One-on-One with Chip Conley

Apr. 15—Chip Conley's age at times has been at odds with his professional career.

In 1987, when he was 26 years old, he founded Joie de Vivre Hospitality, which became the second-largest boutique hotel company in the Bay Area. He ran the company for 24 years before selling it.

Later, when he was 52 years old, he found himself working at Airbnb, where the average age of a person in the company was 26.

He developed the nickname, 'The Modern Elder."

"They said, 'Chip, you're a modern elder, someone whose as curious as they are wise,'" Conley said. "So I really appreciated that. I didn't necessarily want you to make fun of my age, but I do like the idea that you see me as the alchemy of curiosity and wisdom."

Conley, 63, wrote the book, "Wisdom at Work, the Making of a Modern Elder." In 2018, Conley formed the Modern Elder Academy in Baja, Mexico.

The academy is essentially a five-night retreat of sorts.

"The content is really focused on how do we help people reframe their relationship with aging. (Studies) have shown that when you shift your mindset on aging from a negative to a positive, you gain seven-and-a-half years of additional life," he said. "So that's sort of the core principle of MEA, 'How do we help people feel better about aging?' "

After years of operating the academy in Mexico, Conley is expanding into America with academies in Santa Fe. He has a 2,600-acre ranch outside of the city that opens next month. The first academy cohort is sold out. He also has plans to open another academy near St. John's College in the coming years.

A native of California, Conley grew up making frequent family vacations to Santa Fe because his uncle worked for the Navajo Nation.

What made you interested in what it means to be a 'modern elder?'

"What was interesting to me is that we're in a world where people are living longer, yet in the Bay Area where I was located, power is moving younger. People are staying in the workplace longer, pushing off retirement by choice or necessity. And yet, we see a growing number of managers and leaders are younger people. And so I was curious about how do we create more intergenerational collaboration. The U.S. Department of Labor says that next year, 2025, the majority of Americans will have a younger boss. We've never had that before. And so the question for me was, 'How do we create an environment in which we help people in midlife, in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, to understand how they can be valuable in the world?"

When you were at Airbnb in your 50s and the average age of you coworkers was 26, what were the challenges and what did you learn?

"The biggest challenge was learning how to listen after having been CEO of my own company for 24 years; learning how to listen and to recognize that I can learn as much from the millennials that I was surrounded by as they could learn from me. So having the humility to be curious and learn from younger people."

How has your perspective about aging changed since you started the Modern Elder Academy?

"One of the questions that we like to ask at MEA is '10 years from, what will you regret if you don't learn it or do it?' And I think that question means a lot, and means a lot to me personally. Because when I started MEA I was 57 and living in Mexico. And I asked myself, 'Okay, at 67, 10 years from now, what will I regret if I don't do it now or learn it now?' And that's how I started learning Spanish. And I started learning to surf. And you could say that 57 is too old to learn a language or too old to surf. I thought about the future, and the fact that it would be harder to do that at 67 than 57."

How do you like to unwind on the weekends?

"I like writing. I love to swim. I love film of all kinds."

What's your favorite movie?

"'It's a Wonderful Life' with Jimmy Stewart.

"It's sort of a family Christmas movie, but it has a lot more meaning to it than that. Because it helps the person to see 'What would the world be like if I didn't exist?' And so we all could use a Clarence, guardian angel, on our shoulder."

What's something difficult in your life that you had to overcome?

"Coming out as a gay man when I was 22 during the early parts of the AIDS crisis. And it was hard at age 26 to be a very high profile gay CEO of a hotel company."

Did you lose friends during that period?

"In two ways. I lost some friends to AIDS and I lost some friends because I played water polo at Stanford. I was an athlete. And the group of people I tended to hang out with were sort of an athletic macho crowd. So I lost a few of (those) friends."

Why did you pick Santa Fe as your American location for the MEA?

"It has a long history of attracting people to explore and how to transform their lives. It's been a place where people came seeking a new life. There are a lot of artists and creators here; a lot of faculty and facilitators as well. The whole workshop world and personal growth world is very embedded into Santa Fe. We like the fact that there is Indigenous culture, which appreciates elders. So we will bring in Indigenous elders into our curriculum. And the fact that nature is a teacher here. And we liked that it was a little remote."