-Chip, what's the best lesson you've learned about aging?

-That actually, maybe our best years are ahead of us, based upon the U-curve of happiness social science research.

♪♪ -Stay tuned and we'll hear more about that.

♪♪ I'm Cathleen Toomey, host of Seniority Authority, where we get smarter about growing older.

♪♪ Sure, we all love the idea of travel, golf, and relaxation, but research shows that true happiness, later in life comes from something deeper: a sense of purpose.

The Japanese even have a word for it.

Ikigai, your reason to get up in the morning and finding it just might be the key to a longer, more fulfilling life.

Today's guest knows a thing or two about that.

We're thrilled to welcome Chip Conley, founder of the Modern Elder Academy, New York Times bestselling author, TED speaker and visionary entrepreneur.

Thanks for joining us on Seniority Authority.

-Oh, it's an honor to be here.

Thanks for inviting me.

-Chip, before we dive into our conversation, we want to share a story that really captures the kind of purpose and connection we'll be talking about today.

Let's take a look.

-I always wanted to play an instrument, but I didn't know how I was going to do it.

[faint music] And here was a way that I could do it, because they said you could be a beginner.

I was 53 when I started playing.

I didn't play growing up.

So it was a whole new experience for me.

It became just this important part of my life.

-There's a couple of unique things about older adults trying to play music for the first time, or coming back to music after a long break.

Sometimes the first note is the most difficult one to play, coming up with the, you know, courage to, just pick up an instrument and start playing is often the biggest hurdle, and once they get going, they get hooked very quickly and they keep coming back week after week.

-They needed percussion players in the New Horizons band, and I said, ah, that'll be great, what the heck?

It'll be fun.

They haven't asked me to leave so it’s going great, a year and a half later.

-Because I joined the band at its inception 22 years ago I’ve been playing ever since.

I had never played in the band before, so it was really beginners ville for, for, for me.

-Yeah, I was terrified.

[Dennis chuckles] And I was like, probably for the first couple of years that I was here at PMAC.

But they’re such a wonderful, welcoming group of people that they just made it okay.

[laughter] -Russ prefaces a lot of his time with us that your best is good enough.

You learn that you're going to make mistakes all the time, and you just learn how to find your way back in.

And the more and more you do it, the better and better you get at it, and then the mistakes don't matter quite so much.

-If you're still a beginner, you can hop into the group and play what you're able to play and sit out on what you're not able to play yet.

And as you grow as a musician in time through the group, you can play a little bit more and a little bit more, and no one else in the group or the ensemble is going to think you're holding them back.

[faint instrumental ensemble] It really clicked with me that the ensemble was about so much more than the music.

It was really about the opportunity for people to get together and form a little musical community and meet other people, new people, and allows very different personalities, people from very different backgrounds, to share space together and have something really wonderful happen.

-It requires presence and focus because your eyes got to be focused.

I'm getting ready for the next note.

My fingers are waiting.

I mean, I'm present in the moment, am I not, somewhere else?

It's a Zen meditation of a sort.

-You can be in the foulest of mood, and things could have been horrible all day long.

And you come into the New Horizons Band, and you play with your friends, and you leave feeling great.

It's really happy, it really changes your, your perspective on things [instruments play faintly] -This is something I hear from a lot of the participants in the band that you're so focused on making music, and the joy of making music that the entire rest of the world melts away around you, and, it's, becomes the most important two hours of their week to make sure that I cannot miss this, because it's the best possible thing for my mental health and my well-being.

-So about a week before our concert, we practiced and I played it terribly, and I looked at Russ and he looked at me afterwards, and he said to me, you know, you could be sitting at home on your couch just watching lousy TV right now, but you're in here, you're working your tail off and you're exercising your brain.

And I thought, man, that's just what I needed to hear.

-My, my doctor and I talk about music.

He says breathing is good for people.

And as they get older, they don’t breath as much and they're subject to all sorts of breathing ailments.

And also it feeds your brain.

So-- [chuckling] he's picked up on my vibe with music and sees it as part of staying healthy.

[instruments playing] -Yeah, it's, it's almost like a, like a, a drug with hopefully not very many side effects that I can tell.

[instruments playing] -What a great example of finding purpose.

Chip with over 6000 students from 60 countries, you have helped people redefine midlife, find new purpose, and embrace aging as a time of growth, wisdom, and opportunity.

What inspired you to create a program that helps people find new purpose in midlife and beyond?

