Making Peace with Your Midlife, Mid-career Self

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 16 January 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Research shows that happiness bottoms out for people in their mid to late 40s. We might struggle with mid-career slumps, caring for both children and aging parents, and existential questions about whether everything has turned out as we'd planned. But Chip Conley says we can approach this phase of our personal and profesional lives with a different perspective. He's a former hospitality industry CEO and founder of the Modern Elder Academy, and he explains how to reframe our thinking about middle age, find new energy, and become more fulfilled and successful people at work and home. Conley wrote the book Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Check out the 10% happier podcast.
0:04.0	Host Dan Harris has one guiding philosophy.
0:07.0	Happiness is a skill you can learn.
0:09.0	Get advice from top scientists, meditation teachers, and mindful celebrities to learn the skill of
0:15.1	happiness. Listen to 10% happier wherever you listen to podcasts. And the Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Allison Beard. Let me be real with everyone out there for a minute.
0:50.0	Middle age isn't very fun.
0:54.6	Why?
0:55.6	Well, as I recently wrote in HBO,
0:58.0	your face wrinkles, your body deteriorates,
1:00.8	your career tends to plateau, even the best romantic relationship settle. your decline and then pass away. Research has actually proven that people around my age, late 40s,
1:16.0	are decidedly less happy than their younger and older counterparts.
1:20.0	That's because we've lost the exuberant of youth, are saddled with sometimes
1:24.3	overwhelming family and work responsibilities, and haven't yet found the joyful
1:28.9	appreciation for life that supposedly comes with old age. As our guest today wrote in his recent book
1:34.8	Midlife is when we begin to worry that life isn't turning out the way we expected.
1:40.3	But he also argues that it doesn't have to be this way.
1:44.0	Middle age shouldn't get us down.
1:46.0	Instead, we need to see it as a period of positive transition
1:49.0	in which we hone or make peace with our physical, emotional, mental, vocational, and spiritual
1:55.1	selves. Chip Connley is a former hospitality industry CEO, advisor to Airbnb and
2:00.8	the founder of the Modern Elder Academy and he wrote the book
2:04.3	Learning to Love Midlife.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Harvard Business Review, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Harvard Business Review and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.