Hey friends, Eric here with some exciting news. I've been writing a book and it's about to be out in the world in April of twenty twenty six. The working title is How a Little Becomes a Lot, and it's all about how small, consistent actions, the kind that we talk about all the time on this show can lead to real meaningful change. Right now, the book is in the editing process and there's still some shaping to do,
which is where you come in. I'd love your input on what to focus on, how to talk about the book, even what it should be called. If you've got a few minutes and a couple thoughts on what would make this book most helpful for you, I'd be really grateful to hear them. Just head to oneufeed dot net slash book survey. You'll also get early updates, fun giveaways, and to behind the scenes look at what it actually takes
to make a book. Editing marathons, title debates, existential spirals, and me questioning all of my life choices at two am over one stubborn sentence. Again, that's one you feed dot net slash book survey. Thank you so much for being part of this. Your feedback really means a lot to me.
Truly.
Back to Socrates times, he laughed when people said you know everything, It's like, no, I'm still learning. And it's that learning perspective that really makes the most difference. Being willing to become a beginner at something in your life at every time of your life.
Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Midlife has a way of sneaking up on you. I know because I'm in it, and it's not without its challenges. But talking with Chip Conley shifted something in me. In this conversation, he shares how the hardest stretch of his life, burnout, personal loss, a near death experience, ended up being the start of something completely new. We talk about the pull of ego, the search for identity, and how letting go of traditional success opened the door to something more meaningful.
His idea of moving from return on investment to ripples of impact especially struck me. If you're in a season where things feel uncertain or you're wondering what this phase of life is really for, I think you'll hear something in this episode that helps you feel a little more hopeful. I'm Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Chip, Welcome to the show.
It's great to be here, Eric.
I'm really excited to talk with you. Your book is called Learning to Love Midlife Twelve Reasons Why Life gets Better with age, and what a great topic and to somebody who's squarely in the middle of midlife, I'm your target audience.
We'll get to the book though in a.
Minute after we start in the way that we always do, which is with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
One is a good wolf, which.
Represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second, and they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparents as the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
As is true for so many things in life, I'm not sure it's binary. There's nothing that says we can't feed both, and it doesn't necessarily mean you want to feed both, but it does mean that we do possibly feed both. And there's certain parts of our life. In my life, I'll just speak for myself, certain parts of my life are that have a voracious appetite. So there's certain times in your life where your ego wants to
be fed incessantly and frankly. As is true with the hedonic treadmill, the psychology theory that just when you thought the thing you wanted was good enough, once you get it, you want something more. I think that that is very true of the ego, as it's true for many things. The ego in moderation is wonderful. Feeding your sense of accomplishment, feeding your sense of having an identity in the world
that differentiates you is very important. But it's when it gets out of balance and you realize that there's never enough, that's when you've got to be very careful with feeding that wolf. The other wolf you know, often isn't asking for anything. It can get along on a steady, small diet. It's quieter, it's not demanding, and that wolf, though in the long run, is what nourishes you the most. And so for me in my life, just to sum up, I was very very focused on ROI, the return on
investment as an entrepreneur for much of my life. But I have come to see that the ROI that I really appreciate these days is ripples of impact and the return on investment mindset I had sometimes meant that I was feeding the ego and feeding the greed. I've never been very greedy, but but certainly feeding the desire for accomplishment.
And today what I want to feed is that part of me that really is giving back and having a profound impact on other humans as my primary way of feeling success in life wonderful.
Let's start with maybe setting up how you got to the place where you wrote a book about midlife. You have the modern Ellers Academy. Let's talk about how you got there, and you describe it in the book as the tale of two midlives, one very bad followed by one very good.
Talk to me about that.
Yeah, I went to college and graduate school at Stanford. A couple of years out of Stanford Business School, I started a boutique hotel company at age twenty six, called it Juan.
A Vive Joy of Life in French.
Ran that company for twenty four years, based in San Francisco. We had fifty two boutique hotels around California, given the second largest boutiquo Tell You're in the US. But I really was struggling in my late forties.
