How To Live Your Life At Full Power: Graham Weaver (Transcript)

Then I went down the back staircase, went around, and got on the Silverado Trail. I couldn’t find my shirt; I’m not sure if I packed one. It was 75 degrees, so it didn’t matter.

The Transformative Run

I started on this run, and it was glorious. My playlist was amazing, and I was having a great time. On this run, I started to have a runner’s high, which some of you may have experienced. There was this voice, and it said, “Graham, you don’t have to do this. This isn’t you. This isn’t what you’re meant to do.” It was a voice that I had heard maybe 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 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 was the end of the run. I went out, having a great run, and turned around, still experiencing the runner’s high. At the very end of the run, one of my favorite songs came on my playlist: “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor. It’s the theme song of Rocky III. If you haven’t seen that, it’s the gratuitous training scene where he gets beat, then he has to come back and train, and they’re playing that song.

I was feeling it, running, and then there was this long glass building on the trail. I caught a glimpse of myself in it, the sun hitting me just right. I had my bandana on, sweat pouring down, and I was shirtless. I thought, “I look like Rocky right now.” So I started doing some shadowboxing moves, feeling the energy. Then I saw something moving in the window. I took off my sunglasses, looked closer, and all the energy drained out of my body because I realized what had happened.

I had been on this run for two hours. The meeting I was in had ended, they broke for lunch, and they went to lunch in a different room – a restaurant with a window overlooking the vineyard. So me sneaking stealthily back into the meeting actually became me shadowboxing shirtless in front of my entire company. That was the first reason that run was memorable.

The second reason it was memorable was that I realized 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 follow it, starting with allowing myself to leave that job.

The Two Voices Within Us

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 conflict going on at all times inside of you, 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 makes you react to that noise in the bushes that could possibly kill you. It wants to inject into you fear, doubt, worry, and anxiety. It wants you to fight or flight, and that’s your voice of fear and your inner critic. That voice is in your mind all the time.

Then there’s another voice, the second voice, that has been written about and talked about by philosophers for thousands of years. That voice has been called many names: intuition, source, God, the universe, your soul, your true self, your inner wisdom – lots of names for that. That voice is a little quieter, and it isn’t in your head. A lot of times it shows up in your body – in your heart, your gut, your chest. You feel it. 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. And you know this; you already know this. The way that you know this is 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.

Three Promises to Yourself

Today, I want to 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. Are you good with that? Three promises.

1. The first one is a promise that’s going to help you get unstuck.
2. The second one is a promise that’s going to help you find that voice.
3. 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.

Promise One: Take the Nail Out of Your Head

This is the unstuck promise. A number of years ago, there was a video of a woman talking to her boyfriend. She says, “I feel all this pressure, I have headaches, I can’t sleep,” and she seems hopeless. Her boyfriend looks at her, confused, and says, “Well, you know, you could take the nail out of your head.” Then you see she turns, and you realize she has a nail sticking out of her head. It seems pretty obvious. Then she says, “It’s not about the nail.” 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.

Nails can fall into four buckets:

1. Bad habits that are keeping us from reaching our full potential.
2. Unresolved past experiences that we might have had a long time ago that we’ve compartmentalized and haven’t dealt with.
3. 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.
4. 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, so you just stay paralyzed.

These nails are hard to pull out of our head for two reasons:

1. We haven’t admitted that we have one.
2. Life is going to get worse first.

To remove the nail, start by speaking your truth. This is half of the battle right here. The second reason we don’t pull the nail out is that life is going to get worse first. Think of this as the pattern of your life, where 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.

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. 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, you’re going to have to deal with that downward path first.

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 yourselves is to take the nail out of your head. Do that work.

Promise Two: Follow Your Energy

Now we’ve got to listen to that voice. Promise two is follow your energy. I say not your passion. Here’s why I say not your passion: 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.” Has anyone heard that before? Every graduation speech you watch will have that injected in there.

Let me tell you why that happens. Because now I’m up here giving advice, and I’ll explain to you why every speaker wants to tell you this. The reason is that 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 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.

The speakers are trying to say, “Hey, come up over on this side. Go to 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.

The Problem with “Follow Your Passion”

But it can be very harmful advice to go follow your passion, and here’s why. 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.

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 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 just your energy, whatever’s giving you energy at the current time.

The Nine Lives Exercise

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 the 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.

And then lives two through nine, you have two rules:

1. 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.
2. You want to find the things that you’re super excited about. So every one of those other lives should be something that you’re so excited that you jump out of bed to do.

For me, it might have been, okay, I shared life one. Life two would be 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, you know, 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. That’s how you’re going to listen to your soul.

Using the Nine Lives Exercise

There are two things you can do with this exercise:

1. 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. 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 actually inflame the rest of your life with excitement.
2. 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.

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 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.

Three Promises for Living at Full Power

If you want to live at full power in this one precious life of yours:

1. Take the nail out of your head.
2. Go toward the things that give you energy.
3. Go all in now.

The Trap of Being Hedged

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.”

And, you know, Goethe said, “Until one is committed, there’s always hesitancy, a 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 get where you want to go half in, half out.

My Teaching Journey

My story of how I started teaching started 22 years ago. Irv Grosbeck and Janet Feldstein wrote a case about me. 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. 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 I absolutely bomb. I am horrible. My inner critic is just pounding me. “Graham, you’re 29. 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 you know, this isn’t false humility. This was, 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 case.” True story.

So I got that going for me. I’m like, at least we taught the students that. Which is true, by the way. But I was devastated. I mean, 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.”

The Danger of “Not Now”

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. 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 student’s 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.

Sarah’s Story: Overcoming Fear of Failure

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 enjoyed your case.” I was like, “Well, you were the one person that did it.” 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 started this thing when you were 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 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.”

So we did that with Sarah. We looked at all the fears, we walked through each one, and we just 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, you know, tell me a little bit about your thing you’re trying to do.” 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.”

The Trap of Waiting to Start Living

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 are happy, my boss lets me, I move to a new city, am planning my wedding, I get married, I have a visa, I’m an R.J. 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 R.J. 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? You never really get there. It’s like, 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, Sarah said, “You know, I am so excited about this, I’m going to do this, you know, 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.”

Sarah’s Decision and Its Impact

“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 the problem?” About a month later, she sent me a note saying she decided to start a company, called 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.

Going All In on Teaching

The next time there was a case about Graham Weaver at Stanford, there’s this five-minute part at the end of the class 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 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 on how to teach.

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 I should teach. I’m 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 its sword and kneels. Because you’re living in harmony with your second voice.

The Power of Alignment

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 you’re not 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.

You need 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.

Your Past Achievements as Fuel for the Future

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 earn the seat that you’re sitting in. Your drive, your motivation, your persistence, your willpower, and your character, 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’re 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. 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.

The Three Promises Revisited

If you want to live at full power, three promises:

1. Promise you’ll take the nail out of your head along the journey as you get stuck.
2. 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.
3. 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.

Personal Reflection: The Passage of Time

Two years ago, my son Chase, who’s here, he went off to college and it was like someone had reached in and ripped my heart out when that happened. You know, I remember 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, you know, more apple slices, more Cheerios, more books, more everything. And he would just get so excited and 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, you know, 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 because he no longer was part of my life on a daily basis. You know, Blake graduated this year so he’s going off and it doesn’t get any easier.

The Quest for the Meaning of Life

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 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 which I’ve been on my whole life 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, you know, 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.

The Meaning of Life

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 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 second voice wants you to remove that.

Final Thoughts and Call to Action

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, that 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.

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