-I was a boutique hotelier in San Francisco, and started a company at age 26 called Joie de Vivre.

And I sold the company because I was really struggling.

In my late 40s, I was struggling for all kinds of reasons, and it was also feeling a little purposeless.

And then I had a couple of years off, to sort of figure out what I wanted to do next.

And, I was asked by the founders of Airbnb when it was a small little tech startup 13 years ago to come in and be their modern elder, a term I didn't like much at first.

Then they said Chip, a modern elder is someone who's as curious as they are wise.

And so I spent seven and a half years there in my 50s, twice the age of the average person in the company.

Learning about purpose, my purpose, other people's purposes.

As well as learning about what it feels like to be a boomer in the land of millennials.

And based upon that experience, I wrote a book called Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder and while I was writing that book, I came up with the idea for the Modern Elder Academy, the world's first midlife wisdom school dedicated to helping people, reframe their relationship with aging, while, helping them to repurpose themselves, in midlife and beyond.

-Tell me why you think so many people find this process life changing?

Doing this for 6000 people, why do they find it life changing?

-Well, I think part of the issue we have is, in the United States, we have a very ageist culture.

There's a, you know, if there's a bumper sticker that defines aging, it's just don't do it.

[Cathleen chuckles] The opposite-- and there are definitely a bunch of Silicon Valley tech bros who are trying to figure out how to help us, like, live forever and not age, but that is not reality today and instead, what I think people really need to understand is while their physical body, the physiology of their life, may get worse with age on average.

When it comes to our relationships, our relationships improve with age, our emotions, our emotional intelligence grows with age.

Our wisdom can grow with age.

Our spiritual curiosity grows with age.

Our crystallized intelligence, the ability to synthesize complex concepts and bring them into one gets better with age until our early 70s.

So there's a lot of things that get better with age but because we get so fixated in the United States on the physical body, beauty and brawn, we tend to think of aging as being a time of loss as a, as a, as opposed to a time of gaining new things.

That's why I wrote a book called Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better With Age because I really wanted to amplify, a dozen reasons that social science has shown, for why we should feel good about our aging.

-I highly recommend Chip's book, which does give you positive reasons to love midlife.

It's Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better With Age.

And it's an excellent book, and it's an excellent antidote, Chip, to people moaning and groaning about age instead of celebrating age.

Not denigrating age.

-You know, there's a, an academic named Becca Levy at Yale and who in the last 20 years of research has shown that when you shift your mindset on aging from a negative to a positive, which is not easy to do in an ageist culture, you gain seven and a half years of extended longevity.

Which is more life added than if you actually stopped smoking at 50 or started exercising at 50.

So we don't have public service announcements for the upside of aging, but we certainly have PSAs for stopping smoking and starting exercising.

So part of my job as a midlife activist, and I define midlife is 35 to 75, is to help people to see that there are a lot of upsides of aging.

So it's more of a pro aging as opposed to an anti-aging message.

-I love that!

Could you share with us 3 or 4 key principles that everyone should keep in mind?

-There are really three foundational, elements that lead you to healthy aging, and it's purpose community and wellness, purpose- I'll come back to.

Community, it's exceptionally important.

Our social relationships are not a nice to have they’re a need to have.

They're the number one, variable correlated with living a longer, healthier, happier life.

And then wellness speaks to both emotional and physical wellness, and that's a really important piece too.

Purpose is important because it's what gets us up in the morning.

I think one of the things that we mistake in the United States is to-- we think that purpose is only the things that might be on your LinkedIn profile.

So purpose with a capital P. Imagine a circle right here, and there's a big P in the circle.

The P the big P takes all of the circle.

And that's how a lot of people feel in their 20s, 30s, 40s and maybe even in their 50s.

They have a career, and that purpose around their career or they may be raising children, that purpose around raising children, is predominant.

It doesn't give much space for anything else.

And so there's sometimes people feeling like, wow, everybody else has a purpose and I don't, because they feel like everybody else has a career and I don't and the fact is, there's all kinds of purposes there's purpose with a small P, which could be something that isn't, on your, your resume or your LinkedIn profile, but might be what someone says at your eulogy.

The fact that you have always had a quick smile and you had a glimmer of happiness in your eye, or especially when you were doing certain things like singing or like gardening or like getting a dog park created in your local, community garden.

So the small P purposes are really important, and as you get older, we often move from the big P purpose the thing that predominates to, to a series of small P purposes, what sometimes people call a portfolio life, where you have multiple things that give you a sense of purpose.