At the time.
I had never heard of the U Curve of happiness, which shows that the low point on the U curve is around forty five to fifty. And yes, that was the era I was in, but I didn't know anything about that. What I thought was, oh, man, I've hit my midlife and I'm having my crisis. But it was not just the internal feeling like something wasn't right, but it was also externally. I had I had friends committing suicide. I had a adult foster sign going to prison wrongfully
at a long term relationship ending. I was running out of cash during the Great Recession with my boutique hotel company. So it was both internal and external. And then I had an NDE near death experience due to an allergic reaction to an antibiotic and that was the hotel your wake up call. That was when I finally said, like, I've got to make a transition in my life, but I just don't know how to do it, you know.
I felt now a deep sense of a catalyst from that nd Over the next two years, with some help from one of my best friends who was a coach, I between age forty seven and fifty pretty much changed everything in my life.
Some of it was not all easy.
It was in fact very difficult, but by age fifty I sort of hit the reset button and I was ready for something new. And then my fifties were spectacular. So the tale of two midlifs. Were late forties was rough. My fifties were spectacular. And you know, I spent from age fifty two to fifty nine helping the founders of Airbnb take their little tech startup and turn it into the world's most valuable hospitality company, which is where I
earned the title modern Elder. I didn't like it at first, but then they said, Chip, you're as curious as you are wise, and that's a modern elder and I was like, Okay, I like that, And next thing I knew, I was ready to create the Modern Elder Academy, the world's first midlife wisdom school. So I would just say midlife is a complex time. It's a time that hasn't been given
a lot of attention. Part of what I've been doing as a midlife activist now is to help to demystify and elevate and and maybe operationalize how do you go through midlife differently? And what are the tools that are available to you and the key themes that are often going on in people's lives during this time. And that's why we have seven thousand graduates from sixty countries who are part of the MAA Alumni crew.
So let's define midlife real quick, Like, what are we talking about here? What years, what characteristics, How do you think about determining Yep, somebody's in midlife or they're not in midlife.
Well, technically midlife is the life stage that is a bridge. So think of it as a bridge between early adulthood and later adulthood. Makes sense, right, I mean the middle age is between early and late So early adulthood was originally conceived as eighteen to thirty and now is eighteen to thirty five by some sociologists. So you could say
that maybe midlife, early midlife starts around mid thirties. Let me be clear that my definition of midlife, which is defined by a lot of sociologists, is at odds with the history vidorical definition, which has been forty to sixty or forty five to sixty five. But I'm saying maybe mid thirties it starts to creep up on you, and then you have this very long bridge because later adulthood, if you're going to live till ninety or one hundred
later adult, it might start around seventy five. It's when at that point probably retired, although a lot of people are still working in their late seventies still, so it's possible that the bridge of midlife lasts forty years from thirty five to seventy five, with three stages in it, early midlife thirty five to fifty, the core of midlife fifty to sixty, and then later midlife sixty to seventy five. And each of those three stages has a different flavor
to it. But we didn't have this worry and the year nineteen hundred because life expectancy in nineteen hundred was forty seven, so midlife really didn't exist.
That's amazing when we think about that. Let's first talk about what our perspective on aging is and why it's important. Differenced just a second ago, nineteen hundred, age of forty seven, right, And I think many of us of my age, I've noticed recently we're looking at pictures of our parents at our age, or are even more our grandparents at our age, and we're like, goodness, gracious, I seem very different than that.
And I think some of that is we've begun to have a different perspective on what it is to age. But talk to me about why our beliefs about aging are so important.
Well, our beliefs about aging are in the US cultures just pretty toxic.
Let's just be honest.
