You are ostensibly a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and you shared that when people come ask you for advice, the most common question you get is, what should I do with my life?
Imagine that you're walking home from work, you see this bright, shiny object, and you realize it's a magic lamp, and you rub the lamp, and this genie comes out, and the genie says, hey, I can give you one wish.
Whatever you throw yourself into with your whole life and your career, it's going to turn out great.
If that were true and you had that genie, what would you wish for?
At some point in this one life we get, you want to get yourself on that path of that journey.
This whole exercise connects to something that you're a big advocate of, of this idea of getting out of autopilot mode in your life?
You're unconscious and you may not even realize why you're doing what you're doing or even realize what you're doing.
So for example, I get up, work out, drive into work, fight traffic, commute.
Maybe I return some emails, fight traffic on the way home, rush through dinner, go to bed.
It's not a day that is intentional.
It's not a day where I've said, where do I want to be going with my life?
What's important to me in this world?
You have another quote, which is everything that you want is on the other side of worse first.
Pick anything. You want a better body.
Okay. You're going to need to go to the gym.
When you go to the gym the first few times, it's going to not be that fun.
The first move is negative.
If I'm optimizing for tomorrow and I just want to have a great day tomorrow, I'm going to stay exactly where I am.
So many people I see have this happen where they just they hit a plateau and they never move past it because they're not willing to have that that hard day, month, week, year.
When should you quit something?
Because some things are just not worth it.
I think the time to quit is when you can no longer.
Today, my guest is Graham Weaver.
Graham teaches a top rated course at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, a course which is technically called managing growing enterprises.
But as you'll hear in our conversation, he ends up mostly helping students figure out what to do with their lives and how to get out of the autopilot mode that most people are in.
He recently won Stanford Graduate Business School's 2024 MBA Distinguished Teaching Award.
And teaching is actually his side gig.
His full -time job is founder and CEO of Alpine Investors, a private equity firm which, based on my research, is one of, if not the top -performing private equity fund in the world.
So the advice you're going to hear today is coming from someone who is actually doing the thing, not just teaching the thing.
In our conversation, we cover practical exercises that can help you figure out what you should do with your life, including something he calls the Genie Framework and Online Lives Exercise.
We talk about why life is suffering, and you may as well choose something worth suffering for.
Also, why most things in life that are worthwhile take more time than you expect.
Some practical advice for creating accountability in your life to help you achieve your goals, and so much more.
If you listen to this episode and actually try some of the exercises that Graham shares, I promise you that your life and your future will be better off.
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.
It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously.
With that, I bring you Graham Weaver.
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Graham, thank you so much for being here.
Welcome to the podcast.
Thanks so much for having me, Lenny.
I'm super excited to be here.
Okay, so you are ostensibly a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business of a class called Managing Growing Enterprises.
But I was reading an interview with you and you shared that when people come and ask you for advice, they're not asking, how do I start a company?
How do I manage my growing enterprise?
How do I make my company grow faster?
most of the questions, the most common question you get, which is surprising to me, is what should I do with my life?
First of all, is that accurate?
Yeah, that is accurate.
About half of all the times I meet with students, that's the question they ask.
It's really funny, too, because sometimes they'll come with a PowerPoint presentation and a two -by -two matrix and an expected value and all that, but really they're asking the question of, hey, what should I do with my life?
Which is, by the way, a great question.
Why do you think that's the case?
That's not what I would imagine someone at an MBA school in a business class asking for advice on.
My typical meeting with the student will say, the student will start to tell me about these two or three different career or job alternatives that they have, A, B, and C.
Let's just use two, A and B.
And then they go through and they start talking about A, and they tell me all the pros and the cons of A, and they go through it.
And then they go through B, and they start telling me all those things.
And I start asking some questions and over after about five or 10 minutes into that, I can tell that their heart and their soul and their energy is really for B.
That's really what they want, but they're talking themselves out of B and they're going to talk themselves into A.
And so what I try to do is A, first, I try to let them realize that their real energy is for B.
Just let them feel that and understand that.
And then secondly, I try to figure out what are the limiting beliefs they have?
What are the fears?
What are the obstacles?
What are the voices in their head?
What are all the societal pressures that are keeping them from doing B?
And then we try to deconstruct those and get them to go do B.
So that's the process.
Is there an example of a student going, like just this actual conversation you had with someone?
Absolutely. So there's a great example of a student of mine was from Brazil, and And he came in and his prior job, prior to business school, he worked in consulting.
And that was more or less what he wanted to do.
And then at some point, I asked the students, okay, imagine you knew you were going to be successful and you were going to have a dream.
And whatever you dreamed was going to come true, what would you dream for?
And he wanted to start a nonprofit in his home country of Brazil.
to help, uh, students have more access to education.
That was what came up for him.
And over the course of our class, we just chipped away at all the fears and limiting beliefs of why he shouldn't or couldn't do that.
And by the end that's what he did.
And, um, that, so that, that's a, that's a, that's a real life example.
And there's all kinds of other examples, but that, that second one of, you know, going and starting a charity, it's not on the beaten path.
It's not what you're probably your parents are thinking you should do.
It's, there's probably a hundred reasons not to do it.
You probably don't know exactly how to start.
And so it's, it's intimidating.
But if you start with a, this, this idea, Hey, five years out, 10 years out, I know I'm going to be successful and work backwards from that.
You're going to come up with a better answer.
This is a framework that you call the genie methodology of the genie framework.
This question that you just asked that we should spend more time on, which is, I guess you tell the story the genie and how and how you know i i when i was 13 years old i was i was i used to listen to these motivational tapes mowing lawns and i'm i'm pretty sure it was brian tracy had this exercise
and he said okay and and i've adapted it so i i'll use my exercise now so i say basically imagine that you know you're you're walking home from work and you see this magic you see this bright bright shiny object you walk over and you realize it's a magic lamp and you rub the lamp and this genie comes
out and the G says, Hey, I haven't been in this bottle for 10 ,000 years yet.
So I'm not fully formed.
So I can't give you three wishes, but what I can do is I can give you one wish.
And the wish I can give you is whatever you throw yourself into with your whole life and your career, it's going to turn out great.
It's going to work out great.
It's probably going to take longer than you think.
It's going to be harder than you think, but you're going to be really happy you didn't.
