Graham Weaver
Graham Weaver teaches a top-rated course at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (GSB), where he often unexpectedly ends up helping students figure out what to do with their lives. He is also the founder and CEO of Alpine Investors, a people-driven private equity firm.
Career Skills
Executive coaching provides the necessary external accountability and dedicated space to move out of 'autopilot' mode.
"The equivalent of that in your life is an executive coach... Number one, make space to ask yourself the big questions in life about your career, your relationships, your health... And then part two is..."
Use the 'Genie Framework' to identify your true career desires by removing the fear of failure from the equation.
"Imagine that you're walking home from work and you see this 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 genie says, 'He..."
Identifying your ideal career path requires stripping away the subconscious fear of failure.
"The biggest question I think with respect to your career is, within reason, what would you do if you knew you wouldn't fail?"
The 'Nine Lives' exercise helps de-risk career exploration by allowing you to envision multiple fulfilling paths simultaneously.
"You basically come up with nine lives. So you say your first life, life one is the life you have now... The first rule is all the lives have to start from today... And the second rule is you have to b..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
In high-stakes business, the quality of the leadership team is the primary driver of success, outweighing perfect industry selection.
"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..."
Leadership Skills
Hard conversations and firing are foundational 'Xs and Os' skills for any effective leader.
"I was teaching the Xs and Os 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..."
Externalizing fears by writing them down transforms paralyzing uncertainty into a manageable list of tactical problems.
"The first part of limiting 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 overcom..."
Meaningful change requires a willingness to accept short-term decline or discomfort in exchange for long-term growth.
"Everything you want is on the other side of worse first... 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 be..."
The signal to stop a pursuit is the loss of belief in the ultimate vision, not the presence of temporary 'suffering.'
"I think the time to quit is when you can no longer see the vision and you can no longer really believe the vision."
Product Management Skills
Daily repetition of a primary goal combined with three immediate actions creates massive momentum and subconscious alignment.
"I wrote down at the top of the page every single morning, I wrote down, 'I am the number one rower in the country.'... And then I wrote down three things I was going to do that day to move toward that..."