If there was a bumper sticker that defined our belief of aging, it would be just don't do it. And yet, if you don't age, you're probably dying or dead. So, long story short is, because US culture has defined aging often by the physical side of aging, which does, over the course of your life you show physical deterioration, people are scared of it. And yet our emotional aging process, we actually get better at emotional intelligence as we age. We get better at social relationships as we age, so
the social side of aging can be better. Culturally, not everybody, but a lot of people actually get more interested in culture as they age. They get more interested in spirituality in certain pursuits. Intellectually, they are more adept as they
age because of crystallized intelligence as opposed to fluid intelligence. So, long story short is, the society perspective on aging is pretty negative, and yet the U curve of happiness research shows that after age fifty people get happier with time, and Becca Levi's work from Yale has shown that when you shift your mindset on aging from a negative to a positive around midlife, you add seven and a half years of extended longevity so part of my role and
part of NEA's mission is to help people own their age, feel good about the upside of aging and what gets better with age, and then look at how you cannot just be youthful but useful as you get older.
Well, being useful is one of my favorite ideas and core values. Have you ever read The Cider House Rules by John Oyah? Of course, yeah, doctor Wilbur Larch and you know, always be useful, very influential on me when I was a teenager. So as we look at people aging, I think many of us will see people who have become what you're describing as wiser, kinder, better people as they've gotten old.
And then there's the.
Stereotype of the grumpy old man who doesn't want a kit on his lawn and hardens and ossifies in some way what to you shapes the trajectory from one of those outcomes to the other.
It's really the difference between a fixed and the growth mindset. So Carol Dweck at Stanford popularized this idea of mindset. So is the way you see yourself and the world. And if you have a fixed mindset, you tend to think you have a fixed amount of luck or money or time, and you optimize that and you define success as winning and you're trying to prove yourself. But if you have a growth mindset, you're open to something growing with time, whether that's time or money or luck or
knowledge or skill. And so your job is to actually not win and optimize, but it's to actually learn and get better at something. And therefore it's not about proving yourself, it's about improving yourself. Often, when someone only wants to play games that they can win, their sandbucks get smaller and smaller and they get more bored. And when you
get bored, you can get cranky. And the reason you get cranky is because the world is passing you by and you don't understand things anymore because you haven't really been open to learning something new.
There are a lot of people who fit this profile.
I mean, let's be just honest, it's a profile that defines a lot of people who are older. So the growth mindset's really important because it helps you to realize you're open to learning something new.
When I joined.
Airbnb at fifty two years old, average age in the company was twenty six.
I had never been in a tech company before and I was supposed to be the modern elder.
I was supposed to be the one who's like helping the founders figure out what to do with this business, this little growing tech startup. And yet at times I felt like I was the dumbest person in the room. So I had to be open to not just being the oldest, but being the most clueless. And that wasn't easy. But that required me to have a growth mindset. Say, you know what, I'm going to get better. I'm going to learn about tech. I'm going to learn about you know, DQ,
digital intelligence. I had a lot of EQ to offer, but I had to learn some DQ. So long story short is the people who tend to get ossified and calcified and get cranky are often people who have gotten very fixed in their perspective of the world and themselves.
Yeah, it's so interesting because I observe this in myself. The desire to become more certain that I know the way things are, you know, a certain skepticism of the way things are being done today versus when they were done before, a certain amount of less openness to new experiences, Like I feel some of that happen, and I'm very committed to actively countering those things, you know, actively making
myself take on new things, new challenges. I found myself really trying to any time my brain is like, well it was better back when? Is to really take that as like a chance to stop and pause and go hang on a second, like that's a reactionary way of thinking, not that it may not be true in certain cases, but it's also true that some other things are better. Like you said, it's this openness.
Well, I think there's a couple of things. Number one is in our forties in particular, we are so busy that it's really hard sometimes to have the time and space to be curious. Curiosity is the opposite side of judgment, and so in many ways, learning how to judge things quickly it's a super skill because when you're really busy, being able to make a quick judgment on something allows you to sort of say no to something or to edit your life accordingly. You know, that's a coping skill
during a busy time. So let's know that there's an upside to that. The other thing is you can say, well, gosh, you know, as I get older, I'm more discerning, I have more wisdom, and that's probably true as well. But wisdom is not about just what you can say no to. It's also what you can say yes to. It's also what you can learn. Wisdom is not about knowing everything, it's about learning everything. Back to Socrates times, he laughed when people said you know everything, It's like, no, I'm
still learning. And it's that learning perspective that really makes the most difference, being willing to become a beginner at something in your life at every time of your life.