And it's going to work out beyond your wildest imagination.
If that were true and you had that genie blessing you with that wish, what would you wish for?
And then the students come up with an answer that's really close to their heart.
And it's the thing they would do absent the fear of failure.
And then the second part of the exercise is basically that's what you should go do.
You should be spending your life in pursuit of your genie goal.
Maybe you can't start that tomorrow, you have financial obligations, maybe there's some experience you need.
But at some point in this one life we get, you want to get yourself on that path of that journey.
And that's the exercise that I go through with the students.
It's such a simple idea that I can totally see how it could be so powerful.
And I love the way it's framed as not like, it'll guarantee you'll be successful.
Instead, I'll guarantee you'll be happy.
You'll be happy that you took the path.
And the reason I say that is that usually the genie goal is the not well -trodden path.
So you don't even know exactly what the goal is.
This charity to start education for underprivileged kids in Brazil, that takes its own form over the course of a decade.
And it will almost certainly turn out differently than you think.
So it's more it's more that you'll be really happy you went and started that journey and it'll go it will go great it will probably go differently and take longer than you think though what are some other examples of geneekles folks have followed that are kind of non -traditional and and they've ended
up being happy about it i mean mine mine mine was you know buying companies in my dorm room at at business school i have a student who's who's starting uh an amusement park in texas uh that's that's a pretty crazy example um many students who are start who uh are leaving their job and doing startups
a lot of students who are going in the non -profit world so really just lots of examples um it's really it's as it's as it's as different as variant as the number of students i have and that and that's the magic of it because you have inside of you some really unique dream that you maybe haven't even
shared and and the goal is that that that's you know that's your uniqueness and you, and you should be, that's what you should be bringing into this world.
This whole exercise connects to something that you're a big advocate of, of this idea of getting out of autopilot mode in your life.
And the way I think about it is like people, and I'm going to ask you to describe it, but just like, it's almost like you're driving and you've never turned off the cruise control in your car and you don't realize it.
Talk about this idea that most of us are in autopilot and why it's so important to realize that and get out of it.
You start off in you're, and you're unconscious and you're kind of going through the motions and you may not even realize why you're doing what you're doing or even realize what you're doing.
So, for example, a typical person gets up, they have whatever their morning routine, you know, I'll use myself.
I drive and I get up, work out, take a shower, drive into work, fight traffic, commute, you know, I'm late.
I get in, I'm late to a meeting.
I'm kind of rushed, meeting, meeting, you know, okay, quick break for lunch.
Maybe I return some emails, a few more meetings, a couple of Zoom calls, fight traffic on the way home, rush through dinner, get back on email, go to bed.
Okay, that's my day.
And that's a busy day.
I felt like I did a lot.
I'm exhausted. But it's unconscious.
It's not a day that is intentional.
It's not a day where I've said, where do I want to be going with my life?
What's important to me in this world?
What are my values?
What 10 years from now will I wish I was starting to embark on.
Adding that level of intentionality and then working backwards from that is really the magic of getting to that 10 years from now and looking back without regret and getting to a later point in your life and feeling like you're doing the thing you're put on this earth to do, as opposed to just going
through the motions.
So the question then here is, how do you get out of that autopilot mode?
Because first of all, no one really realizes is this the case?
And I'll tell a quick story.
I was, we're interviewing, we're going to different preschools and daycares for our son.
He's a year and a half old -ish.
And we went to this Montessori school and the teacher's like, what we're doing here, I'm going to be very clear.
What we're doing here is informing your child's subconscious.
That's what they're learning here.
And that's a huge responsibility.
We put a lot of love into that idea, but it's very important.
You understand that's what we do at the school.
And I never thought of it that way.
That's amazing that they said that.
So you just opened up another part of this, which is depending on what research you see, you read somewhere between 95 and 98 % of our thoughts are subconscious and those get programmed in somehow, some way.
A big part of that, by the way, is media, our friends, our parents, our boss, our coworkers, what we think we're supposed to do, social media, this is cool, buy this Ferrari, all these different things.
And then you're just operating out of that.
And so the idea of being intentional is create space, get out of that, get out of the fog of war, make some space.
I do it, we'll probably get to this in a little bit, but I do it with an executive coach and really ask deep questions, make space, ask questions, create the intention that you want in each of the areas of your life, and then start having your calendar reflect that intention.
And so this genie exercise is one approach is just ask yourself this question.
Can you say it again just for folks so they don't miss it?
What's the question you should ask yourself?
I mean, the biggest question, I think, with respect to your career is, within reason, what would you do if you knew you wouldn't fail?
That's the biggest question.
I'll give you a few more if you want.
These are some other ones that some different questions trigger different things with people that could be helpful, trigger in a good way.
Here's a few more. If you didn't have to make money, what would you do?
That'll answer what you enjoy.
Naval Ravikant has a great question, which is, what's play for you that is work for other people?
So for you, Lennon, that might be a podcast.
That might be play for you.
That's really fun. You're always going to do better at that.
You're going to spend more time.
You're going to enjoy it more.
That's a good one. Another one is, what's the thing you really want to do, but you're just too embarrassed to say it?
And my answer to this question was that I wanted to be a motivational speaker like Tony Robbins, you know, and, uh, and I would, I was super embarrassed to say that, but that, but I, that actually works into a lot of my life at this point.
Another question, you know, who are some people that you admire and want to be more like and what do they do?
And, and, um, and, and, and, you know, where are some of those, where do you find those people?
Um, what are some things you want to learn and how do you want to grow over the next five, 10 years?
So I know a lot of your, your, um, listeners are, are working in tech, you know, So what five, 10 years from now, you're, you're amazing.
You're best in the world at X.
Um, what's X, you know, and, and how do you start to work toward becoming great at X?
So there's some other, just some, a few more other questions you could throw in, uh, to help you figure out some things you're excited about.
You mentioned this idea of limiting beliefs.
And I think a lot of people listening to this are probably having these beliefs right now of, okay, but I have a family to support.
Uh, how do I, I'm not going to go start a charity in Brazil.
That's absurd. It sounds easy, but I can't actually change my life this radically.
Can you just share something to help people get past that in some way?
Sure. The first thing I would say about limiting beliefs is they're the most powerful and the most dangerous when you don't even know what they are.