I have a good friend, and she was a litigator, and an attorney for a long time that was her big P purpose.

She really hated it at age 60.

She knew she wanted to work ten more years, but she just couldn't imagine that.

And so she came to an MEA workshop on cultivating purpose.

And she came to realize, oh, wow, when I was a kid, I loved cooking pies with my grandmother, what if I went to pastry chef school, and I actually tried learning how to become a pastry chef?

What would that feel like?

Well, after she'd done that for three months, she came to the conclusion that she wanted to become a bakery entrepreneur, a baker, and and go out in her community and, and run a bakery.

And that's what she's doing now.

Now you wouldn't expect a litigator to become a baker.

-No.

-Sometimes you need an intervention like, an MEA program or a coach or someone like that to help you to see what options are, because we tend to, you know, operate often with just the periph-- not much peripheral vision of what else is available to you.

But now she is a baker.

She's an Airbnb host because she had a, cottage in the backyard and her son had gone off to college so she could make some money doing that.

She loves photography, and so she's having photographic shows in local galleries.

She doesn't make a lot of money from that, but it is a place she loves.

And she's still consulting as a litigation consultant.

So she has four sources of income now.

She has four Ps, but she used to earn a lot of money but didn't have a lot of joy.

And now she has a lot of joy and more than enough money to live on.

-You know what I love about that is that everyone's purpose is different, and I think what happens at the Modern Elder Academy is that you have the time and space to go deeper, to really understand, what is your next purpose?

Because so many people feel that their career is over, so their purpose is done, their families been raised, their purpose is done.

You're not done.

We have so much more time and it requires reflection.

-I also think there are four pathways to purpose, sort of like shortcuts.

Something that excites you, and that's sort of obvious that, you know, obviously something that excites you might feel purposeful.

Certainly passionate.

Number two is something that agitates you.

Reed Hastings started Netflix based upon being upset at Blockbuster Video, charging him $60 for three DVDs that he was returning late.

And at the gym he was thinking: ah, you know what, I'd pay a monthly membership whether I come one time, a month, or 30 times a month, why can't I have a monthly membership for my entertainment?

And that's how Netflix got off the ground because he was agitated.

The third pathway to purpose after excitement and and being agitated is curiosity.

And allow curiosity to take you on paths where you're like, I'm curious about this or that, and that may lead you to a sense of purpose.

And then finally, as we talked about with the litigator, looking for something that's neglected from earlier in your life that you used to feel purposeful or passionate about, are you may have put it aside because you didn't have time for it or it didn't seem practical.

And so it's in later in life, as we saw with some of the folks in the orchestra.

I mean, you know, some of those people probably wouldn't have joined the orchestra in their 30s or 40s.

They didn't have time.

It didn't feel like it was practical.

But as you get older, you have something called time affluence.

And time affluence is when you have more time in your life to discover new things and one of-- One of my favorite questions to ask, to ME-- any MEA cohort at either of our two campuses in Santa Fe or in Baja on the beach in Mexico is ten years from now.

What will you regret if you don't learn it or do it now?

Because anticipated regret in the future is a form of wisdom.

It allows you to see an emotion you may feel if you don't give something.

The proper amount of attention and time now.

And usually that thing might be something that you feel purposeful about.

-And you're right.

We have this gift of time that prior generations never got to experience.

So we have time affluence, and we should be happy about that, and happy about the fact that aging has given us this gift to keep going.

Chip, in your experience, what are some common challenges that people face when trying to uncover their next chapter?

And how can we they move past that?

-You know, so-- the common challenges people have is they define themselves to the future based upon who they are today.

Therefore, they if they see themselves as, a lawyer or they are trying to look at what's adjacent to being a lawyer and they don't imagine that they could do something wholly different.

I like to call it same seed, different soil, that the seed is what you know, your skills, your wisdom.

And it's what you bring to anything you do.

The different soil means that you're not in the same habitat you used to be.

Whether that's geographically, you're living in a new place or a new industry or a new kind of role.

Those are all things that are available to you, in terms of doing something that's totally different.

There's a difference between change and transition.

Change is when you change the situation and the circumstance that could be changing your spouse or changing your boss.

But when someone's making a change two years later, they're complaining the same about this new boss and this new spouse exactly the way they did two years ago.

A transition is when the trend and the, what's shifting is not external, it's internal.

It's psychological or spiritual, not situational or circumstantial.