Yeah, like you, I have taken up surfing later in life. Unlike you, I don't live anywhere near where that's a reasonable hob. It's a stupid hobby for me to the Ohio. Oh okay, it is a dumb place to take up surfing. I mean, it just doesn't make sense. But you know, I do it as often as I'm able. But I've also taken up like rock climbing and just different things that keep me a little bit more limber. You say in the book, You've got a line that I really like.
You say, time can be a dictator, but it can also be a liberator. Say more about that.
How we look at our calendar has a lot to do with how we live our life. I mean makes sense. How we spend our days is how we spend our life. That's a wonderful quote. And so for me, it's a really interesting part of my life. I am very focused on my calendar, and so in some ways it dictates my life. It dictates, you know, how I'm spending my
time with you today. You know, I got ten minutes extra time at the start of our what was supposed to be our meeting, which was nice because I needed it and I appreciated the fact that you needed to start ten minutes later, and that was But when I say that, there's like, oh my god. The time defines and dictates my life. Similarly, during COVID, when my life got really spacious, because you know, I spend most of
my time running MAA, teaching classes, et cetera. And all of a sudden we were closed for a period of time because of the pandemic. I put on my calendar three hours a day on Monday and Wednesday and Friday afternoons spying on the divine and that was my opportunity to go into nature with my dog Jamie and to just be offline, not listening to a podcast, which is what I usually do when I hike and just noticing things,
being curious. I was doing what's called an awe walk or what sometimes people call forest bathing, and it was just really beautiful. So in that way, my calendar could be a liberation. Yesterday, I thought I was going to go spend three hours with somebody who's a healer here in Santa Fe, just for fun, not necessarily even healing session.
But it didn't turn out that I did. But I blocked four hours of my afternoon yesterday for that, and the reality was I wasn't feeling very well yesterday, so that was fine ultimately, and I got to spend that time just relaxing, taking a bath and taking a nap, and that's what I needed. So we have more control and volition over our calendar than we think we do. But the language we use around time and calendar is like it's almost as if we're in prison.
I think it's some version of what you just said, which is like, I'm just so busy, I'm overwhelmed, I have no free time. You know, there's different ways of talking about it. I think it's an interesting concept of time being potentially a liberator. You mentioned like being really busy in your forties, and then maybe in your fifties a little bit less busy, and as time goes on, and I think time can be a liberator if we
learn to use little bits of it better. I can say I don't have time to do X, Y or Z, But if I examine my life, then I'm like, but I spent an hour doing that and thirty five minutes doing that, and there are little chunks there. Even in a very busy, dynamic life for me, there are places that without making radical changes, I can begin to claim some more autonomy.
No doubt about it.
Just being able to sit for a moment, maybe even five minutes and close your eyes and meditate and lose track of time is really valuable. I mean, there's lots of social science research that shows that. I think, you know, one of the things that I find interesting is when you can get into a flow state. I was lucky enough to spend some good quality time with Mahaly Chick
something high who popularize the idea of flow. And what's interesting about being in a flow state when you're doing something that has timeless awareness, meaning you're so engaged in it that you lose track of time. There's starting to be some research that shows that when you lose track of time in a state of flow, it is possible
that you're not aging during that time. So finding time in your life where you can lose track of time is not just joyful and make you feel nourished, but it also may extend your longevity.
I want to change directions here for a second and talk about one of the things that we all know about aging is that your body changes in often ways that are less than desirable. And you say men are not spared the bodily indignities of aging, and that women talk a lot more about it. We talk about menopause, we talk about pair of menopause, and we could argue whether we talk about it enough.
I don't know. I'm not a woman.
