Last Lecture Series: How to Live your Life at Full Power — Graham Weaver

[FOREIGN] >> Change wise. >> Change your organization. >> Change the world. >> Class of 2024, it's an honor to present to you the one and only, the goat, the legend, Graham Weaver. >> [APPLAUSE] >> [LAUGH] I graduated from Stanford, GSB, and I took the safe job, a corporate job that I wasn't that excited about, wasn't that good at, but I grinded it out. I toughed it out. And about a year into that job, we had this offsite in Napa. And, we're sitting in these conference teams for three days listening to these presentations and this is like PowerPoint old school where there's 87 words on the slide.

And the the person who's speaking reads every single word to you in 0.5x speed. And it's brutal. So, but a day and a half into this off site, I hatched my escape plan. So I'm sitting in the room and I put my suit coat on. I tuck my notebook under the suit code just to make sure there's no trace. And then as we take a break at 10.45 in the morning and I file out and I'm be make sure I'm the last one to go in the bathroom and I hide out in the stall. And so I wait like three minutes for everyone to leave.

And then I wait like, just to be safe, I wait another five minutes. And then at one point, it does occur to me, I'm like, I'm a 27 year old vice president. I'm in the men's room in the stall hiding from my own company. [LAUGH] All right, nonetheless, I bust out, I don't see anyone. I go up the back staircase, go to my room, take my suit off, take off my tie, and I put on my running clothes because I'm going to go for a run and I put on my running shoes, my running shorts. I tie this red bandana around my head, which I always work out with a red bandana.

And then I go down the back staircase, and I go around and get on the Silverado Trail. I couldn't find my shirt, I'm not sure if I packed one. It's 75 degrees, it doesn't matter. So I start on this run and it is just glorious. My playlist is amazing, and I'm having this great time. And on this run, I start to have this runner's high, which some of you may have experienced. And there's this voice. This voice says, Graham, you don't have to, this isn't you. You don't have to do this, this isn't what you're meant to do.

And it was this voice that I'd heard me other times but this time it was like really powerful. And I realized that this voice was speaking to me and it was my truth. And this wave of calm and peace just kind of came over me as I finished this run, realizing that I was going to listen to that voice. There were two memorable things about that run that have stayed with me to this day. The first one is the end of the run. So, I go out, I'm just having a great run, I turn around, again, having runners high.

And at the very end of the run, one of my favorite song comes on my playlist, which is Ida Tiger by Survivor. And it's the theme song of Rocky III, if you haven't seen that, the gratuitous training scene where he gets beat, and then he has to come back and train. They're playing on that song and it's like. So then I'm like, okay, I'm feeling it, I'm running. And then there's this long glass building that is on this trail. And I'm like running and I catch a glimpse of myself in the thing that sun's hitting me just right.

I got my bandana, sweats pouring down. I'm shirtless, I'm like, I look like Rocky right now. [LAUGH] I started just looking in the mirror start doing some of these >> [LAUGH] >> And then I start doing some of these, a little bit of that, start doing a little bit of this. And then I'm like, yeah, yeah, feeling this. And then I see something kind of moving in the window, take off my sunglasses, take my sunglasses down, I look and all the energy drains out of my body because I realized what's happened.

I've been on this run for two hours. The meeting I was in ended, they broke for lunch. They go to lunch in a different room, and it's a restaurant with a window overlooking the vineyards. So me sneaking stealthily back into the meeting actually became me shadow back in shirtless in front of my entire company. So that was the first reason that run was memorable. >> [LAUGH] >> That happened. The second reason it was memorable was that I realized that I had heard this voice, which was my inner truth.

And I made a promise to myself that day that I was going to continue to listen to that voice and I was going to continue to follow it starting with allowing myself to leave that job. So I've been teaching here now for 22 years, I've met with so many students over that time and what I realized is that, you all have this and all of us have this conflict going on at all times inside of us, and it's between two forces. And the first force is your survival instinct that's been with us for 1000s, if not 10s of 1000s of years.