When they're in the recesses of your subconscious mind, that is 95 % of your thoughts, that's when the limiting beliefs are the most dangerous.
So a simple example might just be like, I have a limiting belief that I'm not funny.
And that's in my subconscious and I don't even realize I have it.
So I avoid things where I'm trying to be funny or tell jokes.
I mean, that's a silly example.
But let's use your career now and come up with some maybe deeper ones.
Let's use that charity example, the Brazilian charity.
I'm going to start a Brazilian charity.
What are the limiting beliefs?
Well, oh my gosh, there's a million.
I don't know how to start.
I don't know how I would pay for myself.
I have business school debt.
I don't really know what I'm even talking about.
I don't even have a plan for it.
How would I get funding?
Those are all these things that are flooding your mind.
So the first exercise is just write all that down.
Just get it down on paper.
And then two things will happen.
One is when you get it down on paper, it will almost immediately strip that limiting belief of a lot of its power and and a lot of its scariness because now it's just something like for example how would i fund this so the second the second thing that is is that a lot of that scariness becomes just
a to -do item so you're you're you're in in the recesses of your subconscious that is a very scary limiting belief that will actually keep you from doing the thing you love once it's on paper now it's just a to -do item that you can actually deal with with your conscious mind just like you do anything
else so how would i you know uh i i how would i fund this just becomes a a plan like i need to make i need to design a plan where i get funding for this charity and then that just is a problem like any other problem it's not this nebulous scary fear it's just a it's just literally a to -do item so so the first
part of living beliefs write them down understand what they are, look at them in the cold day of light on paper, and then translate them into things that are just obstacles to be overcome.
And by the way, if you're listening to this podcast, you've overcome millions of obstacles in your life, and these are no different once they're down on paper.
Are you actually doing these exercises with your students?
Like they're taking a class about growing their enterprise, and then it's like, okay, let's analyze what you want to do with your life.
Is that how this class goes?
That's a really good question.
I'll give you a little bit of background.
I was a case guest at Stanford Business School while I was buying companies in my dorm room.
It was talking about all the things that went wrong.
It's a really fun case.
I did that for 12 years.
I started to realize that was my most energetic day of the year.
Long story short, I started teaching a class full -time.
I did that for four years.
I was teaching the X's and O's of being a CEO, basically.
Hiring, firing, having hard conversations, managing a board, fundraising, selling, all the things you would imagine that a young CEO would need to know.
After about four years, I started to realize that was great, except that no one went and did it.
So the class is on entrepreneurship and they learned how to be an entrepreneur.
They did the only problem.
There's only one problem.
They didn't actually become entrepreneurs.
So then I said, well, wait a sec, I have to readjust my class a little bit.
And I have to spend some time on the stuff we've just been talking about, finding out what your dream is, your limiting beliefs, starting to map out goals toward your actual entrepreneurship dream or whatever your genie goal is.
So the way I say it is the university allows me to teach the class because I teach them entrepreneurial tricks, tactics, tools that will help them become a great CEO.
Oh, and, but the real reason I teach is because I'm trying to help, help people really go find the thing that they're excited about and get, get that, get into the life path of doing that thing.
So I do, I do both, but I do the, I do the second one kind of, uh, maybe that's not the headline of the course.
Although, although I think that's probably why people like the course so much.
It's like a Trojan horse.
Exactly, yeah. Tony Robbins used to say that people hire him for success and he has to give them that so that he feels like he earned his money.
But what he really delivers them is fulfillment.
And it's a little bit like that.
People take my class to learn how to be a CEO.
What they really get is hopefully on the path of doing the thing they want to do.
A lot of what you've been talking about is this kind of, it's almost an assumption that you will be more successful and happier if you follow your energy, your passion versus the, here's how I'll make a bunch of money.
Here's how I'll move up the ladder.
Can you speak to that?
Yeah, I, gosh, Lenny, it sounds so cliche when you say it like that, that I almost, I almost cringe a little bit.
Let me try to give it a little bit different framework where it won't sound as, because you know, cliches are cliches because they're true.
But let me try to give you a little bit different framework to think about it.
I think about it as you have your heart or your soul or your internal scorecard, and then you have your head and your mind and the world's external scorecard.
I'll speak from this from experience.
So when I graduated from business school, I took the job I was supposed to take.
And it was the safe job at the big private equity firm that paid well and looked great on my resume.
And I took that job.
That was the external scorecard.
my head said that I built like an expected value calculation, all that stuff.
The problem was it didn't, it wasn't my internal scorecard.
You know, it had nothing to do with what I actually cared about and wanted to do with my life.
And so the way that shows up is just this tension, friction, stress, anxiety, burnout, all those things.
It just, and you can, you can will that, you can will yourself through for long periods of time.
In fact, you can, if you want, you can will yourself through that your whole life.
But then once I got into the path of the thing that I was excited about, that's when I really felt my energy change dramatically.
And I developed almost like a superpower in that thing because it was, I had more energy.
I was willing to work longer.
I was willing to do it.
I've been running my company now for 23 years.
I was willing to do it for a longer period of time um i thought about it in the shower i thought about it when it went on runs you know i talked to people they wanted to join because i was excited and it just it was a whole different level of of of power and um that that i that i that i was able to
and and for the life life force that i was able to bring to that so i'm saying this from experience that you're going to show up so much differently in the thing that you're excited about uh, that, that alone is going to make your life a lot better.
But the great irony is you're going to do so much better in that thing than you are the thing you quote are supposed to do.
And I certainly, certainly understand that people have real life constraints on their finances.
And, and, and I, and I 100 % get that.
And so a big part of what I do with students is work through those things and say, okay, great.
Let's, let's talk about this job you're going to take for X years and you're going to pay off your loans or whatever.
But during that time, let's gets you on the path of the thing you really want to do.
Um, so sometime in your life, you want to, you know, sometimes soon in your life, you want to get on that path.
There's a bunch of directions.
I want to go here. One is I'll just share like what you're describing is exactly what happened to me without knowing this advice.
I just started writing things online because the pole was there and people seemed to enjoy it.
So I just kept following that path.
And the whole time, my wife's like, you can't make money writing on the internet.
that's not a thing.
Why would you do this?
You have all these skills that can be, you can make a lot more doing other things.
But I just kept doing that.
And that's what led me to this life now where I make much, much more than I made as a product manager at Airbnb.
