354 Chip Conley: On Finding Your Love Of Life, Even In Midlife

01/02/24 • 52 min

2 Listeners

Disrupt Yourself Podcast with Whitney Johnson

Do you know that feeling when you’re cooking, and you’ve got all your ingredients chopped and ready to go, spices measured, oven pre-heated? All that’s left is for you to spin your magic as a cook. In the kitchen, the French call it mise en place, everything in its place.

In that same vein, to disrupt yourself, your strategy and support need to be in place. You need to give yourself the room to roam, so to speak, to realize your full potential.

Our guest today is all about creating spaces that let you realize that potential. Chip Conley is the former founder of Joie De Vivre, a boutique hotel chain. He’s worked with AirBnB as a quote unquote modern elder, and now Chip’s turning his attention to the potential of midlife – a word so laden with stigma, he’s building regenerative horse ranches to change that.

His new book, "Learning To Love Midlife", is out January 16th.

In that same vein, to disrupt yourself, your strategy and support need to be in place. You need to give yourself the room to roam, so to speak, to realize your full potential.

His new book, "Learning To Love Midlife", is out January 16th.

Previous Episode

353 ENCORE Tara Swart: Your Neurons Are Much More Nimble Than You Realize

Isn’t it frustrating when we feel like a passenger to our own thoughts and actions? In Buddhist thought, we’re supposed to watch our thoughts pass by like clouds in the sky... but that’s the ideal, after all.

It’s a hard truth to swallow, that the human mind is much more mysterious than we’d hope it to be. So for today’s episode, we wanted to bring back a conversation I had back in 2020 with the neuroscientist and author Dr. Tara Swart. She’s spent her career tinkering with our brains, as both a doctor and an executive advisor, figuring out how we can harness this mysterious power we have.

The machinery of our minds might be unknowable, but the way it adapts is not.

So what can we learn about not being a passenger to our own thoughts, about taking the wheel? I hope you enjoy.

Next Episode

355 Ashley Smith: The Hidden River Of Energy Flowing Through All We Do

In middle school physics, we learned that an object at rest has potential energy – an amount of currency it has to spend, if it wants to move. When you pull back an arrow, the potential energy flows from your muscles, to the bow, to the string, and then the string pays all that money in one go to propel the arrow – turning potential into kinetic energy in a single motion. Our lives are organized around those same flows of energy, too. We dream, we store energy, and then we trade in potential for kinetic. Ashley Smith has made a career out of translating these flows of energy – and showing others how to do it, too. It’s in her dance studio, turning emotion into movement. It’s in her partnership with her husband, Ryan Smith, the executive chairman and co-founder of Qualtrics. And it’s in her love for the state of Utah, flowing from Ashley’s love for community, downstream, to ownership of the Utah Jazz basketball team with Ryan. How can we better understand the flows of energy in our own life, and in our bodies?