And this is the thing that that noise in the bushes that could possibly kill you. It wants this inject into you fear and doubt and worry and anxiety. It wants you fight or flight, and that's kind of your voice of fear and your inner critic. And that's really loud. That voice is in your mind all the time and then there's another voice, the second voice. And that voice has been written about and talked about by philosophers thousands of years and that voice has been called many names. It's been called your intuition, it's been called source, God, the universe, your soul, your true self, your inner wisdom.

Lots of voice names for that. That voice is a little quieter and that voice isn't in your head. A lot of times it shows up in your body. It shows up in your heart, your gut, your your chest. You feel that. And unfortunately, that first voice really drowns us out a lot of times. And the thing is that the voice of fear will lead you to a life that's too small. And you know this. You already know this. And the way that you know this is you feel this. You feel this conflict, this dissidence and tension when you're in that position, when you're doing something that's too small.

If you want to reach full power in this one life of yours, it's in the second voice. It's in the voice that's the real you. This contains your dreams, your path, it contains your energy. And when you stop denying who you really are, there's really no end to what you can accomplish. So today what I want to do is I want to talk to you about how to access this voice. And I'm going to invite you today to make three promises to yourselves as you get ready to graduate. You good with that? Three promises, so the first one is a promise that's going to help you get unstuck.

The second one is a promise that's going to help you find that voice. And the third one is a promise that's going to help you follow it. And then you can tap into this energy source, not episodically or randomly on a run sometime, but actually intentionally and regularly. And you can feel the full magnitude of what you can do in this life. So let's do it. So the first promise is take the nail out of your head. [LAUGH] This is the unstuck promise. So number of years ago there was a video of a woman and she's talking to her boyfriend and she says, I feel all this pressure, I have headaches, I can't sleep, and she's just, she seems like she's hopeless, and her But her boyfriend looks at her he looks a little confused.

And he says, well you could take the nail out of your head. And then you see that she turns and you realize she stick as a nail sticking out of her head. And it seems pretty obvious. And then she said, [LAUGH] and then she says it's not about the nail, and she wants to talk about anything and everything except the thing that's actually going to make Kurt unstuck. Unfortunately, this is also true with a lot of us. We are walking around most of the time with a nail in our head. Sometimes our nail is just as obvious as it is in this video.

We know what it is we're just not dealing with it. Sometimes it's a little less obvious, but our nail is the thing that's keeping us stuck and until we remove it, we're not going to reach our full power. So nails can kind of fall into four buckets. The first one is bad habits that we have that are keeping us from reaching our full potential. The second one is unresolved past experiences that we might have had a long time ago that we just have compartmentalize and we haven't dealt with them. The third one is rules or assumptions.

This is the way your life needs to go. You have to do this first your parents want you to do that, all these constraints we put on ourselves with our own rules. And and the fourth one is fear. And it's fear that's keeping you stuck. So in my case, it was a job that I didn't like, but I was afraid to leave, so I stayed in the job. You could be in a relationship that you shouldn't be in, and you're afraid to leave, so you stay in the relationship. Or it could be really any decision that you want to make, but you're afraid, and so you just, you stay paralyzed.

And these males, just like you're thinking in that video, why doesn't the girl just? Just pull the thing out, right? Why is this complicated? There's two reasons that it's hard to pull these nails out of our head. The first one is we haven't admitted that we have one. And so the first way to pull your nail out of your head is to speak your truth. So let me just give you an example of this nail. So I have a close friend of mine and she has insomnia, and it controls her life. She can only sleep a few hours a night, she's tired all day.

It absolutely controls her life. So she goes to the doctor and doctor has her fill out all the stuff what are you eating, what are you drinking, what time you're going to bed, all these different things. And the doctor says to her, hey, I have good news for you, or I know how you can secure your insomnia. She says, great, I'm super excited to hear that he and the doctor says to her, you could stop drinking four to five glasses of wine with an hour of you going to bed. That'll help your insomnia. And she says, that's a horrible idea.

