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

organiz Change organiz 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] [Laughter] 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 uh we're sitting in these conference rooms for three days listening to these uh presentations and this is like PowerPoint old school where there's 87

words on the slide and the and the person who's speaking reads every single word to you in 0.5x speed and I'm just you know it it's brutal so about a day and a half into this offsite I I hatched my escape plan so I'm sitting in the in the room and I I put my suit Cod on I tuck my notebook under the suit Cod 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 I 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 3 minutes for everyone to leave and then I wait like just to be safe I wait another 5 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 but 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 bandan around my head which is I always work out with a red bandanna and and uh and then I go down the back staircase and I go around and get on the uh the um Silverado Trail I I couldn't find my shirt I'm not sure if I pack one it's 75 degrees it doesn't matter so I start I start on this run and it is just glorious like my my playlist

is amazing and I'm having I'm having just 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 and this voice says you know Graham you don't have to this isn't you you know you you don't have to do this like this isn't what you're meant to do and it was this voice that I'd heard maybe other times but this time it was like really powerful and I realized that this voice was speaking to me and it was it was my truth

and and this wave of calm and peace just kind of came over me as I finished this run realizing that that I was going to listen to that voice there were two memorable things about that run that that have stayed with me to this day the first one is the end of the run so I go out I'm going on you know just having a great run I turn around again having Runners high and at the very end of the run one of my favorite songs comes on my playlist which is I the tiger by

uh Survivor and it's the theme song of Rocky 3 if you haven't seen that like the gratuitous training scene where he gets beat then he has to come back and train that that they're playing that song and it's like so then I'm like okay I'm 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 the sun's hitting me just right I got my bandana you know sweats pouring down I'm shirtless I'm like I'm I look

like Rocky right now I start I I just looking in the mirror I start doing some of these 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 I I see something kind of moving in the window take off my sungl take my sunglasses down I look and all the energy drains out of my body because I realize 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 vineyard so me sneaking 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 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 realize 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 thousands if not tens of thousands of years and this is a thing that you know that that noise in the bushes that was could could possibly

kill you it wants to inject into you fear and doubt and worry and anxiety and once you would fight or flight and and that's your 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 for 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 you

know 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 you know 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 reason you the way that you know this is you

feel this you know you feel this conflict this dissident 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 you there's 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 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 you know but actually intentionally and regularly and you can feel the full magnitude of

what you're supposed to what you can do in this life so let's do it so the first promise is take the nail out of your head this is the unstuck promise so a number of years ago there was a video uh 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 you know and she's just she seems like she's hopeless and her uh her boyfriend looks at her he looks a little confused and he says well you know you could take the nail

out of your head and then you see she turns and you realize she stick has a nail sticking out of her head and it seems pretty obvious and then she 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 her 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 some times 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 um 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 compartmentalized 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 you know all these constraints we put on ourselves with our own rules and the and the fourth one is fear and it's fear that's keeping you stuck so in 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 you were you stay paralyzed and these nails just like you're thinking in that video why doesn't a girl just pull the thing out right why 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 was is is to speak your truth so let me let me just give you an

example of this of this nail so I have a I have a close friend of mine and she has insomnia and she it controls her life she has a she you know she can only sleep a few hours a night she's tired all day it's it's absolutely controls her life so she goes to the doctor and she's you know doctor has her fill out all this stuff what are you eating what are you drinking what time you're going to bed all these different things and uh and then and she the doctor says to her hey

I have good news for you or I know how you can cure your insomnia she says great I'm super excited to hear that he and um the doctor says to her you could stop drinking four to five glasses of wine with with an hour of you going to bed that that 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 you know medicine she keeps in her cabinet and then what she does is she proceeds to build a helmet

around her nail so she she basically has all these drugs she takes she goes to bed at a certain time she can't be out late she during the day she needs nap 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 you know 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 other 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 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 you know 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 have you're going to have to you're G to have to deal with that that downward uh path first and then you're going to reach another plateau and you'll

have another one and 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 yourselves 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 got to get unstuck now we got to listen to that voice so promise two is follow your energy and I say not your passion here 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 you have that like 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 why is that what every speaker wants to tell you the reason is that I'll speak for myself 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 and it was and it

just absorbed a lot of of of energy I could fight through it with willpower for a little bit of time and I've spent en a lot of my time in an area that gave me a tremendous amount of energy and and there is no comparison and so the speakers are trying to say hey come up over on this side you know 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 this advice

with you but it's very 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 at 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 give

up 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 is 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 you could partake in the first life is going to be the thing that

you're doing right now so for me that was I'm in the corporate job you know I'm going to live in the Bay Area I'm going to pay off some debt that's kind of Life number one and then lives two through n lives two through nine you have two rules the first rule is uh that you they all have to start from today so you can't go back in time all your all your remaining eight lives start with where you are right now the second rule is you want to find the things that are you're super

excited about so every one of those other lives should be something that you're so excited that you you jump out of bed to do so for me it might have been okay my I I shared Life One Life two would be hey I want to start my own company someday and you know 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 be a DJ in Vegas you know life six I'd be

