School on January 12 when I rang the bell after 36 sessions of radiation. Three days later, I was on Good Morning, America. A day after that my book came out. And, the day after that, I was blowing air kisses to Hoda on The Today Show set. I felt surprisingly remarkable as ending the radiation and being off my hormone depletion pills gave me such a spurt of energy.