She goes and sees four more doctors and then she ends up with a plethora of medicine she keeps in her cabinet. And then what she does is she proceeds to build a helmet around her nail. So she basically has all these drugs she takes. She goes to bed at a certain time. She can't be out late. During the day, she needs naps, she's tired all the time. So her energy goes into protecting this nail that's in her head, rather than pulling it out. The reason we don't pull it out, as I said, first is we haven't admitted to ourselves that we have the problem.

So we haven't said out loud, I have a problem with alcohol or I'm in a relationship that I shouldn't be in or a job that's not giving me energy. So to remove the nail, the first thing is to start by speaking your truth and this is half of the battle right here. The second reason that we don't pull the nail out is life is going to get worse first. So when we trade so if you think of this as the pattern of your life, where at any given time you're going to reach a plateau. And the path to get to the next plateau involves something that's going to get worse first, and these nails go on.

And the way to pull them out is going to almost always involve something that's going to be uncomfortable at first because change always is. So if you leave a job, if you end a relationship, if you try to address one of your really bad habits, things are going to get worse first. But the path to reaching the next height is really to you. You're going to have to deal with that downward path first, and then you're going to reach another plateau and you'll have another one. And this is a big part of your life.

So just to realize that everything that you want is on the other side of worse, first, everything that you want is often. On the other side of the thing that you fear right now. Think about the thing that you fear, and that's the thing you should be going at. That's where your work is right now. So if principle one, if you want to live your life at full power, the promise I would ask you tonight or today to make to yourself is to take the nail out of your head and do that work. Okay, that's the not fun one.

That's the getting unstuck. So, next is to try to find your energy. So, we're tapping in that inner voice. First we've got to get unstuck. Now we've got to listen to that voice. So promise two is follow your energy and I say, not your passion. Here's why I say, not your passion. Because when I was at the GSB, and probably every speaker who stood up here had a moment in their speech where they said, some version of follow your passion. Right, has anyone heard that before? And every graduation speech you watch will have that injected in there.

So let me tell you why that happens first of all, because now I'm up here giving advice and I'll explain to you why. Why is that whatever the speaker wants to tell you. The reason is that I'll speak for myself. I have spent a large portion of my life doing something for which I had very little energy and it was tough and it felt like a grind and it was it just absorbed a lot of energy. I could fight through it with willpower for a little bit of time, and I've spent a lot of my time in an area that gave me a tremendous amount of energy, and there's no comparison.

And so the speakers are trying to say, hey, come up over on this side. Go into the thing that gives you energy. By the way, the reason that they're on the stage in the first place is that they made that decision. So that's why they're sharing this advice with you but it can be very harmful advice to go follow your passion and here's why because it implies that you have only one passion. It implies that you're supposed to know what it is when you're 28 that you're supposed to go do it for the next 40 years and you're supposed to know how to follow it.

And I don't think any of those things are true and my firm, Alpine, we've invested in over 500 entrepreneurs who've built successful companies, and not one of them followed that path. Even the people who will stand up and tell you that advice didn't follow that path. So instead, what I'm going to offer is for you to not follow necessarily this nebulous passion of which there's one and it's intimidating. But instead to follow your, just your energy, whatever's giving you energy at the current time.

So there's this exercise that I want to do with you today, which is called Nine Lives. And the way it works is imagine that you had nine parallel universes that you could partake in. The first life is going to be a thing that you're doing right now. So for me, that was, I'm in the corporate job, I'm going to live in the Bay Area. I'm going to pay off some debtm, that's kind of life number one. And then life's two through nine, life's two through nine. You have two rules. The first rule is, that you, they all have to start from today.

So you can't go back in time. All your remaining eight lives start with where you are right now. The second rule is you want to find the things that you're super excited about. Every one of those other lives should be something that you're so excited that you jump out of bed to do. So for me, it might have been, okay, I shared life one. Life two would be, hey, I want to start my own company someday and be a founder, be a CEO. Life three, I'd love to be a professor someday at Stanford Business School.