And also it's a lot more, it's a lot less stressful.
Yeah. And it is probably that, you know, if you go back to what I was saying before, you probably were answering the question, you know, what, what would I do if I didn't have to make money?
You know, you just did that because you enjoyed it.
What's play for you Let's work for other people.
You know, what do you do in your free time?
You know, you were answering all those questions.
And then I think a lot of people just say, oh, well, that's just a side hustle or a hobby.
It is until it isn't right.
And, and, um, and then you're, and you're a great example of that.
Just to set expectations with folks.
It's not like, like you told me, how often does this actually work out for someone where this ended up being the right path for them, that it ended up working well for them?
Just, you know, cause people can hear this and be like, yeah, okay.
Like, I'm sure it works for some people, probably not for most people.
What's your what's like the success rate?
How do we define that for your students?
OK, so the short answer is I don't know because I don't I don't have full information about how my students do or what their path would have been had they not done it.
So it's a it's kind of a difficult question to answer.
but what i would say is that the formula you're solving for is you excited about something for like a decade or more so what has to happen you excited about something we just talked about the decade or more is gonna come true more likely if you're excited about it but also you have to go in at the beginning
with that mindset and the structural ability to stay at it for a long period of time.
The missing ingredient in most of the people that fail is time.
I'll use myself as an example.
I started Alpine. We lost money on our first fund.
We started doing well.
We got hit by recession.
We started digging out, whatever.
But long story short, I was 14 years into running my firm until I could say with confidence we were going to even stay in business, let alone be really successful.
And probably 18 years until we were, what I would say, really successful by external standards.
And now 23 years, we've had a great run.
But if you take away the time period, then I would have gone down as one of the quote failures as opposed to, I would say, one of the success stories using this methodology.
So time is really the variable.
And I think the biggest part of that is it's really, believe it or not, not typically the finance or the structural piece.
It's the entrepreneur or the individual's willingness to actually stay with it.
And in the upstream of that, it's their belief about how long it's supposed to take.
And I really hate this about the social media and just media in general, where they try to paint this picture that things are going to happen overnight.
And we've invested in 600 founder 600 businesses the vast much let's say 550 of those are founder founder started businesses where we're the first money I've never in one of those examples seen anyone who did thing something quickly they've all been very very long uh stories to get to that point this reminds
me of a quote I read that you I don't know if you wrote this or you shared it this idea that life is suffering so choose something worth suffering for I wrote that yeah you wrote that talk about that and because it feels like it's exactly what you're describing it's going to take a long time exactly
yeah exactly it's a good I'm glad you brought that yeah I mean think about it like in again using myself as example the first job I had I wasn't suffering any less I was getting on planes I was working late hours I was my time was not my own you know if I would have had kids I'd be missing their little league
games and all that stuff So I'm doing that anyway.
I'm just doing it for something I don't care about.
And then, you know, I start my own company and I was quote suffering, you know, getting on planes, doing all that.
I just, it was just something that I cared about.
So yeah, the quote, life is suffering.
So figure out something worth suffering for.
You're going to suffer either way.
And that's another thing I think people don't realize is like, there isn't really a path that is easy that I've ever found.
You have another quote along these lines, which is everything you want is on the other side of worse first.
Yeah. I mean, I know those are two not super optimistic quotes perhaps, but they're, um, but, but I think that I think they're true.
The second one, uh, everything you want is on the other side of worse first.
And this is something where I almost can't think of many exceptions to this where you pick anything.
You want a better body.
You're going to need to go to the gym.
When you go to the gym the first few times, it's going to not be that fun.
You're going to set your alarm.
You're going to get sore.
It's not going to be great.
You're going to have to probably make some changes to your diet.
That's not going to be fun, at least initially.
That's one example.
You want to change careers.
You're going to have to learn a new career.
You're going to have to leave your career.
You're going to have to maybe interview for new jobs or whatever it is.
In each case, the first move is negative.
The first move is negative to getting in shape.
The first move is negative to get out of a bad relationship, to get into a career you want to be in.
The reason I think that's important to say is because if I'm optimizing for tomorrow, and I just want to have a great day tomorrow, I'm going to stay exactly where I am because my life will be better tomorrow if I don't make any changes.
I don't have to break up with my girlfriend, have a hard conversation, have the tears, be alone, go on dating apps.
I don't have to do that if I just stay in it one more day.
So if you realize this and instead ask the question, the version of myself five years from now, what would they wish I was going to do right now?
So I can guarantee your five -year version of yourself will say, get out of that toxic relationship, no matter how painful it is for the next two months.
And if you can make decisions from that, and then on top of that, realize it's going to get worse first, then that's why I say everything you want is on the other side of worse first.
But if you don't do that, you just end up plateauing.
And so many people I see have this happen where they just, they hit a plateau and they never move past it because they're not willing to have that, that hard day, month, week, year, whatever it is.
I'm imagining many people hearing this right now are like, damn, I see what I need to do now.
That was really powerful advice.
It makes me think of a parenting advice.
Here's some parenting advice.
I recently saw Dr. Becky has this advice of your job as a parent, isn't to make your kids happy, but it's to make them resilient.
I love that. Yeah. By the way, watch how people parent, they parent exactly the opposite of that.
You know, you and I both live in Marin, you know, I, and I don't know how, if you have kids or how old they are, but they, when you, when you get kids in school in Marin, you know, you see parents, they try to clear all obstacles away from their kids.
It's the worst thing you could do.
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I want to talk about another exercise that you have.
But before I do that, I just there's all this advice you're sharing that people might be hearing be like, yeah, yeah, OK, this is great.
But I'm going to show this in the intro, but But, and we're not going to talk a lot about your fund, but I did some research on it.
And from what I understand, it's one of the top performing PE funds in the world, which is very hard considering how many smart people run PE funds and how ruthless that industry is.
Anything you can comment on there?
And is that just like, yeah, I think that's important for people to know.
Well, I think one of the things I would say is that I never stand up in front of students or be on a podcast like this and say anything that I'm not doing myself or that I'm advising students or people who work at Alpine to do.
And so I appreciate the kind words.
And I think that the things that I'm talking about are rooted in real results.
