Change lives, change organizations, change the world. It's an honor to present to you the one and only, the GOAT, the legend, Graham Weaver! 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 the off-site in Napa.
And we're sitting in these conference rooms for three days listening to these presentations. And this is like PowerPoint old school where there's 87 words on the slide and the person who's speaking reads every single... word to you in 0.5x speed and I'm just you know it's brutal so about a day and a half into this off-site I hatched my escape plan so I'm sitting in the in the room and I put my suit coat on I just tucked my notebook under the suit coat just to make sure there's no trace and then as we take a break at 1045 in the morning and I file out and I 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 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 is I always work out with a red bandana and uh 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 pack one. It's 75 degrees.
It doesn't matter. So I start on this run and it is just glorious. Like my playlist is amazing and 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 don't have to do this.
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 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. run.
So I go out, I'm going on, you know, just having a great run. I turn around, again, heaven runners high, and at the very end of the run, one of my favorite songs comes on my playlist, which is Eye of the Tiger by Survivor, and it's the theme song of Rock and Roll. Rocky I, if you haven't seen that. Like the gratuitous training scene where he gets beat, then he has to come back and train. They're playing 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. The sun's hitting me just right. I got my bandana, you know, sweat's pouring down. I'm shirtless. I'm like, I look like Rocky right now.
And I start... So 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 see something kind of moving in the window, take off my sunglasses, take my sunglasses down. And 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. 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-baxing 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. 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 noise in the bushes that was... could possibly kill you. It wants to inject into you fear and doubt and worry and anxiety. 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. 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 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, 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 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. 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. This is the unstuck promise. So a number of years ago, there was a video of a woman, and she's talking to her boyfriend, and she says, I feel like I'm in a relationship all this pressure. I have headaches.
I can't sleep. You know, and she's just, she seems like she's hopeless. And her, 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 has a nail sticking out of her head. And it seems pretty obvious. 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. 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 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 to... 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 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 were you stay paralyzed.
And these nails, just like you're thinking of that video, why doesn't the girl 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 hands. 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 the doctor has her fill out all this stuff.
What are you eating? What are you drinking? What time are you 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 cure your insomnia. She says, great. I'm super excited to hear that.
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 a 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 a 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 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, 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 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, the 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'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. 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 is that what every 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 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 is because they're trying to get you 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. 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 a stand up and tell you that advice didn't follow that path.
So instead what I'm gonna 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 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 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. So 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 wanna 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 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 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.
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 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. 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 become 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, Goethe said, until one is committed, there's always hesitancy, a chance to draw back. always in effectiveness.
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 story of how I started teaching started 22 years ago. Irv Grosbeck 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 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. 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 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 company.
True story. So that's so I got that going for me I'm like that yeah at least we taught the students that. So, which is true by the way, but I was devastated.
Like I was, I mean my inner critic was like 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 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.
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 she said hey Graham you know I enjoyed your case. I was like well you were the one person that did so thanks for and she said but You know, the thing I wanted 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 started this 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 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 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'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 happy. My boss lets me.
I move to a new city. I plan my wedding. 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 gonna start. This is when I'm gonna 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, ah, 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 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 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 at Stanford, there's this five minute part at the end of the class where the professor asked the guest, do 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, 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 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.
You know, 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 its sword and kneels. Because you're living in harmony with your second voice, 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, it's 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, 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 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, 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 will 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, um, 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 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 you know his room was empty for the first time ever and because he no longer you know was part of my life on a daily basis. And then my son Blake graduated this year, so he's going off and it doesn't get any easier.
And so 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 in it. 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, 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, 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, you know, 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 gonna 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 voice wants you, 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. Thank you.