Transcription
[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. We're sitting in these conference rooms for three days listening to these presentations. This is like PowerPoint old school where there's 87 words on the slide. The person who's speaking reads every single word to you in 0.5x speed. And it's brutal.
So, a day and a half into this offsite, I hatched my escape plan. I'm sitting in the room, I put my suit coat on, I tuck my notebook under the suit coat just to make sure there's no trace. Then, as we take a break at 10:45 in the morning, I file out and make sure I'm the last one to go in the bathroom, and I hide out in the stall.
I wait like three minutes for everyone to leave. Then, just to be safe, I wait another five minutes. At one point, it does occur to me, I'm a 27-year-old vice president. I'm in the men's room in the stall hiding from my own company. [LAUGH]
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. I put on my running shoes, my running shorts. I tie this red bandana around my head, which I always work out with.
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. On this run, I start to have this runner's high, which some of you may have experienced. 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."
It was this voice that I'd heard other times, but this time it was really powerful. I realized that this voice was speaking to me, and it was my truth. A 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 a runner's high. At the very end of the run, one of my favorite songs comes on my playlist, which is "Eye of the Tiger" by Survivor.
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 that song, and it's like, okay, I'm feeling it, I'm running.
Then there's this long glass building that is on this trail. I'm running, and I catch a glimpse of myself in the glass. The 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 start just looking in the mirror, 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.
Then I see something kind of moving in the window. I take off my sunglasses, 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 vineyards.
So, me sneaking stealthily back into the meeting actually became me showing back up 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. 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.
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.
The first force is your survival instinct that's been with us for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years. This is the thing, that noise in the bushes that could possibly kill you. It wants to inject fear, doubt, worry, and anxiety into you. It wants you to 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. Then there's another voice, the second voice. 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, your inner wisdom. Lots of names for that voice.
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 chest. You feel that. Unfortunately, that first voice really drowns us out a lot of times.
The thing is that the voice of fear will lead you to a life that's too small. You know this. You already know this. The way that you know this is you feel this. You feel this conflict, this dissonance 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. 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 talk to you about how to access this voice. 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. 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. The third one is a promise that's going to help you follow it.
Then you can tap into this energy source, not episodically or randomly on a run sometime, but actually intentionally and regularly. You can feel the full magnitude of what you can do in this life. So let's do it.
The first promise is take the nail out of your head. [LAUGH] A number of years ago, there was a video of a woman, and she's talking to her boyfriend. She says, "I feel all this pressure, I have headaches, I can't sleep," and she seems hopeless.
But her boyfriend looks at her, he looks a little confused, and he says, "Well, you could take the nail out of your head." Then you see that she turns, and you realize she has a nail sticking out of her head. It seems pretty obvious.
Then she says, [LAUGH] "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.
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. 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 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. All these constraints we put on ourselves with our own rules. The fourth one is fear. It's fear that's keeping you stuck.
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 stay paralyzed.
These nails, just like you're thinking in that video, why doesn't the girl just pull the thing out, right? Why is this complicated? There are 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. The first way to pull your nail out of your head is to speak your truth. Let me just give you an example of this nail.
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. She goes to the doctor, and the 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.
The doctor says to her, "Hey, I have good news for you. I know how you can cure your insomnia." She says, "Great, I'm super excited to hear that." The doctor says to her, "You could stop drinking four to five glasses of wine within an hour of you going to bed. That'll help your insomnia."
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. What she does is she proceeds to build a helmet around her nail.
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. 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. 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."
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, if you think of this as the pattern of your life, at any given time, you're going to reach a plateau. The path to get to the next plateau involves something that's going to get worse first, and these nails go on.
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. 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. This is a big part of your life.
Just 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, principle one, if you want to live your life at full power, the promise I would ask you 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.
Next is to try to find your energy. So, we're tapping into 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, 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?
Every graduation speech you watch will have that injected in there. 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.
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. It felt like a grind, and it just absorbed a lot of energy. I could fight through it with willpower for a little bit of time.
I've spent a lot of my time in an area that gave me a tremendous amount of energy, and there's no comparison. 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. 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. I don't think any of those things are true.