a writer social media uh influencer you know whatever you come up with these these these things that are exciting for you and then what you've done when you do this is you found things that you have energy for energy is the language of your soul that second voice that I access 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 it's it's 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 your your soul there's two things you can do with this exercise the first is as you're on path one and you're and you're cranking away on path one pull something in from one of those other lives that you 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 a class at Stanford or all these things and what happens when you pull something in like 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 one way 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 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 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 your richest dream the human soul needs something to hope for and that's why you want to continue to inject it

with your energy 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 you know it'll come clear at some point I'm not really sure when this happens then I'll do it you know it's on the other side of this thing as soon as I get done with this and you know Gerta 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 you're not going to get where you want to go half in half

out my story of how I started teaching started 22 years ago Irv grck and Janet feldstein wrote a case about me and it was when I 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 I dreamed of I thought it was going to be the coolest experience

ever and uh so I go in the class and I absolutely bomb I am horrible like my inner critic is just pounding me you know 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 like you know like look at the guests who came before you they're way more accomplished than you and I I was horrible I was in my head the whole time and just so you know this isn't false humility um this was I was 29 and I had uh

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 uh one of the takeaways from the Graham Weaver case was um you don't need to have Charisma or be articulate to start a true story so that's so I got that going for me I'm like that yeah at Le at least we taught the students that so which is true by the way but but I was I was devastated like I I was I I mean my my inner critic was like

Graham come back in 30 years when you've actually done something you know when you have something to say you know and this is a really common thing that our inner critic says it one of it has many tricks it uses and one of those is to utter is to utter to you the two most dangerous words that you're going to hear that you're going to say in 22 years of being a case guest or a 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 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 teach it said go get 20 years of experience you know go figure it all out go make sure until everything's perfect and you're you're you're ready and everything's going 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 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 you know I enjoy enjoyed your case I was like well you were the one person that did so thanks for uh and she said but you know the thing I want to talk to you she didn't want to talk about how to build a business or hire or fire or investing or anything like that she said I want to hear how did you overcome your fear of failure you know you're

you started the thing when you're 25 like 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 failure so I said okay 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 class is 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 walked through each one and we just made we stripped those fears of their power and she felt a lot better and she felt like a lot more confident and then and then I said well Sarah you know tell me a little bit about your your thing you're trying to do you know you know you're excited about this whatever and then she just lit up and she said I'm so excited

about this you know I'm going to go all in I'm going to do this with every ounce of my soul and so most of us say you know I'll start living when and we say I'll start living when I pay off my loans I get more experience I have confidence I'm ready I know I'll succeed my parents are having my boss letes me I move to New City I plan my way I 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 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 when I'm going to start this is when I'm going to get going when one of these things happens and you know what then there's always a new thing right that never you never really get there it's like and and then they say you know 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 you know I am so excited about this I'm going to do this you know I I have tremendous energy this I'm all in I'm going to go as long as this takes this is what she said and I said so Sarah let me get this straight you're fired up you have energy you're all in as long as it takes I said what's the decision then I don't understand like what's what's the problem and and and one 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 uh about Graham Weber at at Stanford there's this five minute part at the end of the class where the professor asked the guest you

know 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 I was like Allin 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 you know 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 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 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 I

should teach you know I am a teacher at this point and this this uh this conflict that I'm having between my two voices it just dissipates because the the the voice of fear has lost that battle when you're all in and it lays down its sword and kneels and there because you're you're living in harmony with your second voice there's just there's just a lot less 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 this confused they think that burnout comes from doing something for a long time that's not true burnout comes from friction stress 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 wants 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 and so energy is abundant going back to you I would say you are the person this is the formula for starting any 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 that you get to transport that on the next Journey that you 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 CR 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 will go toward the energy as it as you 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 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 um my son Chase who's here uh he went he went off to college and it was like someone had reached in and ripped my heart out when that happened um you know I I remembered the very first time when Chase was born I remembered holding him and I remembered he we taught Chase sign language because before he could speak and he would do this

for more and he wanted you know more uh apple slices more cheros more books more everything and he would just get so excited he'd do this I remember um his his very first walk and the joy he had 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 you know walking away that day and and and going to his dorm in college and then driving home and his you know his room was

empty for the first time ever and cuz he no longer you know was was part of part of my life on a daily basis and then my son Blake graduated this year so he's he's going off and it doesn't get any easier and so this kind of set in me this existential crisis uh of like I had this ending of something that was really important to me without a new beginning and and there was this finite nature of life that I think everyone reaches maybe that's a midlife crisis I'm not sure um so I went

on I I did what what all of you would do I went on a quest for the meaning of life which been on my whole life but I intensified it and and I went to the rural cities in Mexico I went to the jungles of Costa Rica and I uh I hired medit I went on meditation Retreats I had a meditation teacher as you know I have lots of executive coaches and uh just did a lot of work I did a lot of reading and was searching for this um some of my favorite philosophers Jesus

Aristotle Buddha Socrates Alan Watts you know read did a lot of reading on what they came up with for the meaning of life which were great you know love thy neighbor serve God be present and suffering um seek truth you know all these all these great meanings so there's clearly not one meaning of life uh 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 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 a day day and day 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 wants you your 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 it 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 that there's really only one decision class of 2024 which voice will you listen to thank you thank you