I'm not going to weigh in on that, but I certainly hear people talk about that way more than I ever hear people talking about men in aging outside the context of you know, an ed commercial, right like, outside of that, it never gets mentioned.
Bob Dole some viagra.
Talk to me.
About this and how might we as men better support each other in this.
Yes, you know, it's beauty or braun when it comes to women, it's beauty and the fear that you lose your beauty with time. Just as you get comfortable in your own skin, it starts to sag. With men can be braun, you know, the physical viral being feeling virile. There's a word to describe the men's version of menopause,
and it's called andropause. What's different versus menopause is menopause obviously has a huge fertility element to it in terms of you no longer having menstruation and therefore no longer able to have children.
And it's huge.
I mean, it's a very important part of a woman's life. For men that you don't have that kind of sort of functional change, but you have a lot of things that are happening.
One of them is the gut.
You are actually gaining of fat, and your gut can be actually very dangerous and.
You're remarkably stubborn.
It is. It's really hard. It's very hard to get rid of.
I gatined a bunch of pounds when I was doing some cancer treatments the last two years and cannot get rid of that gut. You know, my gut's that huge, But it's it's something so there's that there's the reduction in testosterone that really starts in your thirties and it actually declines over time, and it can really accelerate for many men in their fifties and be more noticeable in terms of the lack of both appetite for being sexual or even capacity.
So that's happening.
Obviously, you're losing hair, maybe losing your energy. There's a lot of elements to this. Many of them sort of relate to men feeling a little bit less masculine, and that can be interesting. That's some of the crankiness that some men get into in their fifties and beyond is just trying to mask the lack of masculinity that they're feeling internally. My father's an interesting example of this. My
father's eighty seven years old. Both my parents are eighty seven, and my dad was a marine captain and a real hardcore, you know, masculine dude, and when he got into his fifties, sixties and seventies, he all of a sudden started to soften a little bit. And I don't know how much of it was really the physical or hormonal side, but emotionally you started to you know, read poetry occasionally, or
just be open to having an emotional conversation. And so I do think, you know, there's a real beauty in seeing men start to become a little bit more soft, seeing women become a little bit more vocal and strong willed in their opinions as opposed to just a people pleaser. This is one of the reasons why I say that
as we're growing old, we're also growing whole. And what that means is we're learning to alchemize the polarities inside of ourselves, you know, whether it's wisdom and curiosity, introvert extrovert, masculine, feminine gravitas, depth and levity, humor. I think that one of the things that I really admire about an eighty five year old person is when I spend time with them,
there so present, they're not compartmentalized in any way. They have alchemized their polarities into this sort of integrated whole, and I think that's really what we maybe should aspire to.
Going to take a moment and ask a more personal type question here of my own interest, which is you mentioned energy dropping in people as they age, and one of the things I've talked to a number of men in their forties and fifties about this, and it is a drop in energy and trying to figure out.
What is it?
Is it, you know, lack of engagement with something that you're doing.
Is it diet? Is it this?
And one of the questions I sort of asked myself is like, what is a reasonable amount of energy for a fifty five year old person? How have you thought about that question? You know, have you noticed an energy decrease and how have you thought about it and contextualized it?
Well, I mean, just on a personal level.
For two years, I had to take hormone depletion therapy because I was dealing with prostate cancer. Okay, that went from stage one to stage two to stage three, and so to actually in essence inhibit my testosteron so that it was running around eight or ten instead of five hundred meant that I was struggling with not a lot of energy at a time when I had a book tour and I was launching our second MAA campus and all kinds of stuff, so dark chocolate.
I was feeding on that. I think that you can feel.
The lack of energy inside you, and you need to respect that and look at what are some of the root causes. Are you getting enough sleep, are you eating well? Are you drinking too much alcohol? For a lot of people, a lot of men, they're drinking more in their fifties and sixties than they did when they were younger. And the truth is that, you know, alcohol is problematic and actually even more problematic for older women in terms of how you metabolize it. It can mess with your sleep
as well. So some of the reason that there's a lack of energy could be just physical issues, but sometimes it's also not feeling the sense of purpose. And when you have a sense of purpose, it's like a north star that you are aspiring to get to, and you know, you keep walking in the desert to.