In 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, follow your energy, whatever's giving you energy at the current time.
There's this exercise that I want to do with you today, which is called Nine Lives. 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 debt; that's kind of life number one. Then life's two through nine, you have two rules. The first rule is that 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 about that you jump out of bed to do.
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.
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 are two things you can do with this exercise. The first is, as you're on path one, and you're cranking away on path one, pull something in from one of those other lives that gives you a tremendous amount of energy.
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. What happens when you pull something in is your energy will become infectious. You'll light a spark, you'll light a match, and 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: 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 the class of 2024, I would argue that 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.
I think that's where you'll find 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.
If you want to live at full power in this one precious life of yours, promise one: take the nail out of your head. The second promise is go toward the things that give you energy.
The third promise is to go all in now. 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 I get done with this."
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. This is a huge waste of energy, and 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 Grosbeck and Janet Feldstein wrote a case about me. 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.
The case had a lot of things go wrong; most things went wrong. I was so excited to be a case guest; I thought it was going to be the coolest experience ever. So I go in the class, and I 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." I was horrible; I was in my head the whole time.
Just so this isn't false humility, I was 29, and I had friends of mine that were in the class. 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 company."
>> [LAUGH]
True story, so I got that going for me. At least we taught the students that, which is true, by the way. But I was devastated. My inner critic was saying, "Graham, come back in 30 years when you've actually done something. When you have something to say."
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 hear, that you're going 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 do it." No student has 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. Go figure it all out. Go make sure until everything's perfect, and 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 said, "Hey Graham, I enjoyed your case." I said, "Well, you were the one person that did, so thanks for that."
She said, "But the thing I wanted to talk to you about, 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 started this thing when you were 25; how did you actually get the confidence to do that?'"
I actually had a lot to tell her on that because I did have to overcome my fear of 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.
The reason we do limiting beliefs in classes 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. We stripped those fears of their power, and she felt a lot better and a lot more confident.
Then I said, "Well, Sarah, tell me a little bit about the thing you're trying to do. You're excited about this, whatever," and then she just lit up. 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 soul."
Most of us say, "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 aren't bossing me, I move to a new city, I 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 start. This is when I'm going to get going when one of these things happens."
You know what? Then there's always a new thing, right? You never really get there. 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, you said, 'I am so excited about this. I'm going to do this. I have tremendous energy for 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. Fired up, you have energy, all in as long as it takes. What's the decision then? I don't understand; what's the problem?"
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.
I said, "This was also true for me about teaching." So I decided I was going to go all in as long as it took and throw all my energy into this.
The next time 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 asks the guests if you have any advice for the students.
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.
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 are no other ingredients required; this is it.
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 I should teach. I am a teacher at this point.
This conflict that I'm having between my two voices just dissipates because the voice of fear has lost that battle. When you're all in, it lays down its sword and kneels.
Because you're living in harmony with your second voice, there's just a lot less conflict. It 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" or "it's not supposed to be now" that goes away.
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, 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.
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. You forget that sometimes it's a new journey, but you get to bring you.
Excited about something, going all in as long as it takes is not just enough; 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.
When I started teaching at 29, I had no other skills other than this. This is not just enough; it's the most powerful force there is. 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. 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.
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] went off to college. 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.
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. I remember teaching him how to ride a bike, throwing a football with him.
Eventually, I taught him how to drive a car, and then I remember him walking away that day and going to his dorm in college. Then driving home, his room was empty for the first time ever because he no longer was part of my daily life.
Then my son Blake graduated this year, so he's going up, and it doesn't get any easier. This kind of set in me this existential crisis of like, I had this ending of something that was really important to me without a new beginning.
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.
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. I read a lot of their work on what they came up with for the meaning of life, which were great: love thy neighbor, serve God, be present in suffering, seek truth, all these great meanings.
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. What I came up with, my answer for the meaning of life, is to live your life at full power.
I believe that that power is already inside you right now, and that the way to access that power is through your second voice. 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. You'll think about it 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 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 would do if you knew you wouldn't fail.
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, there's really only one decision, class of 2024: which voice will you listen to?
Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]