How Does Chip Conley Separate Knowledge and Wisdom?
Chip Conley draws a line between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is something you accumulate and add. Wisdom is something you distill and simplify, the difference between a plus sign, a division sign, and a square root. The Modern Elder Academy is the midlife wisdom school he built around that idea.
He also wants to hear the eulogy friends would give if he died tomorrow, while he is still living. He has stage three cancer and does not know how much longer he will live. In San Francisco, Santa Fe, and Baja, where the academy has campuses and friends, small groups share a dinner and give that eulogy for each other. At 47 he flatlined. In the space between life and death he was in a living room with a 40-foot ceiling, able to fly and talk with small birds, and they told him to slow down, because beauty and awe stay invisible unless you slow down.
Simplifying now, for him, means fusing that slowdown with what he calls holy urgency: Sundays offline, silent retreats, and the sense that he is doing the work he is supposed to do. He points to Laura Carstensen at the Stanford Center on Longevity. When people sense less time left, they focus on the present rather than the past or the future, and he finds that focus often feels happier.
