Chip Conley on Today’s Intergenerational Workplace Potluck

I had the humbling opportunity to speak to the legendary New York Times Bestselling author, Chip Conley on the Humans 2.0 Podcast!

At age 26, Chip founded Joie de Vivre Hospitality by taking an inner city motel and turned it into the 2nd largest boutique hotel brand in the world. After being CEO of his innovative company for 24 years, Chip accepted an invitation from the founders of Airbnb to help transform their promising home sharing start-up into the world's largest hospitality brand.

In four years as Head of Global Hospitality & Strategy, he taught his award-winning methods to hundreds of thousands of Airbnb hosts and created the world-renowned Airbnb Open. 

When Conley received the call from the founders of AirBnb he new he had the industry experience, but lacked in the digital fluency of his 20-something colleagues.

He didn't write code, or have an Uber or Lyft app on his phone, was twice the age of the average Airbnb employee, and would be reporting to a CEO young enough to be his son. Conley quickly discovered that while he'd been hired as a teacher and mentor, he was also in many ways a student and intern. 

What emerged is the secret to thriving as a mid-life worker: learning to marry wisdom and experience with curiosity, a beginner's mind, and a willingness to evolve, all hallmarks of the "Modern Elder."

Watch the full podcast episode below and catch the audio versions on  iTunes, Spotify, Google, Stitcher Radio, iHeart Radio 

Before we get any further. Chip and I talked about meditation and how useful of a practice it has been towards his success. Meditation has fundamentally changed my life and I recommend it to everyone!

Chip Conley's Meditation Practice

I usually wake up in the morning and I meditate. That's something I've been doing for about 30 years and the reason I do that is it helps to center me for the rest of the day. I do transcendental meditation and a buddhist meditation centered around love. 20 minutes in the morning and usually 20 minutes before bed.

I'm not saying it works every day that way but it is a really great way to say..okay…you know what I'm here….my feet are here on the earth. 

Meditation helps put everything in perspective. There's a full quote from Victor Frankel's book man's search for meaning my favorite three sentences ever written in a book is - between stimulus and response there is a space in that space is our power to choose our response and in our response lies our growth and our freedom.

That is basically saying that instead of us being a reactive little pin balls in a pinball machine which is how many people's lives feel like with certain practices…Frankel wasn't speaking specifically to meditation but his three sentence is defined for me as meditation. 

Meditation helps me move out of reaction and into response and it's interesting that the root of the word responsibility is the word response. It's not react-ability its responsibility and meditation helps me quiet down the amygdala. The primal part of my brain has a natural tendency to react to things and I'm not saying just in the midst of meditation but it changed me during my day.

Intergenerational Potluck 

A lot of people don't realize but in the 20th century we went from an average 47 year old longevity in the year 1900 to 77 by 2000 so we got 30 extra years what that did is it bought us some extra time. 

Midlife almost led to the midlife crisis which is a term coined in 1965 and frankly since then we've gotten even more longevity. What is clear is that when you get to a stage in your life when you're elderly you're at a stage where you're you probably have a little bit less to offer in a productive way to society and in some cases society is helping to take care of you. 

Not to say you don't have wisdom and you could be someone that is full of wisdom no doubt about that, but there are the people I'm talking about are and that in the u.s. today the average age of when a person goes into a nursing home is 80. 150 years ago it was 65, so 16 additional years of what we would call the modern elder. 

The modern elder is somebody's typically in the second half of midlife but actually could start as early as 45 and they're in a place in their life where they realize they're a generation or two older than a lot of the people. Frankly in some cases they don't have a clue on the technology side of what's happening. 

Emotional Intelligence & Digital Intelligence (EQ & DQ)

“Many young people can read the face of their iPhone better than the face of the person sitting next to them.” - Chip Conley

I have some emotional intelligence EQ and a little bit of digital intelligence. A lot of your compatriots are probably more heavy on the digital intelligence than the emotional intelligence and that's the real opportunity. How do we create an intergenerational potluck where I offer use of EQ and you offer me some DQ….some digital intelligence.

I think there's certainly a technology intimidation factor but I also think there's a bit of a cultural one. The biggest one is the person who's holding on to the past. Two pieces to it - this is the sociological past and the personal past.

The sociological past is when somebody is let's say 55 years old and they're saying I deserve some reverence… and and my point of view is you're not gonna get reverence unless you’re relevant.

Chip’s Experience at AirBnb

At AirBnB I had to be a intern and a mentor at the same time. I had to right-size my ego first because I had to really say - I’m not here to express wisdom from the pulpit and everybody in the pews has to listen to me.

I also had to really get to a place where I was willing to learn and to have a beginner's mind. To be the person who was asking sometimes the dopiest naive questions in the room. I didn't do that all the time because people get really tired of that because some of those kind of questions you can ask one-on-one after a meeting.

If you actually show up with the person who's got the most curious mind in the room and you ask some why & what if questions...which are different than what and how.

What and how questions are optimization questions. Why and what if questions are the kind of questions a four year old asks and sometimes that four year old why and what if question might actually expose a blind spot for the company and I did that over and over again. 

Listen / Watch the FULL Humans 2.0 Podcast episode with Chip Conley & Mark Metry

If you’re looking for a technological self-development podcast that focuses all about the human experience transformation in this 21st-century world, you should definitely check out my podcast, Humans 2.0 

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You can Listen to my podcast, Humans 2.0 on iTunes, Spotify Google, Stitcher Radio,iHeart Radio or YouTube.