Chip Conley: Airbnb’s Mentor on How to Transform Yourself

Cal finds there can be life after one’s heart stops beating. Chip Conley tells him what it was like to flatline at age of 47, how he recovered and went on to sell his boutique hotel company, which put him in the surprising place where he could mentor Brian Chesky and a group of millennials who’d founded Airbnb.

The combination of young minds and the wisdom of Chip’s experience in hospitality made history. Airbnb has transformed travel across the planet, reinventing the hotel industry by allowing people to rent out their homes and apartments in 80,000 cities in 190 countries around the world.

Conley has taken the lessons from this experience and set them in his newly-released book, Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder.

In this episode, he shows Cal the benefits that mentorship can have for both those with youth and age. The takeaways are life-changing, and needed now more than any other time in history.

As the author Yuval Noah Harari writes in his most recent book: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century:

“If you try to hold on to some stable identity, job, or worldview, you risk being left behind as the world flies by you with a whoosh. Given that life expectancy is likely to increase, you might subsequently have to spend many decades as a clueless fossil. To stay relevant — not just economically but above all socially — you will need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvent yourself...”

Chip’s experiences and his book show you how.