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Modern Elder | Chip Conley | TEDxBlackRockCity


hello my burner community how are you
okay I’m the last one before a break and
then there’s some more people great
people after that but let me just start
with a Rumi quote right when at Burning
Man quote Rumi 750 years ago Rumi wrote
the following he said my life can be
summed up in three phrases I was raw I
became cooked and then I burned digital
life has accelerated our cooking time
there’s a growing number of us who feel
like we’re like a carton of milk with a
expiration date as Kat was talking about
earlier stamped are on her wrinkled
foreheads and many modern technologists
believe that knowledge doesn’t
accumulate with time but that it
actually grows out of date last year was
the first year that all baby boomers
were 50 years old or older but if you go
back to the year 1900 the life
expectancy rate was 47 years old
it grew to 77 years old by year 2000 and
it might be a hundred seven years old by
the year 2100 if that is true that at
age 55 I am almost halfway or maybe
halfway through my my life which is a
good feeling because I can go hang out
at play ranch a little bit more so
what’s interesting and I think a pair
one of the paradoxes of our time is
there’s a group of people we call them
the baby boomers who are living longer
and healthier and in the workplace
longer and feeling less and less
relevant
are we a carton of milk or a bottle of
fine wine do we have some insight to
offer you or is it time for us to get
the hell off the stage if the latter I
guess it’s time for me to get off stage
but I’m an optimist
and I truly believe that especially in
the digital era there is something that
the elders can offer and that’s what I’m
going to talk about tonight
truthfully historically wisdom has
flowed downhill but this may be the
first time where an intergenerational
transfer of wisdom can happen such that
it flows indirect both directions both
uphill from younger to older and
downhill from older to younger in a way
that we can learn from each other and
that’s that’s again the big topic of my
my conversation with you tonight so the
last few years I have experienced my own
version of the recipe of being cooked
and burned at the same time I started a
boutique hotel company when I was 26 I
ran it for 24 years I sold it and I
didn’t know what the hell I was going to
do next how many of you ever saw Robert
DeNiro in the movie the intern last year
I can’t even see you so but it was a
great film came out last year he said
the following he said musicians don’t
retire they stop when there’s no more
music left inside of them so I knew that
I still had some music left inside of me
but I just didn’t knew who I was
supposed to share it with and so that’s
how my experience got started the last
three or four years because I had the
three young founders of a company called
Airbnb approached me Brian Chesky who’s
the one of the co-founders and the CEO
approached me in early 2013 and he said
we want to take our small start
fast-growing tech startup and turn it
into a global hospitality giant and he
said we’d love to have you along for the
ride and have you helped us with that
so that was fine but I had actually
never heard of Airbnb I’m just I’m such
an old-school hotel guy than in early
2013
I didn’t really know what Airbnb was and
for that matter I didn’t have an uber or
lyft app on my phone in early 2013 I
really was old school so initially I was
a little intimidated I’m a 52 year
old guy at that time who’s being asked
to join a tech company for the first
time where I’ll be twice the age of the
average person and my boss a really
smart guy named Brian the CEO is 21
years younger than me what would it feel
like to actually have him give me a
performance review for the first time
when he’s about the age of my son
so my first I said yes I’ll do this I
tried it I said you know what what can I
lose my first day on the job I was
sitting in a meeting room and someone
asked a sort of tech existential
question if you created a product if you
create a feature if you should actually
know if you shipped a feature and no one
used it did you did the feature really
ship this is a nexus tester question I
never learned it in philosophy in
college but I was bewildered and I
realized I was in deep ship because I
didn’t know what shipping a product
meant I never heard the phrase I’m not a
tech guy by the end of my first week I
was dazed and confused Brian had asked
me to help him and to mentor him to grow
the company but after the first week I
felt more like an intern than a mentor
could I simultaneously be a mentor and
an intern yes thank you
that’s what I’m going to talk about and
that’s really you know for me it’s been
lucky it’s been a great three and a half
years I’ve been surrounded by some of
the most inspiring people in Silicon
Valley and have learned a lot and that’s
what I’m going to share with you I mean
I say there are three things that I’ve
learned that I’m going to share now that
have allowed me to share to the young
and to actually receive it in return
because I’ve learned just as much as
I’ve given so let me tell you what those
three things are the first one is I’ll
sum it up by saying I’ll give you a
little
emotional intelligence if you give me a
little bit of digital intelligence now
as we all know here on the playa we
don’t spend a lot of time with our