See that north star.
You're never going to catch the north star because it's just like a rainbow. You're never going to catch the rainbow. But it is what drives you forward. So I think for some men there's that. I actually think the physical side also of when you start getting some weight and you're not exercising as much, there's that going on as well.
You're carrying around a little bit more of a load.
You don't have the cardiovascular program that you used to have. I mean, I think it's multifaceted. I will also say that as someone who is running on a treadmill in my career, that actually getting off the treadmill allowed me to slow down a little bit and realize how completely fatigued I was. And sometimes you just need that space to get some sleep and to just slow down a little bit. And that's okay as long as in the long run you feel like you're regenerating yourself. Yeah, there'll
be a renewal as a result of that. Yesterday, I was not feeling well. Last night. I went to bed early. I had no alcohol, and the night before I had had small alcohol. I fasted last night, I didn't have dinner, and I took a bath last night, and I just felt so good. When I cut up this morning, I felt very different than I did yesterday, and I have a lot more energy. So I just on a personal level, I can say like that is just two days for me of very different feelings.
Yeah, let's talk for a moment about gratitude or being grateful for our lives. And you have a line in the book that I think is really interesting. And I don't remember who you were talking to or who said this to you. But here's the line that you wrote. It was the particularness of his gratitude that shield him from either envy or pride. Talk to me about gratitude and particularness of it.
What does that mean.
I mean, there's a lot of social science evidence showing gratitude and happiness have a lot They're like kissing cousins. If you're struggling, the best thing you can do is to find gratitude. If you want to feel happy, go write a gratitude list. But what's been found is that just a generic gratitude list is not necessarily as helpful as being quite specific about what you're feeling gratitude toward.
And so the specificity if someone wants to do a gratitude journal or a daily gratitude list, the specificity is what's important, you know, And because what it does is from a neurological perspective, it's like there's a precision that you're sort of saying, honing in on.
That's what I want to feed, you know. It is back to you know, the one you feed. I want to feed that.
If you said, you know, like I'm feeling gratitude because I feel, you know, love, for my family. Well that's great, Okay, what's specific about that today? Could you say I feel love for my family because my daughter today just told me how much she loved me and I could see a twinkle in her eye. That's much better than just saying I feel love for my family, because the love
for you family could be generic across any day. But actually, when you say because my daughter said she loved me and I could see that twinkle in her eye, it's almost you can visualize it, and your brain is sort of saying, like, ooh, more of that, please, And when something's generic.
It has less visceral impact on you.
And I think when it comes to gratitude, feeling the gratitude and visualizing it is really important.
That makes a lot of sense. I know for me, if you're just listing the things that you intellectually know you should be grateful for my family, my health, those things tend to if you're doing gratitude as a regular practice, it becomes the gratitude version of the Hadonic treadmill. Right. It no longer does anything, but the specificity that you're talking about does. I also think it tunes into the granularity of our experience more which is a really positive thing.
For a while, I used to do a gratitude list and have a couple of pictures with it, and my dogs were always on it. Like, when I looked back, I was like, well, I appear to be ten times more grateful for my dogs than any other person in the world, which seems funny in retrospect, but taking a picture of what they were doing that I found so adorable was a way of getting that specificity.
Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. And you don't want to get bored with a gratitude list. Yeah, let's just be really blunt.
It will be boring if it's generic.
So a lot of people talk about here are the things I'm not going to do, And as a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, I think that there have been some very clear things for me that it's like I'm.
Not doing that. I'm not doing that.
But you talk about creating something you called the Ten Commitments, Yeah, which is a play on the Ten Commandments.
Tell me about that.
Yeah, you know, I grew up learning the ten and I remember saying to my parents, you know.
Like it's all about do not, do not, do not. I think eight of the ten or do not?
