You're Never Too Old to Have a Hero

I showed up numb. Since my cancer diagnosis a year earlier, I’d stopped listening to my body. I was 15 pounds heavier than I’d ever weighed. I’d stopped exercising, meditating, dating. I was taking 30 different supplements a day, and regularly receiving acupuncture and shamanic treatments — along with listening to my western doctor’s advice — but I’d become tone deaf to my body’s lovely, lyrical voice. I felt betrayed. And I was in exile from the poetry in my life. 

I made the pilgrimage to Tucson’s Canyon Ranch in late June for a variety of reasons. A quarter century earlier, I was creating a 20-room spa hotel on San Francisco’s Nob Hill and visited both the Arizona and Massachusetts Canyon Ranch locations as “role models.” I would soon be buying and renovating the city’s largest spa, Kabuki Springs and Spa, and building Costanoa, a boutique campground that offered yoga and spa services (more than a half-dozen years before the word “glamping” had been coined). Making the trip to Canyon Ranch was a learning journey, with stunning collateral benefits.

On this visit, I was hoping to run into my secret hero, Canyon Ranch founder Mel Zuckerman. A few wise hospitality industry observers had recently counseled me that I was aiming to do for “midlife wisdom schools” what the founders of Canyon Ranch did for “destination spa resorts” by creating a new real estate category at the intersection of hospitality, wellness and education. Just like Mel Zuckerman did 40 years ago in Tucson.

Mel’s story was legendary, and well-chronicled in his book “The Restless Visionary.” He was an overweight, overstressed real estate developer on the precipice of 50 who’d found religion at a spa in Ojai in the late 1970s. But, he was curious why his only choices for getting healthy were fat farms or pamper palaces, both of which exclusively catered to women. Weren’t there a few other restless and overwrought men out there who wanted to seek out a healthier lifestyle? His personal mantra became “I want to feel like this forever and share it with others.”

Like me, with no hotel experience other than understanding how to renovate real estate, he immediately stumbled onto his first project. Two weeks after he came back from the fat farm, he found the Double U Dude Ranch, a cheap motel-style property that had seen better days. Two weeks after my 26th birthday when I’d finished writing my business plan to create Joie de Vivre Hospitality, I stumbled upon the bankrupt Caravan Lodge which became The Phoenix, San Francisco’s now-legendary rock ‘n roll hotel. He bought his for $714,000. I bought mine for $800,000. Mel got 42 acres and 39 decrepit rooms in the desert. I got an acre in the gritty Tenderloin and 44 filthy rooms. Both of us struggled trying to finance our crazy visions. He took no salary for his first ten years. I twice went for long salary sabbaticals that lasted nearly four years during my time as CEO of Joie de Vivre. Our common humble roots and stubborn determination helped make us who we are today. 

So, it was incredibly fortuitous that I was given 30 minutes to meet (for the first time) Mel Zuckerman, 91 years young, who lives with his wife Enid on the Canyon Ranch campus. During our two hours together (we lost track of time, not a bad thing as you age), we’d come to realize we’d sprouted from the same seed. We were both introverts who worked on our personalities like a school project. We became more gregarious in our late teens and college years, sometimes to the point of being overly-assertive. We had a drive for perfection and growth — that feeling of never being satisfied wherever we are, the appetite for more. We tended to spend a lot of time on the figurative treadmill of achievement.

We both desired to create a healing space for others to find joy and peace even when, ironically, we found that elusive ourselves. He’d received an astrological reading (as did I) early in his history of creating Canyon Ranch that told him he was on the right path as long as he sought “attunement to your inner nature.” We believed in karmic capitalism, treating our employees well meant that our guests and, ultimately, our investors would be treated well (I wish I’d made the pilgrimage to Dallas to visit Southwest Airline’s founding CEO Herb Kelleher before he died earlier this year as he’d famously said something Mel and I believed in, “The guest doesn’t come first. The employee does.”)

Mel believed that Canyon Ranch’s mission was to help people “die young, as late as possible.” I’d written some notes to myself in the creation of the Modern Elder Academy (MEA) that we wanted to help our students “die wise, as healthy as possible.” We both realized that we couldn’t help our guests or students turn back their chronological clock, but we could reset their biological clock with Canyon Ranch focusing more on the physical side and MEA focusing on the psychological side. Canyon Ranch catalyzed a new consciousness that taking care of your body would help you live younger longer. MEA is helping the world see that aging can be aspirational as long as you mine your mastery and repurpose it in new ways since a “modern elder” is as curious as they are wise. Buoyed by a well-publicized Yale study, which showed that those with a positive perspective on their aging lived seven and a half years longer than those who didn’t, MEA’s purpose is not to just help people live longer, but also to live deeper and happier as well.

It was such a treat hearing Mel talk about the Elder Camp they’d created for Tucson’s seniors and the fact he’s gestating a new idea, a small resort community for those later in life who believe they’re going to live to 100. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who’s been going to Canyon Ranch with her mother since she was a young adult, recently asked Mel, “So, what are you going to do next?” We need to ask that question of more 91-year-olds, right?!

As a New York Times Op-Ed suggested, “how we respond to aging is a choice made in the mind, not in the gym.” With a societal narrative on aging that is so at odds with our personal narrative (as evidenced by social scientists’ discovery of the U-curve of happiness), MEA’s mission is to do for our aging spirit what Canyon Ranch did for our aging body 40 years ago. Cultivating and harvesting our wisdom in the second half of life is the best investment we can ever make because it’s something we can share as our legacy. And, when you experience a midlife realization that you can graduate from the playing field of your body to the playing field of your heart and soul, you realize that shifting your mindset on aging may be the heaviest but most valuable lift of your life. 

Chip Conley is the bestselling author of five books including “Wisdom@Work: The Making of a Modern Elder,” a Strategic Advisor to Airbnb, and the founder of the Modern Elder Academy.