iPhones or our galaxies or whatever our
smartphone is but there are a lot of us
and a lot of us who are younger who
actually know the face of our phone
maybe better than the face of the person
sitting next to us truthfully there’s
people who actually understand that
gadget and the screen better than the
eyes of the person who they work with
day to day I’m not saying that young
people don’t understand emotions they do
and we do and in the digital life we
have emojis which is one way to
understand emotions we also have a term
being an emo I mean back in my
school-yard days I didn’t know what an
emo was but you know it’s a it’s a
phrase that’s relevant in the in the
modern day but the bottom line is emojis
are not the same as having interpersonal
face-to-face fluency which is what we
experience here at Burning Man and I
realized pretty early in my my time the
first few weeks at Burning Man at Airbnb
that I was surrounded by a bunch of
people who are intensely smart and
digitally savvy who might not realize
that being emo savvy or emotionally
savvy was what would make them a great
leader my friend Nancy Giordano I’m
going to actually pull out the one thing
I’m going to read today is a quote from
my friend Nancy Giordano who’s a
futurist because I think her quote
totally captured this she said with
little training we expect young digital
leaders to miraculously embody the
relationship wisdoms we elders had
decades to learn so what I became
committed to in those first few weeks is
the sense of like I want to help people
understand how important emotional
intelligences is to being a great leader
so even though it wasn’t part of my job
when Brian asked me to join we I created
a Learning and Development function in
the company so that twenty eight year
olds could help to lead twenty four year
olds and most importantly part of the
themes of this were how do you help to
actually create an alliance with someone
who you’re in conflict with or how do
you walk into a meeting room about
delete a meeting and read the emotions
of the room before you actually have
started talking so back in that in that
film of last year the intern the young
CEO Anne Hathaway says that she doesn’t
want Robert De Niro to be her personal
intern because he was a little too
observant being too observant is what
helped me to succeed at Airbnb it’s how
I was able to become a close friend with
people and to create an emotional bank
account with those that I worked with so
I think no matter what kind of world you
live in whether you’re in the b2b world
b2c world C the C world a to Z world
business and life is H to H human to
human and a lot of us forget that in the
tech world we think somehow that there
are other qualities that are actually
going to allow us to be successful
leaders that don’t speak to EQ or
emotional intelligence but the truth is
that the more the more responsibility
you have in an organization the more EQ
is important emotional intelligence
author Daniel Goleman has shown that
two-thirds of the success of leaders has
to do with their EQ and only 1/3 has to
do with the combination of IQ or level
of experience in the job my second
observation of the three was that
learning never ends William Yates once
wrote education is not filling a pail
it’s lighting a fire so I was able to
light a fire at Airbnb by being
catalytically curious
I didn’t know any better the truth is
that I was an old fart in a new company
and I’d never been in a tech company
before as such I didn’t have to be the
expert yes there was some subject I was
the expert on but generally speaking I
was an intern a lot of the time so I was
able to have a beginner’s mind and if
you have a beginner’s mind it means you
don’t have to live the experts the
habits of an expert so it meant that I
can actually act like a little kid and
ask a lot of what if or why questions
whereas most senior leaders get obsessed
with the what and the how of business I
learned pretty quickly that it’s better
to intern publicly and mentor privately
because nobody wants to be actually
criticized in the meeting by someone as
old as their dad uh-huh I also I also
learned that Peter Drucker who wrote
who’s a famous management theorist wrote
20 years ago he said the leaders of the
future I’m sorry he said the leaders of
the past knew how to tell the leaders of
the future will know how to ask in a
constantly changing world questions may
Trump answers excuse the use of the word
Trump in that last sentence so the
traditional elders had the wise answers
the modern elders have the catalytic
questions and incidentally Peter Drucker
lived to the age of 95 and he translated
his curiosity in life such that every
two years in those later years he would
study a subject that had nothing to do
with his work whether it was Japanese
flower arranging or medieval war
strategies so I would ask you as an
invitation for you as to ask yourself
how can you be more curious what’s a
subject unrelated to your
work in which you can become one of the
world’s leading experts my third lesson
or revelation from being a modern elder
amongst people who are half my age is
that it’s not always about know how it
can also about be about know who Google
maybe the best search engine in the
world but it doesn’t understand nuance
like a finely attuned human mind or
heart yes you can go out and search for
the how but sometimes it’s the who who’s
going to give you the revelation that
