On the final day of my five-day workshop at a ranch in Santa Fe on the new MEA campus, a midlife wisdom school, I looked around the room at my 13 compadres. We had begun our week as strangers and now we are intimate friends. I had fallen in love, literally, with men and women whom I had never met just four days ago.
My five-day workshop, Entrepreneurship at Any Age, is being led by MEA co-founder, Chip Conley, and Mackey McNeill, a CPA rebel who turned the accounting industry upside down. Mackey talked with us about her concept, Prosper for Business, a CFO coaching system designed to help business owners accomplish epic goals.
I had just been declared a “Modern Elder” again by my friend of over 40 years, Chip Conley, at our graduation ceremony. My first MEA workshop was at the Baja campus in early 2019. What change that five years had given us!
I had ended a 23 year career raising funds for nonprofits, survived a pandemic, and decided just months ago to return to my roots in real estate. Thanks in large part to the lessons learned at two previous MEA workshops, I had made what seemed now like an obvious decision to lean in to my real estate talent and form a new company to help people co-own a holiday home in France.
I was taking in Chip’s comments about how I was now officially a “Modern Elder” and now I had the floor to thank my fellow travelers. It was my turn as a new graduate to comment on my experience. Taking a deep breath, I began to speak without forethought. That was just one of the lessons I had learned that week, which was the art of listening.
Saying how grateful I was for the support and confidence provided by my new friends was easy; same for thanking Chip and Mackey for their leadership wisdom. The fun part was expressing gratitude for our facilitation team of Darby Hillman and Rob King. Rob and Darby were masters at keeping us in line and making every day’s busy schedule seem so seamless. Their talent was speaking from their heart.
So here I was at a midlife school at age 77 graduating again. But this time, somehow, it felt different. I had finally aligned my talent and my passion in the form of my new company. I knew that this entrepreneurial effort put me in my life flow more than anything I had ever done and that this group of intimate strangers now had my back. That’s powerful stuff.
-Don
Don Spradlin started his career as an investment banker armed with an MBA from Harvard Business School. After owning several of his own real estate companies, he transitioned to a psychotherapist after earning his second Masters degree in Clinical Psychology, which led to helping nonprofits raise money as their Development Director for over 20 years. This year, he established Joie de Vivre Homes to help people co-own their holiday home in France.