And when you make those changes internally, you're wearing a new pair of glasses, and by wearing a new pair of glasses you're able to better see and better discern what's right for you.

-Chip, is there a time frame that you recommend for this journey, or is it different for everyone?

If people are sparked by this discussion?

-For so, for so many people, it’s the mindset.

It's the thought like I am too old to fill in the blank.

When I moved to Mexico eight years ago, I had a mindset which was I was too old to learn Spanish or learn to surf.

And then I put it in the framework of ten years from now, what will I regret at 66?

What would I regret?

And I said, like, man, if I'm still living in Mexico part time, I will regret that I never learned Spanish.

It would have been easier at 56 than at 66.

We make a huge investment in our education and our learning in our adolescence, and then in early adulthood, especially if we go to college or graduate school.

Where is the investment in our future in midlife and beyond?

It's, it's something we all need to do.

-I'm so glad you brought that up, Chip, because the next story we're going to look at is people who discover their purpose by diving into learning.

Let's take a look.

[indistinct chatter] -I mean, I've never bought into the thing.

Oh, I'm getting older or anything.

It's like, why would you stop learning?

Why?

[indistinct lecturing] [soft music] ♪♪ -It keeps our brain going, and it's given me a chance to do things I couldn't do when I was working.

♪♪ -The camaraderie is just overwhelming.

But that's what all these are all about.

-I am the program director for, OLLI or the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

♪♪ The idea is to provide, academic and classroom opportunities just for the enjoyment of learning.

♪♪ [indistinct chatter] [faintly] -And so this is when you look at like-- -Each institute is individualized.

Some of them are purely academic.

Others, like ours here incorporates academic classes as well as creative pursuit.

♪♪ -So we do-- -I’ve had classes in chocolate.

I've had classes for F. Scott Fitzgerald history.

I couldn't wait to get started.

I wish I could clone myself into two others because there’s so many aspects that I personally want to do.

♪♪ -These are classes and opportunities that you don't have to worry about the pressure of a midterm or a final you just get to come and share your thoughts with like minded individuals and have those engaging conversations.

♪♪ -I recently retired in 2020, and I have been active in the OLLI program since teaching a civility and politics class and a civics slam class.

♪♪ I think older people are always fascinated because of their life experiences.

They're always fascinated with what's happening around them, and they're always willing to engage.

And it's remarkable because they have so many life experiences that they can bring to the table.

♪♪ -Because there's so much out there that we don't know.

For instance, reading F. Scott Fitzgerald as an adult versus when I had to in school.

I got a lot more out of it.

So I think we get a lot more out of things by being with other adults who really care and want to learn, and who are curious.

♪♪ -Not only the classes, but meeting friends and having that continual friendship people that you can call on.

And I just think it's so important as we grow older.

-Great example of how some people find purpose in learning.

Chip, what do you think most people get wrong about the idea of purpose?

-I think people think of it as a possession almost like a BMW in the driveway [both chuckle] You're comparing-- You're comparing your purpose with someone else's.

You know, our purposes are very internal, and they don't have to be on our LinkedIn resume.

So I just think the thing people get wrong about purpose is that it could be very personal.

It doesn't have to be very public.

And I think once you know that and you realize something that gives you motivation to get up in the morning no matter what it is, then you're on the right track -Of all the seminars and topics that the Modern Elder Academy has covered in the past few years, what's your favorite and why?

-Well, of course, I love our Cultivating Purpose workshops.

[Cathleen chuckles] Yeah why-- why would I not say that given the top-- But I also like our navigating, transitions workshop and like, learning how to navigate transitions at any time in your life.

I think it's really essential.

It's a modern skill.

I also love, the guest faculty we have.

We have famous faculty from Elizabeth Gilbert to, the famous Christian mystic Richard Moore, to, Arthur Brooks, the Harvard professor and, and author.

So we, we specialize in bringing in thought leaders around the topic of purpose, aging and longevity.

-You have rock star faculty members.

I have interviewed, Arthur Brooks on Seniority Authority and, you've just got the best of the best.

Chip, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today I really appreciate your time on the show.

-It's such an honor to be here, I appreciate the great work you're doing in the world.

-Thank you.

To learn more about the Modern Elder Academy and to keep the conversation going, visit nhpbs.org/seniorityauthority ♪♪ Until next time, stay curious and keep thriving!

♪♪ -Major funding for the production of Seniority Authority is provided by Road Scholar ♪♪ and by viewers like you.

Thank you!

♪♪