And this is not, you know, just kind of happy talk podcast.
it's it's one where the this this is the the formula i think for greatness is to be intentional get in the path of the thing that you're most excited about and then give yourself several decades to do it and that that's that's based on you know investing in 600 companies and building my own business
so i appreciate the the kind the kind call out yeah for people that are listening and be like okay i'm motivated i want to do this other than taking your class anything you can recommend to just like do these sorts of exercises ask yourself these questions that you've seen work i mean the answer is accountability
you know how do you how do you keep yourself accountable to kind of living the life you want to live and the analogy i would use is let's let's say that um you really really your number one goal in life is you've got to get in better shape you just have to let's say you have even medically that's gonna you
know you're, you're, you're, you're going to have real health problems.
If you don't do that, I would say you hire yourself a personal trainer, you know, pay what you need to pay.
Okay. Maybe you, you don't have a ton of money, but that's where I'd spend it.
You know, that person is going to, a, they're going to hold you accountable to showing up at the right, at a certain time and B they're going to, um, drop, uh, they're going to show you the exercises.
They're going to, you know, call you if you're not there.
Um, you know, you're just increasing the chances of success.
Plus you spend some money, you want to get your money out of it.
The equivalent of that in your life is an executive coach.
And I figured this out in 2009 in the dark recesses of the recession.
I hired my first executive coach and I was like, wow, it's a personal trainer for me for two things.
Number one, make space to ask yourself the big questions in life about your career, your relationships, your health, your spirituality, your children, whatever the big things are in your life, ask the big questions, find out what your intention is.
What are you looking for in those areas?
And just have, in my case, several hours a week to get clear on those things.
So that's part one.
And then part two is that person can hold you accountable.
I have one coach, then I can't even have the call with the coach unless I fill out a piece of paper that said, or an online form that says, here's what my one -year goals are, outcomes I want to have this year are.
Here's what I did last week based on those.
Here's what I'm going to do next week toward those.
And here's the outcome, or here's the outcomes I want to have for the call we're about to have.
And even if I never had the call, just having to fill that out every single week is incredibly powerful and account and hold, you know, allows me to hold myself accountable.
Now, so a hundred percent, that's what I'd recommend.
Let's back up and say, okay, let's say you can't afford a coach or you're, you're worried about that.
Okay. Then, and this is the same thing as like, let's say you couldn't afford a personal trainer.
I would give you the same advice, which is find a very like -minded friend of yours and sit down and do it for each other.
So if you're using the workout example, okay, you're going to go on a run Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays with your friend, and they're going to meet you at 7 a .m.
at this trail or 6 a .m.
at this trail. That's your accountability.
And you're going to be more likely to do it.
You don't want to let them down.
They're going to beat you up if you don't get there.
Same is true with this.
This is how I started.
I did this with my roommate in business school and we would, you know, we would go on a walk for 30 minutes and talk about my dreams and hopes.
And then we go on a turn around and talk about his.
And it had, it was great because we, we, we made room for each other to have those conversations.
And we also developed a great friendship.
So short of having an actual executive coach, you, you know, find a really like -minded person that could get into this with you.
And that, that would be a, another thing, but accountability is huge.
I'm going to just say one more thing.
I'm sorry, I'm going on a little bit long on this place.
But there's another thing that happens that's magical, which is you activate a different part of your brain when you talk.
You actually activate more of your brain when you talk than when you think or write.
So thinking activates the least amount of your brain.
Writing is a little bit better, but talking activates a whole different region of your brain.
And so that's the other big benefit of not doing this, you know, just on your own is being able to talk about it with someone.
I love that there's a whole spectrum of ways to create accountability for yourself.
I love this. The second coach you shared were just filling out that form was basically the biggest benefit.
When I was in college, I learned this from these audio tapes.
When I was in college, I had this green notebook and I was trying to row crew and I never rode crew before.
And I wrote down at the top of the page every single morning, I wrote down, I am the number one rower in the country.
I wasn't. I was a freshman, novice, 135 pound Midwestern, never even been on a boat.
But I wrote that down.
And then I wrote down three things I was going to do that day to move toward that goal.
And I did that every single day that I was in college.
And it's just incredible.
We talked earlier about your subconscious mind.
You're just locking your subconscious mind into your goals and where you want to go and who you want to be and how you want to show up.
It's, it's, it's, it's really powerful.
And that's advice anybody can implement.
You could do that. You could do that.
Exactly. Yeah. It's such a simple thing.
I want to be the best product manager.
Here's three things I'm doing today to help me.
Absolutely. I have, this is my students have to do this every, uh, twice a week.
It's one of their assignments and they actually have to turn it in.
And, uh, I have so many students that say like five years later, I still do this, you know, a couple of times a week And it's been unbelievable.
It, you will get more done.
I'd say this to all your listeners, you will get more done writing, writing down your goal and three things you're going to do to move toward that goal.
You'll get more things done in three months than you will in three years without that.
That's an awesome thing to just try tomorrow at work, write this down, see how it goes.
The coach point, I just want to highlight that.
But what convinced me to get a coach back when I was working is I just realized one, every athlete has a coach that tells them, here's how to become better slash everyone that you work with that is like a leader and exec basically has a coach.
And the people that have an exec coach will do better in their career and life than those who don't.
So why would you not have someone there just helping you become better at this craft?
Like it just makes so much sense if you can afford it.
There are different price points for different coaches.
Most people can probably afford it in some.
That's right. That's right.
Sweet. Okay. Let's talk about another framework that you have that you call nine lives.
And this is essentially another way.
It's like another way to hack your brain to come up with things you really should be doing.
Probably talk about this exercise.
So this, this idea of like, what my, what's my passion and what's my career goal?
Like it can be really intimidating.
And it is, it is intimidating.
And so this exercise is to make it less intimidating.
And you basically come up with nine lives.
So you see your first life, life one is the life you have now.
So when I did this exercise, I was, I think, let's just say, let's pretend I did this exercise when I'm right out of school, taking that job.
So life one is I'm working at this big firm.
I live in the Bay Area.
Here's what I'm doing.
That's life one. And then you say, okay, now there's two rules.
First rule is all the lives have to start from today.
So you can't go back in time.
They all start from today.
And second rule is you have to be excited about all these lives.
So I might say, hey, my second life is I want to start a private equity firm and be a founder and be a CEO.
And that's life two.
And life three is I want to be an author and I want to write whatever fiction or nonfiction.