Life four, I'd love to be a monk and become enlightened. Life five, I'd love to be a DJ in Vegas. Life six, I'd be a writer, social media, influencer whatever. You come up with these things that are exciting for you and then what you've done when you do this is you've. Found things that you have energy for, energy is the language of your soul. That second voice that I accessed that day on the run, the way that it talks to you, is through your energy. It doesn't use words, it uses your whole body and shows you things for which you have energy, and that's how it's talking to you.

So when you're excited about something, when you're excited about someone, when something is firing you up it's your soul talking to you. That's its voice, so you've just created with these nine lives nine things that you're super excited about. So that's how you're going to listen to your soul, there's two things you can do with this exercise. The first is, as you're on path 1, and you're cranking away on path 1, pull something in from one of those other lives that gives you a tremendous amount of energy.

So, you could pull in playing the guitar, or playing a sport, or writing a book, or writing a blog, or teaching in class. At Stanford or, all these things and what happens when you pull something in that, is your energy will become infectious. You'll light a spark, you'll light a match, and that'll that'll actually inflame the rest of your life with excitement, so that's the first way that you can use that exercise. The second way which I think is even more powerful is, ask yourself this question, and of all nine of those lives, what would I do if I knew I wouldn't fail?

Which one of those would I choose? That is by definition silencing that voice of fear and really getting in touch with that thing that is your most dear dream. In class of 2024 I would argue, at some point in your life that's the path that you want to to be on, the thing you would do if you knew you wouldn't fail. And I think that's what you that's where you'll find your richest dream. The human soul needs something to hope for, and that's why you want to to continue to inject it with your energy.

If you want to live at full power in this one precious life of yours, promise one, take the nail out of your head, second promise is go toward the things that give you energy. Third promise is, to go all in now. So, one of the biggest traps that we have is we're hedged, we have one foot in, we have one foot out. Well, should I, shouldn't I? I'm not sure, I'm kind of in, I don't know if I'm in this job, I don't know about this relationship. I don't know, I'm kind of still waiting, it'll become clear at some point.

I'm not really sure when this happens, then I'll do it, it's on the other side of this thing as soon as they get done with this. And, Goethe said until one is committed there's always hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Sadly, most people spend most of their lives here, never really fully committing to things. And this is a huge waste of energy, and you're not going to to get where you want to to go, half in half out. My story of how I started teaching started 22 years ago, Irv Grosbeck and Janet Feldstein wrote a case about me.

Was 25 years old and I was buying companies, in my dorm room, at Stanford Business School, using a lot of debt, and some credit cards. And it was, and the case had a lot of things go wrong, most things went wrong. So I was so excited to be a case guest, I mean it was something that I dreamed of I thought it was going to be the coolest experience ever. And, so I go in the class, and absolutely bomb [LAUGH] I am horrible. My inner critic is just pounding me, Graham you're 29 I was 29 when I taught it, you haven't really done anything.

You don't really have anything to teach these students, look at the guests who came before you. They're way more accomplished than you and I was horrible, I was in my head the whole time. And just so this isn't false humility, I was 29 and I had friends of mine that were in the class. And so the two days after I teach, the professor does a recap of the case, and one of the takeaways from the Graham Weaver case was, you don't need to have charisma or be articulate to start a couple. >> [LAUGH] >> True story, so I got that going for me., at least we taught the students that so, which is true, by the way.

But I was devastated, I mean my inner critic was Graham, come back in 30 years when you've actually done something. When you have something to say, and this is a really common thing that our inner critic says. It has many tricks it uses and one of those is to utter to you the two most dangerous words that you're going to to hear that you're going to to say. In 22 years of being a case guest or lecturer, no student has ever said to me, Graham, you know what? I have this dream I'm really excited about but I just give up, I'm not going to to do it.

No students ever said that, instead, they say, not now, and that's what my inner critic said. It didn't say you're never going to to teach, it said go get 20 years of experience. Go figure it all out, go make sure until everything's perfect, and you're ready and everything's going to to be just right, and then you go do it. That's what my inner critic said, this is just fear in another form, that's all that is so. So that would have been the end of it for me, the inner critic would have won, but for, a student named Sarah, I'll call her Sarah.