And so for me in my life today, and while I do have a spiritual practice and belief system, it's not so much the ten commandments, which I do feel are helpful, but it's really more about what are my proactive, positive commitments I can make in my life, and those are not going to be hard and fast and say like, okay, those are the only ten I'll ever have, But you know, having ten that makes sense to me and are working for me you know today are important and they become
sort of the guardrails of my life.
And so that's that's a that's a good thing.
What are a couple of them? Can you share a couple of comments?
I don't have them in front of me.
They change, So I like in the book I had my ten, and I think one would be just being less focused on my resume and more focus on my eulogy and how do I show up and create the conditions in my life. Says that I am, after age fifty, more focused on my eulogy than on my resume, and I think that's one that.
Has lots of catalytic effect in terms of what does that mean.
It means I'm less egocentric. It means I'm less focused on my accomplishments. It means I'm more focused on the small things I do in life that are impacting other people. That's an example of a commitment as opposed to a commandment.
That's back to the ROI the ripples of impact, which I absolutely love. I think that is such a great phrame is in a way of thinking of it, And I love the idea of ripple right because I think that's the way our impact generally is. Sometimes we get to see it directly, but most of the time I don't think we actually see the good that we put into the world. It ripples out in this very gentle way, and it takes a certain amount of faith and belief that indeed that is happening.
Yeah, there's got him Kip Tyndall, who I always thought of as a role model for me. He started the Container Store Company a long long time ago, and he talked about your wake. You know, in the context of your life, sometimes you don't know what the wake is that you're like in a boat, there's a wake behind you as you're focussing forward on the boat, especially if you're driving it. You don't necessarily know your wake behind you.
And the truth is, the bigger you are in an organization, the higher you are in an organization, the more power you have, the larger you're wake. And as a water skier who knows what it's like to ski across the wake, I know that you know, having a huge weight can be hard, it can be very disruptive. So the ripples are sort of a form of wake.
There's a wake.
Also, what you really want to do in life is to have a really positive wake and recognize that the more senior you are, the more contagious your emotions, the more contagious your character, in essence, the bigger you're wake. I think metaphors are often very helpful for people to sort of visualize how the world works.
You have a question in the book that you say to ask, am I frustrated or disappointed? What's the difference and why does it matter?
So when you're frustrated, there's still the opportunity to change something, and so frustration can relate to anger, it can relate to a lot of sort of combustible emotions that can propel you forward to take action to make it different. Disappointment, which some people could say they're the same, but they're not. Disappointment is an energy that actually is a shrinking.
Frustration is a growing. Disappointment is a.
Shrinking partly because you're beyond frustration. Disappointment is when you come to realize that there's not much you can do to change something now, And regret is one step further, which is a sense of responsibility about that disappointment. So regret is actually more painful than disappointment because you actually feel like you had some fault in leading to the disappointment. But disappointment can happen in all kinds of ways, and
often it's outside of your control. Therefore, there can be a sense of like, Okay, oh well, I'm going to have to live with that. When someone has too much frustration in their life, it can lead to anxiety and high blood pressure and a deep sense of urgency and stress. When someone has a lot of disappointment in their life, it can actually lead to learned helplessness and depression and a sense that a woe is me or there's nothing
I can do. So they're very, very different in terms of emotional effect, and yet sometimes people talk about saying I'm frustrated and disappointed. It's like, well, which.
One is it?
Yeah, well, it's another version of the serenity prayer, right to the things I can change, the things I can't change, and the wisdom to know the difference. And wisdom is a big word with you, and I think that's a really important thing to know, right, because the response is very different.
You talk about.
Expectation in the book, so you say, you know, when you're faced with disappointment, you can either improve your reality or lower your expectations. So improving my reality would sort of throw me back over on the maybe not frustrated side of the court, but that energy, right, the energy of change. If, on the other hand, I'm on the disappointment side, then lowering my expectations talk about how we do that in a wise way.