And then life four is I I want to be a professor and teach, and life five is, maybe I want to make videos and be on social media, and I want to be, like six, I want to be an actor.
And you go through this whole list of these lives.
And the idea is that a couple of things from this exercise.
One is, let's say that you're in a position where you need to be working in the job you're in.
there might be one of these lives that gives you the most energy and it's the thing you if you knew you wouldn't fail you would do this one and it's good to recognize what that is and then pull that life a little bit into your current life so you know let let's say you know lenny that you were a product
manager but you really love doing podcasts and that was one of your your nine lives start you know do do a podcast every other week you know and and just and just pull it into your life, which is, it sounds like what you did, you know, you started doing it as a side hustle.
And, and then that'll have two amazing effects.
One is, you will just have more energy everywhere else in your life.
Like, if forget if you ever do this full time or not, just the act of pulling something into your life, you're really excited about will give you a tremendous amount of energy.
And then the second thing is, you'll, you'll ideally find the path that, you know, is the thing that you you know, that gives you the most synergy.
The other thing that I've learned in doing this exercise is you actually can have pretty much all nine lives.
You can't have them at once, but if you're fortunate enough to live long enough, you can have all of these things.
So I have had the corporate job, been the founder, been the professor, been a writer, had videos, taught people.
I've been able to bring in most of those uh lives into into this current life there's a couple things there that come up as you talk about one is on that point what i do now is my fourth career first i was an engineer then i became a founder then i was a pm and now i do whatever the heck this is and i
think people don't realize that's how life often goes you think you're going to do one thing and then you have many different careers that pivot into exactly and i think that's the thing it's it's just trying to make it a little less intimidating like you don't have to have this one life purpose passion thing
that you do for the rest of your life if you just follow the thing that gives you energy at each time it'll probably be a good indication of like where you want to be going the other thread there is i know one of your other really important piece of advice is to avoid this not now idea where everyone's
like here's the thing i should be doing my genie goal but not now thoughts on just how to think about that i was just like okay i know i have these lives i could live, but not now on this or that?
Yeah. I mean, in 20 years of teaching, I've never had a student come to me and say, Hey Graham, my real dream is to do X, but I'm just going to give up on it.
I'm not going to do it.
No one's ever said that.
Instead, they say, not now.
And not now, if they're not careful, will turn into not ever.
Because not now is just really another way of saying, I'm not going to do it.
And then there's a million reasons why you can't do it now.
And those, those reasons, some of our legit, some of them are just fear, fear in another form.
So in terms of like how to overcome that, I think, I think it's kind of helpful to realize that it's never really the right time.
When you're making a change or you're going to go do something different, it's never going to feel secure and safe.
You're always going to have some fear.
You're always going to feel like you're not ready.
You're going to feel like it's too soon.
You're going to feel like you don't know exactly what that path looks like.
And so just understanding that's normal.
That's called entrepreneurship.
That's called life.
And if you wait for the clouds to part and this ray of sun to come down and say, now's the time, you know, you're going to wait, you're going to wait your whole life.
And, and so I think, I think that realization can maybe be helpful.
And then, and then, and then try to try to figure out like, what is the, what are the things that need to be true for you to launch?
And usually for my students, it's something financial that is the, is the big bottleneck.
And what I tell them is, you know what has people have raised money to start a business before that's happened you know where you're you've had uh people who started businesses without their own money that have been able to pay themselves and that's not a reason to not do it like it's it's a it's an obstacle
it's something you have to solve but it's not a it's not an insurmountable obstacle this touches on a quote i definitely wanted to get to something that you wrote not long ago.
Here's the quote, the most important thing I've learned in the past, in the first 50 years of my life is that the true game of life is an internal one, not an external one.
And that journey starts with three powerful words.
I am enough. Talk about that.
Why is that so important?
Well, that's a, I mean, that's a really kind of a deep topic.
And, um, but, but I'll just, I'll talk about the internal and external journey.
Yeah. So life, life presents itself as a series of external obstacles and events.
And it, and it feels very much like an external journey and, and it, and it can feel that way your whole life.
But what I think what you'll realize, and I started realizing this when I really started meditating and spending time kind of distancing myself from that, the subconscious thoughts is it's almost, it's a very, very large part of life is internal.
I say very large part because obviously you need some food, clothing, shelter, some basic, you know, some basic needs that are external.
But for most people that are, have the ability to even listen to this podcast, I would say the vast majority of your life is internal.
So what do I mean by that?
I mean that you're writing a story about what it is you think you need to be happy.
Or you're writing a story about things you think you need to be enough or to be respected or to feel worthy or to get admiration of other people.
You're writing that story.
And it's just a story.
you and and if you really follow this logic you'll realize you'll realize that you'll realize it is 100 just a story or it's a story that you should even care and and then that that opens up a lot more agency that you have over deciding what is important to you you know what is your internal scorecard
what are the things that that matter to you not not what the external world thinks or what or the story you've been writing for a long time this when you start to open this up it's really kind of scary at first because you'll start to realize most of the things you're operating from are really just
stories that have been written at some point in your life and and and so it's it's actually terrifying at first and then it starts to become really liberating was there an example of that in your life because externally it feels like you're killing it a killer P fun teaching at Stanford like the scorecards
looking good so it's interesting you say that the first time I really realized this was when I it was in 2015 I mentioned to you it took me 14 years to be successful so we had just sold the last company from our second fund which is where we really got paid I had a financial event that was it wasn't
like I never have to work again in my life, it was just like, I could exhale a little bit.
I knew I was going to be able to pay my mortgage and put my kids through college.
It was that kind of an event.
For a couple of days, I was euphoric because I felt like I'd worked so hard for this.
I'd been, again, at this for 15 years, but really longer than that.
If you go back to getting into college and the whole thing had been a long journey.
Then it hit me that nothing changed.
Nothing internally changed at all.
I still had the same problems.
I still felt the same way about myself.
I still had the same kind of a lot of negative thoughts about myself.
This goal that I thought that I had for this whole long period of time, it didn't actually change anything.
It changed externally for sure.
Like I said, I could exhale and pay my mortgage and those are all really good things.
But that was the first time when I realized like, oh, wait a second, it's really up to me to find things that are going to give me joy.
And the achievement of some kind of external event is not one of those things.