She called me and she said hey Graham I, enjoyed your case, I was well, you were the one person that did. So thanks for, and she said but, the thing I wanted to talk to you she didn't want to to talk about how to build a business or hire, or fire, or investing, or anything like that. She said, I want to to hear, how did you overcome your fear of failure? You started this thing when you're 25, how did you actually get the confidence to do that? So I actually had a lot to tell her on that because, I did have to overcome my fear of failure, so I said ok Sarah let's do this.

Why don't you write down everything you fear? Because your fears have the most power over you, when they're in the recesses of your subconscious mind. That's when your fears are most dangerous, that's where they can control you. So the reason we do limiting beliefs in classes we got to get that out, of our head out of our subconscious and put it down on paper. So we did that, with Sarah, we looked at all the fears we walk through each one. And we just made we stripped those fears of their power, and she felt a lot better and she felt a lot more confident.

And then I said well Sarah, tell me a little bit about your thing you're trying to do. You're excited about this whatever and then she just lit up, and she said, I'm so excited about this. I'm going to go all in, I'm going to do this with every ounce of my my soul. And, so most of us say I'll start living when, and we say, when I'll start living when I pay off my loans I get more experienced. I have confidence I'm ready, I know I'll succeed, my parents are having bosses me I moved to New City, my plan my way to get married.

I have a visa, I'm an RJ Miller scholar, I pay off my mortgage. I have kids, my kids are older my kids are grown up, I've heard every single one, well not the RJ one, but every other one of these. I've actually heard people say in my coaching classes, this is what I'm going to to start. This is when I'm going to to get going when one of these things happens, and you know what? Then there's always a new thing, right? It never you never really get there, it's and then they say, sometime in the future later, not now, which will turn into never.

That's the path that we take, so anyway going back to Sarah, I said, Sarah said, I am so excited about this. I'm going to to do this, I have tremendous energy this, I'm all in, I'm going to to go as long as this takes. This is what she said, and I said so Sarah let me get this straight. Fired up, you have energy all in as long as it takes. I said, what's the decision then? I don't understand, what's the problem? And about a month later, she sent me a note saying she decided to start a company, she just raised her seed round.

As would happen many, many times throughout my teaching, as I gave advice to a student, I realized I was really giving advice to myself. And so I said, this was also true for me about teaching. And so I decided I was going to go all in as long as it took and throw all my energy into this. So, the next time that there was a case about Graham Weaver [LAUGH] at Stanford, there's this five minute part at the end of the class where the professor asked the guests if you have any advice for the students?

And I was going to write this thing on overcoming your fear of failure. Without hyperbole, I spent 60 hours on this little five minute thing at the end of the case, which no one really pays attention to. But I was like, all in, and then sure enough, a lot of students started reaching out. I started coaching them to help them overcome their fear of failure, the case then got taught one time a year then three, then five, then seven. Then I started doing some lectures and panels and more students and then I eventually, the very class that I bombed when I first started is the class that I now teach.

So, you with energy all in as long as it takes is enough. You don't need anything else. There's no other ingredients required, this is it. And you have these already for the things that you're excited about. What happens when you go all in, when I went all in, is my identity shifted. All of a sudden, I'm not on the fence, I'm not wondering if If I should teach, I am a teacher at this point. And this conflict that I'm having between my two voices, it just dissipates because the voice of fear has lost that battle when you're all in and it lays down his sword and kneels.

And because you're living in harmony with your second voice, there's just there's just a lot less calm conflict, doesn't mean you won't hear pangs of doubt from your first voice. But the big thing about you're not supposed to do this Is not supposed to be now, that goes away. And so you're not spending energy fighting yourself when you're all in. If you've taken a class from me or been in a lecture, I have more energy teaching now than I even did 22 years ago. People get get this confused, they think that burnout comes from doing something for a long time, that's not true.

Burnout comes from friction, stress and tension, it comes from you being out of alignment. If I stayed in that first job for even three more years I would have been burned out. 22 years of doing the thing that your heart once and I have more energy, energy is not an exhaustible resource like willpower, or endurance or fossil fuels. Energy is abundant, it's like love. The more that you tap into it, the more you have and the more you give it away the more you get back. And so energy is abundant. Going back to you, I would say, you are the person, this is the formula for starting any journey that you want to start.