you were looking for I’m lucky enough to
be a very curious soul they called me
curious white boy in my inner-city high
school in LA and I have always been
interested in people and things and I’ve
read a lot of books and met a lot of
people which means I guess that I’m
well-read and well well-connected what I
didn’t expect in those first few months
at Airbnb is that the word would get out
that chip is there he knows a lot of
things he has a lot of like a network of
knowledge and people and so I ended up
becoming this person that everybody
would not everybody but a lot of people
would come and talk to and say I want to
run an idea by you I want you to tell me
if you know someone who might know about
this now I guess I’d be give me the ask
me guy in the company now I guess if you
looked at all of the different people
who came to me like most of them are not
people who directly reported me to be or
I worked with very closely I always said
yes to them because I thought I was
going to learn something from them and
they’d learned something from me
hopefully as well but if you look at all
of those people that I got to meet
especially in the first year or two in
the company I had created a web of
relationships and knowledge that allowed
me to be a strategic advisor to the
founders such that I really understand
the pulse of what was happening in the
company it was wasn’t part of my job
description
but because people knew that I knew
things and I’d been around for a while
they wanted to tap into that and that’s
important and the truth is that modern
organizations tend to be so
of speed and transactional Nate a
transactional nature we don’t help our
young leaders to cultivate things like
emotional intelligence or curiosity or
relationship building and so that’s at
the other day this has been for me a
humbling and exhilarating journey I
thought I would run my company the name
of my company that I started 20 or 30
years ago almost was called joie de
vivre joy of life boutique hotel company
I thought I’d run it for the rest of my
life and then at age 50 I was burned out
and I just needed to get out of there
and I sold it I had no idea what would
happen next
and then of course the Airbnb founders
came knocking on my door and I was able
to join them and that has been a really
fortunate journey for me um because I’ve
learned from them just like they’ve
learned from me and and the bottom line
is I believe that boomers and
Millennials have a lot to learn from
each other and I think all generations
do it’s not just the boomers and the
Millennials it’s Gen Xers and everybody
else we have a lot to learn from each
other
those of us who are older the older half
of the population are feeling less and
less relevant the younger half of the
population are seeing power come to them
faster than any young people have ever
seen in the history of mankind partly
because you people who are 40 and
younger have a facility with the digital
that those of us are older don’t
generally generally these are
generalizations don’t have so what I’m
pondering is how can we create a
relationship I like to call it the
modern elder relationship
how could I be both potentially someone
who’s serving you but also learning from
you how can I be a mentor and an intern
how can I relish being both a student
and a sage at the same time now this
idea of intergenerational transfer
wisdom is particularly relevant to
boomers we’re going to live 10 years
longer than our parents but power in a
digital society is moving 10 years
younger so do the math if we’re going to
live 10 years longer and powers moving
10 years younger we have 20 years of
additional obsolescence and irrelevance
e which can create some serious
boomeranged that’s why we need to invest
in the idea of modern elders there are
three times as many people in the
workplace today over the age of 70 than
there were a generation ago and that
number is only going to grow an
interesting thing is that when you
research has shown that when elders
actually people over 50 have a positive
perspective on their aging they happen
to live on average seven and a half
years longer which is a larger increase
in lifespan than those who actually
start exercising or stop smoking so if
you have a positive perspective on aging
you live longer which is beautiful so
this is not just a problem to be solved
it’s an opportunity for society to take
advantage of people who might have
actually been considered past their
expiration date there’s a beautiful
African proverb that I want to quote you
now and it is when an elder dies it’s
like a library has burned down
unfortunately in the digital era
libraries and elders aren’t that popular
anymore but wisdom never grows old and
wisdom is about pattern recognition and
the longer you’ve been on this planet
the more patterns you’ve likely seen
elders have always been there to support
the growth of the young but for the
first time in our history on this earth
as mankind
that wisdom can move in both directions
there can be a symbiotic sharing of
wisdom from young to old and old a young
in the gifting economy that is the
future I believe that modern elders need
to rewrite roomies three phrases or
phases of life maybe it should be
I was raw I became cooked I burned and
then I became raw again thank you so
much enjoy your burn and I wish you all
the best
[Music]
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