Chip Conley: Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal - The Tim Ferriss Show • Podcast Notes

“The meaning of life is to find your gift and the purpose of life is to give it away”  – Shakespeare 

“Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”  – Oscar Wilde

From Chip’s book –  Emotional Equations

• Despair = Suffering – Meaning


• Anxiety = Uncertainty * Powerlessness


• Disappointment = Expectations – Reality


• Happiness = wanting what you have / having what you want

“If you’re good and if you really understand your customer, it goes beyond the expectations, beyond the desires, beyond focus groups…. it’s the thing you know that they want next that they don’t even know they don’t want”

Build the business plan as if the business isn’t going to succeed”

“The thing that happens in midlife is you start to feel the weight of accumulation of what you’ve acquired throughout your life. I don’t mean just physical things, I mean friends, responsibilities, the identities, and the invisible name tags that define who you are in the world. You frankly start to feel overwhelmed by all that accumulat

The most important question any business leader could ever ask themselves –  “What business are we in?”

• If you ask yourself this question ~5 times (without repeating answers, of course) it’s like an archaeological dig to figure out the true essence of your company