You're the person who earned the seat that you're sitting in. Your drive, your motivation, your persistence, your willpower, and your character is enough that you get to transport that on the next journey that you go on. And you forget that sometimes it's a new journey, but you get to bring you and you excited about something going all in as long as it takes is not just enough but this is the most powerful force that there is. I started my firm when I was 25. I had no other skills other than this and when I started teaching at 29, I had no other skills other than this.

And this is not just enough, it's the most powerful force there is. And this is all that you need to go on the journey that you're going to go on, it's all you need.

If you want to live at full power, three promises. Promise you'll take the nail out of your head along the journey as you get stuck. Promise you'll go toward the energy as you start to feel that energy, you'll move toward it, particularly the thing you would do if you knew you wouldn't fail. And promise you will not utter the words not now that you'll start heading in the direction of your dreams and that you'll go all in and you'll stay unhedged and you'll start that now. Those are the three promises.

So, two years ago, my son Chase who's here, [COUGH] he went off to college. And it was like, someone had reached in and ripped my heart out when that happened. I remembered the very first time when Chase was born, I remembered holding him, and I remembered we taught Chase sign language because before he could speak, and he would do this for more. And he wanted, more apple slices, more Cheerios, more books, more everything, and he would just get so excited he'd do this. I remember his very first walk and the joy he had on his face, and I remember teaching him how to ride a bike, throwing a football with him.

And eventually teaching him how to drive a car, and then I remember him walking away that day and going to his dorm in college and then driving home and his room was empty for the first time ever. And because he no longer, was part of my dear life on a daily basis. And then my son Blake graduated this year, so he's going up and it doesn't get any easier. And so this kind of set in me this extestential crisis, of like, I had this ending of something that was really important to me without a new beginning, and there was this finite nature of life that I think everyone reaches.

Maybe that's a midlife crisis, I'm not sure. So I went on, I did what all of you would do, I went on a quest for the meaning of life, [LAUGH] which I've been on my whole life, but I intensified it. And I went to the rural cities in Mexico, I went to the jungles of Costa Rica, and I went on meditation retreats. I had a meditation teacher. As you know, I have lots of executive coaches and just did a lot of work. I did a lot of reading and was searching for this, some of my favorite philosophers Jesus, Aristotle, Buddha, Socrates, Alan Watts, read.

Did a lot of reading on what they came up with, for the meaning of life which were great, love thy neighbor, serve God, be present and suffering. Seek truth, all these great meanings, so there's clearly not one meaning of life. The meaning of life that I came up with, is that the meaning of life is for you to find your meaning of life, and what I came up with, my answer for the meaning of life is to live your life at full power. And I believe that that power is already inside you right now, and that the way to access that power is through your second voice.

And your second voice is not just the path to accessing that power, but it will also show you where to direct it, to have the biggest Impact that you're going to have in this world. That voice will start ruminating on a problem, and it'll start bringing this up, and you'll think about it day in day in and day out, when you have something that's keeping you stuck. That's a sign that you have your nail in your head, and your voice once your second voice wants you to remove that, so make a promise that when that happens, you'll take the nail out of your head.

That voice speaks to you in the language of energy. That's how you know what it's saying. So, go toward that energy and make a promise that you will constantly move in the direction of the thing that gives you energy, particularly the thing you knew you would do if you knew you wouldn't fail. And finally, more than anything, that voice wants you to go all in and wants you to experience yourself at full power. So make a promise that you will not wait, that you will not utter the words not now, but you'll go all in with wherever you are in your life right now.

I used to think that there were millions of decisions that we would make, and that life was really complicated. But now that I've been on this earth for 52 years, I think that I've realized if you want to live at full power and feel the full magnitude of what you can do in this one life that you have. But there's really only one decision, class of 2024 which voice will you listen to? Thank you. >> [APPLAUSE] >> Thank you. >> [APPLAUSE]