And I know that sounds really, really weird, but there's so many people that I've heard that have had very, very similar stories.
And so it was really disorienting for me.
And I actually, it was the first time in my life where I experienced depression because I just had this thought of like, well, that wasn't what I thought.
I think I was working my whole life for that.
And it wasn't what I thought it was going to be.
And so now I was thinking, well, what, what is it then?
You know, what, what is the thing that's going to give me joy?
And then that, that takes, you know, that takes some, uh, some introspection to, to ask those questions.
i was just having a conversation with a friend who's an angel investor and he just had a bunch of exits and he's like cool i got some money in my bank account now but i don't i don't feel anything like it just doesn't i thought i'd be like holy moly it's all this is exactly what i was hoping for and nothing
changed exactly i was describing there you know there i think i think you get a little bit of peace of mind when you have some financial security which is which is valuable.
But in terms of now, my life changes.
Now I'm enough. Now I am happy.
Now I feel good about myself.
None of that changes for really anybody that I know.
And the hardest part, as you said, is you think it will.
You think, oh, I'll be so happy once I achieve this thing.
And I think an example is just there's a lot of miserable billionaires from what I read and that should tell you a lot yeah exactly maybe a second to last question i'm curious if there's anything recently you're focused on i've been thinking a lot about that you maybe you change your mind about or it's
kind of changed the way you think about the world the last um two years i had my two oldest boys go off to college um 2022 and then 2024 and that really hit me hard i you would think that i would have been preparing for that for 18 years for each of them.
But for some reason, it just really hit me really, really hard.
And I think it was a real wake up call of mortality, I guess.
And to realize that nothing goes on forever.
And these wonderful people that I had lived with for each for 18 years were no longer going to really be a part of my daily life.
And that really set me off on a journey of a lot of spiritual work, doing a lot of meditating and working with some gurus.
And it's been really profound.
And it's put me a lot closer in touch with the things that really matter to me and I've given myself more permission to spend time doing those things than the normal external world type things.
So that was a pretty profound change for me.
And the, and the spirit spiritual journey is a arguably really the important journey.
Um, if, and, and this could be a longer conversation, but, um, and, and maybe you have the luxury of doing that journey, you know, as you get older or something, but, um, but it's been, it's been a, a really profound, profound journey.
I'm excited to see what insights come out of this part of your life.
Final question before we get to our very exciting lightning round.
We have this segment on the podcast, I call Failure Corner, where people come on this podcast, they share all these wins.
Oh, I have this amazing PE fun that's killing it.
I teach at Stanford.
I've launched all these things, all these students are so great.
Life's amazing. Nothing ever goes wrong when in reality it does.
And those stories often aren't told.
So I'm curious if there's a story you could share of time you failed in your career and If you learned something from that experience, what you learned?
Yeah, I'll tell a couple stories.
So when I was in high school, I wrestled and I cut a lot of weight to make the varsity team.
And I was not in the best mental place because of cutting weight.
But anyway, I lost a big match my junior year and I quit and I never wrestled again.
And that haunted me.
So first of all, that was a failure, a big failure for me.
and it really haunted me.
And so I kind of, after that, made a promise to myself that I wasn't going to have that happen again.
When I went to college, I tried to row crew.
I failed year after year trying to make the team, trying to make the boat, eventually had some real success my senior year.
But prior to that, just failure after failure.
And then at Alpine, we lost money on our first fund.
We had real trouble during the recession.
We made a lot of...
I think five of my first eight investments I ever made in my life lost money.
And in venture world, that's one thing, but in private equity, that's a whole different ratio, which is not a good ratio at all.
um you know when i first started teaching um wasn't wasn't good at teaching uh you know what had a lot of insecurities was i was really young when i started and i didn't feel like i had really anything to share with the students and i i i think that showed up and i it took me a long time to kind of figure
that out so i i i guess my almost my entire track record is one that starts with things not going well and then just over a long period of time of chipping away looks like a success on paper but anytime in that early in the process would look like an abject failure so I'm quite familiar with failure
in the form of setbacks I think the ultimate failure though was the wrestling one where I just quit that was that was really the only one I would characterized as a failure.
The other ones, because I kept going and staying with it, turned out to work out well with a lot of scars and bruises, but the failure would have been quitting.
I love that this circles back to your core advice of stick with it.
Most things that are important take a long time and there's a lot of suffering.
Something I wanted to ask, I can't help but ask at this point because I think a lot of people are wondering this, just like when do you quit when should you quit something because some things are just not worth it is there any advice there you could share yes for sure i i think the time to quit is when you
can no longer see the vision and re and you can no longer really believe the vision and and then when that happens for a long period of time or when maybe you're no longer even excited about the vision um some somewhere in there i think you the excited one you have to be a little careful of because in the dark
days, it's exciting is not the word you're going to use, but at least like in, in, in our company for the first 10 years, it was not going well, but each time I could start to, we we'd make fewer mistakes.
We'd start to see something working.
We do one really good deal in this fund.
We'd start to learn from that.
We get one really good hire.
We'd learn from that, we would, you know, little by little, start to see these green shoots.
And, and I have this unbelievable, there's unbelievable statement, I didn't write it, Dan and Chip Heath wrote it in their book Switch, you know, which is scale your bright spots, you know, find what's working and do more of that.
And as you start to progress, like for me, for example, at Alpine, almost all the time, we always had at least a small glimmer of a bright spot, and then we'd scale that.
And then we'd continue forward and we'd find some more and we'd scale those.
And over time, all those bright spots became our business.
That became what we did.
That became our strategy.
That became how we hired people.
That became where we recruited from.
All those bright spots just started to magnify until the entire business was pretty much a bright spot.
But it took time because we had to figure out where those were and we had to do a lot of things wrong to figure out where the bright spots were.
Graham, is there anything else that you wanted to share or you think is important to leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?
I mean, I think what I would say is just in general, you got one life, you get one shot.
And so take the time to really figure out and answer the question, what does a wonderful, amazing, incredible life look like?
And just get as clear as you possibly can on that.
No matter how crazy or aspirational it seems, write it down.
Write down that thing that would make this life amazing and write it down for your life, your career, your relationships, your friends, your body, your spirituality, your financial situation.
And just the first magic is just knowing what you want.
And I'd say 90 % of people never even know what they want.
So take the time to do that.
