Ep. 191 - Chip Conley: How To Find Your Calling

He died. He was giving a speech, sat down, and the next thing... he was dead. They called an ambulance. They got paramedics. They did that thing. They brought him back to life. But his body didn't like living. He died again. Eight more times they used machines to convince the machine in his body that we call a heart, to come back to life. Please come back to life, the machines said to his heart. And finally his heart decided to stay. After that, things changed. Like they often do when we die at the age of 47. "There are three things," Chip Conley, now the head of hospitality for AirBnB, told me, "a job, a career, and a calling." "I had been building and running hotels for 20 years. It was my calling to be in the hospitality business. I built over 50 hotels. But it was starting to feel like a job." "When I died, I realized I couldn't do it anymore. I had to go back to my calling." Within a few years he had sold his business. He had nothing left to do. "I had faith in my calling, though," Chip said. "Something would happen." And it did. It did. Adam wrote me. He was my Airbnb host. I've been in 4 different Airbnbs that Adam owns over the past three years. So we knew each other. I only live in Airbnbs and I know many of the regular hosts in New York City. "I'm having a special guest in the apartment right downstairs from you," Adam wrote me. "He's the head of all hospitality for Airbnb. Would you like to meet?' Yes, very much so. I had spent 90% of my life in Airbnbs over the prior three years and just about 100% in the prior year. In 2014 I even wrote an article, "10 Ways to Improve Airbnb." Adam made the introduction. Chip Conley, the man who had died a few years earlier and sold his hotel business, responded. "Should I bring a bottle of wine?" he said. He came upstairs and we started to talk. "Brian Chesky, the founder of Airbnb, called me and asked me if I wanted to be the head of hospitality. Airbnb was a tech company, it wasn't used to being a hospitality company." "When I ran 50 hotels, hospitality was my main focus." "For each hotel, I had the hotel managers come up with five adjectives for what that hotel would be." "Maybe the adjectives might be: funky, hip, modern, clean, rock & roll." "Every employee, even the housekeepers, would keep those adjectives in mind in whatever they did. And, if possible, we even made sure the five senses the customers would experience in the hotels would match the five adjectives." "This is a great idea," I said, "You can even apply ideas like this to writing a book. Or even building a career for yourself. What five adjectives do you want your life, or the objects you create, or your relationships, be used to describe it." "Absolutely," Chip said. So he went to Airbnb to start creating an atmosphere of hospitality among the hosts. He had found his way back to his life's calling. I had felt it. Since 2013, Now I live in them. Now they are home. All because Chip died. "How do you find your life's calling?" I asked him. "What did you love doing when you were 6, 8, 10 years old," he said. "Like I had one friend who even at 6 was making mudpies as if they were real pies. Then she became a lawyer but was always unhappy." "So she quit being a lawyer and is now one of the biggest pastry chefs in the world." "For me, I was always pretending to run a restaurant in my house. I always wanted to be in the hospitality business." I thought back to when I was ten years old. I was writing short stories. And when I was 12 I even wrote an article in the newspaper interviewing politicians. You find your interests from back then and see how they age into the current day. "Find the thing you did where you lost all sense of time while you are doing it," Chip told me. "Remember the equation from Victor Frankl's 'Man's Search for Meaning'," he said. "Despair = Suffering - Meaning." "Find the things that bring you meaning.... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.