So one of the reasons that people often feel not great about age forty five to fifty is because of disappointment equals expectations of myst reality. In your teams, your twenties, your thirties, you build these expectations, they sort of propel you forward, and then by the time you're getting starting to flirt with fifty, you're at a age where like, yeah,
I don't know if that's ever going to happen. You could believe it's going to happen in your thirties still, but by the time you get to closer to fifty, maybe not.
And that's really hard.
And Brende Brown calls it the midlife unraveling, and the midlife unraveling is unraveling your expectations in such a way that you are no longer feeling so wrapped up in something that there's no space for anything else. So the key, the wise way to deal with that is to rejigger your expectations and get clear on what's important to you.
For a lot of.
People around forty five to fifty, they are in a stage in their life where they are running on a treadmill that was defined by their parents, or their spouse or their community, but not themselves. And so it's around that era of life that sometimes people wake up and say.
Like I want to be a firefighter. I don't I don't want to be an accountant.
We see those people come to mea or you know, a woman recently is like, I don't want to be a litigator. I want to be a pastry chef. It's like, okay, you can do that. You know at twenty it was hard for you to do that because your parents were sort of saying you got to go to college, you got to make money, and then you end up getting on the treadmill and you say like, oh, I'm getting married,
now I have kids. It's like and for some people they wake up around forty five to fifty and say, like that David Burns song, is this my wonderful life? And it's not their wonderful life. It's the life that you know somebody else wrote the script for. So finding the agency and then the autonomy and the clarity of vision is part of what we help people with ATMA.
People coming to mea is this a guiding idea of what's bringing them? There are people coming there largely because they are feeling unmoored in middle age and they're not quite sure what to do.
For some people, something abstract like that, it's like, Okay, I feel sort of a little lost in middle age and am feeling not good about aging, and I want to improve on that. And sometimes it's like i feel like I've got to get clear on what my purpose is or what my wisdom is. I've built and that's also important. But the number one reason people come to MAA is because they're going through some kind of transition
in their life. Maybe they're in the Sandwich generation, but they're about to lose a parent, or they're becoming an empty nester. The kids are leaving or are they're getting divorced. They're selling their business, they're changing their career, they have a cancer diagnosis, they've stopped drinking, they have decided that they're going to move to a new place. They have a new spiritual curiosity that's leading them back to Catholicism.
There's lots of things that are happening for people in midlife. There's menopause, There's so much going on and so little in the way of social infrastructure to help support people during this time. So that's the number one reason people come.
That makes a lot of sense. I mean, we tend to seek out extra support and help when we are facing something that feels acute. You mentioned in the book Bruce Filer, who's been a guest for us a couple times, and wonderful guy who talks all about that sort of life quake idea.
Bruce is taught in our online programs and I have a lot of respect for his work and his writing. In his book Life Is in the Transitions, he talks about when you're having multiple transitions at once. He calls that a life quake. And I think the thing that's really helpful to know about transitions is you can go through multiple of the ones, but each transition sort of has this anatomy or a framework, and it's usually the
ending of something is the first stage. The second stage is the messy middle, and then the third stage is the beginning of something new, and there's coping mechanisms for each.
And once you understand that three steps ending, messy middle, beginning, you can realize that in one part of your life you're having a transition, but you're at the ending of something, and another one you're in a transition, you're at the beginning of something, and another one you're at the messy middle, and so there's a different coping mechanism for each, and once you have that sense, it really helps wonderful.
Well, I think that is a great place for us to wrap up, Chip, I've really enjoyed this conversation. You and I are going to continue for a little bit longer in the post show conversation because I want to talk about something that you write about, which is this idea of basically wanting what we have. You know, how do we get to that? Because that's a you know, what I have is all I need?
Ye.
So, listeners, if you'd like access to the post show conversation to hear Chip and I continue, as well as ad free episodes, a special episode I do for you each week called Teaching Song and a poem, and other benefits. We'd love to have you as part of the community and that's at oneufeed dot net slash join Chip. Thank you so much, Oh, thank you Eric, It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring or thought provoking, I'd
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