And the more clear you are on that, the more invested you are in that, the more likely you are to make it come true.
What I love about that is you don't have to do this thing.
Just step one is understand what it could be if you could do that.
And it's almost like understand where your Google directions could take you if you turned off autopilot.
Right. Oh, man. Okay.
Well, with that, Graham, we reached our very exciting lightning round.
Are you ready? Let's do it.
first question what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people so in the in the uh sort of realm of a lot of the topics we've been talking about um which is your internal and external game i love the book um untethered soul and i love the book don't believe everything
you think they have very similar themes but they come at it differently But I think both of those will really change your perspective if you read them.
And then a very, very practical book that's probably the book I've read more than any other book is How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, which was written in like 1930.
But it is absolutely – there's no other book like it.
There's a reason that people are still recommending it 100 years after it's written.
So it's definitely worth checking out.
yeah that book i still think about it often even though i read it like 30 years ago at this point i love that recommendation and it's like it's like a very old book to read but uh you have to get past the fact that it was written a long time ago okay next question do you have a favorite recent movie
or tv show you've really enjoyed i were i for the first time watched the movie where the crawdads sing and uh i just loved it um it was it's kind of a romantic comedy or not not comedy sorry romantic uh love story meets murder mystery meets coming of age and uh it was just it really really touched me
then i i probably read the book as well so i love that do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love i'm a really big fan of sleep uh i i think it makes a massive difference in your life and that's a whole other topic we could go down another time.
But, uh, so I have, I have two things, a few things that have helped me on that.
So if you, if you saw me sleeping, I have earplugs, I have a noise machine, I have a sleep mask, and then I have a chili pad that goes on my bed to keep the bed cool.
And, um, I sleep great.
All those things really help the, the, the earplugs and mask and noise machine kind of allow you to not hear the ambient noise.
And then the, there's a lot of research actually on the temperature at which you want to sleep in this and your, your body goes up and down throughout the night.
So this chili pad that goes under your mattress, um, there's a whole bunch of versions of that.
And, and, and that, that helps a lot.
Uh, I also sleep with an eye mask and my wife and I rotate the earplugs because someone has to pay attention to the baby there you go yeah makes wakes up and this chili pad is this like the eight sleep or is this like uh like just a cold bag well no i like you know so i actually bought the eight sleep
and it was too much like it would it would turn on and off and i would wake up and and then it would track my sleep and then i'd start to freak out because it told me i wasn't sleeping well so i actually returned it and i got a really simple one called uler and it just turns on and off.
There's no timing or there's no like any weird functionality.
So it was a lot cheaper and it works better for me.
So everyone used their own thing, but that one worked better for me.
Okay. Next question.
Two more questions.
Do you have a favorite life motto that you often think about that you find useful in work or in life?
I love this quote that is kind of sums up a lot of what we talked about in the podcast.
It's by Howard Thurman.
And he says, don't ask what the world needs.
Ask instead what makes you come alive, because what the world needs most is for you to come alive.
And I think that just talks about, it's really about you coming alive.
That's the most important thing.
And that is going to have so much positive exhaust in the world.
And things from that will come that you can't even imagine right now.
I was thinking of that quote as you were describing your philosophy.
Final question. I feel like a lot of people might be listening to this being like, I came here for one of the most legendary private equity investors of all time.
And you don't talk about private equity at all.
So let me just use this opportunity to ask you just a question here.
What is it that you, what do you look for in a company that you want to buy that maybe other people don't?
Is there some insight you can share?
yeah well I I'm happy to talk about private equity by the way it's just I um we talk we'll do another episode on that this could be a whole podcast episode I understand really happy to talk about that um so I'll say like more I'll answer the question more like what's a little bit of a different philosophy
that we have so when we were um coming out of the recession and I hired this coach we looked at all of our companies and we were looking for where did we make our most money?
And what was the most consistent trend?
And we looked at valuation, growth rates, capital structure, geography, industry.
We cut the data every way you could imagine.
And we had these three companies that kept showing up on all these lists that were three of our top performers, but they didn't seem to really have anything in common.
And then we're like, well, they have one thing in common, which is they started off really badly, so badly in fact that we put our own person from Alpine in to go run the company and then they ended up becoming our best companies so we said wait a second maybe that's the highly correlated thing is us
putting our own team in place and even upstream of that maybe just having an incredible management team so that was foundational and we and we now we put our own leadership team in a 100 % of the time.
And not only that, but we have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to build a program to help people who are in their late 20s, early 30s, learn how to become CEOs.
And that's been foundational.
So the thing that we probably believe to be true that not that many people agree with us on is that the management team is really where we think all the alpha comes from.
You can't get the industry wrong because if you hire the best management team in the world to run a typewriter business, you're going to lose money.
So you can't be wrong on the industry, but you also don't have to be perfect on the industry.
You have to have a good enough industry and then a world -class management team.
And we found that to be a really good formula for consistent returns.
And it's way more fun because you're literally in a board meeting with someone that is on your side of the table because you're, you hire them and put them in.
And so you're, you're building the company together and they're, um, they're bringing a lot of the similar values.
And so it's, it's been a, a real differentiator for us.
Uh, I have so many questions, but I'm going to cut and cut it off there.
We could do another episode going deep on all this Graham.
This was amazing. I think we're going to be helping a lot of people with what they want to do with their lives and nothing else, give them a little opportunity to break out of autopilot, at least for a little bit.
Two final questions.
Where can folks find you?
Align if they want to maybe follow up, ask maybe some other questions that they are thinking as they hear this.
And then how can listeners be useful to you?
My website's gramweaver .com.
I have a blog on there as well as a lot of videos and different things.
And then on Instagram and TikTok, I'm Graham C.
Weaver. And then on LinkedIn, I'm Graham Weaver.
And on YouTube, I think I'm Graham C.
Weaver. So Graham C.
Weaver will pretty much get you on all those channels.
How can listeners be helpful?
I would say I'd love to hear from you.
So my best way to reach me is gramweaverblog .com and tell me what's on your mind.
I may not respond 100%, but I will read all the emails.
And then if you're interested, subscribe to my blog.
So go to my website, gramweaver .com.
And I have a blog where I talk about a lot of the topics that we're talking about today.
Amazing. Graham, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you, Lenny. Bye, everyone.
Thank you so much for listening.
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