Last Lecture Series: How to Design a Winnable Game – Graham Weaver

Speaker 0:00 [upbeat music]

Speaker 0:01 Change lives. Change organizations. Change organizations. Change the world. Welcome the man who pushes us to dream bigger and live louder, your limiting belief’s worst nightmare, Graham Weaver. [clapping] Thank you. The, um, lowest point of my career was October of 2008, and Lehman Brothers had just blown up about three weeks earlier. I had started a private equity fund, and the market was down 40%. And that particular day in 2008, uh, my largest investor had called me and said that he wasn't gonna be able to come in my fund because they had no money. And he said something scarier at the end of that call that I remember. He said, "You're probably gonna get this call from just about every single one of your investors." And he was right. That night I tried to go to sleep. I didn't sleep one second. I'm tossing, I'm turning, I'm just, like, getting nowhere. And so I'm like, "All right. I better, I might as well get up." I go up to my home office and I bring out, break out my spreadsheet, and I'm like, "Well, we're not gonna have a fund anytime soon." So I calculate how many months, uh, we could continue making payroll and I could keep paying my mortgage before I blew through my entire savings, and the answer was 12, which was not what I was hoping for. Uh, so I close my laptop and I look across the room, and my home office was also, uh, doubling as my daughter's bedroom. Uh, my daughter's two weeks old at the time. [laughs] So she is sleeping very soundly. She seems to be taking the collapse of the US housing market in stride.

Speaker 1:41 [laughs]

Speaker 1:42 And, uh [laughs] and I get... All of a sudden I get really, really emotional because I start to realize that she doesn't realize it at the time, but she is counting on her dad to figure this out, and Dad's not figuring this out. Um, it's not going well, and it's not going well at all. Uh, I had worked... I felt like I was doing all the right things. I was working super hard. I, I went to these brand name firms on Wall Street, and then I started my own fund and I was working as

Speaker 2:12 hard as I could, but I wasn't winning. I was about to run out of money, and it just, it just wasn't going the way that I drew it up at all. So that night I just sat there, you know, contemplating, uh, what was going on, and I had this f- realization, uh, that I wanna share with you, which is the realization was I think I'd been asking the wrong question the whole time. The question I had been asking was, "How do I play this game better, faster, stronger?" You know, hit the more button, grind it out. And I'd been doing that for 14 years since I graduated, and it wasn't working. So I said, "All right. I'm gonna ask myself a different question. The question I'm gonna ask, uh, that I sh- is, 'Am I playing the right game at all?'" And the answer I knew right then in my gut was like, "No." A resounding no. So I started saying, "Well, how could I design a winnable game?" And the winnable game, the way I defined it, was a game that you can win, a game that you wanna win, you're excited to play, and a game where if you actually play that game, it's gonna bring you closer to the person that you really wanna be. And maybe if I had to simplify it, it'd be something like the external success and your internal fulfillment aren't in conflict, but they're actually in the same game. And so that's what I wanna share with all of you today. I wanna share four steps that I came up with to help you try to design and play a winnable game. So the first step is

Speaker 3:44 choose a game that stirs your blood. So that night, uh, in October of 2008, I went back and I thought, like, "When was a time in my life when I was really, really fired up to play this game, and when was I... When did I feel like I was actually really winning?" And I went back to college, and I rowed crew in college, and I was one of 70 freshmen who went out for the rowing team. I'd never rowed before. I grew up in Ohio, in northwest Ohio. Went to a public school. I didn't even know that the boats went backwards. So I, like, go out for the team, and three weeks in the, uh, they post the boats of the people that made the team. My name's not on the list, uh, not, maybe not surprisingly. And so they said, "Okay, if your name's not on this list, you get to be a land warrior. You get to use the rowing equipment and, uh, you know, but, but you don't get to go on the boats." I'm like, "Okay, no problem." So that night I do some calculus and I'm like, "Okay, there's the women's team and the heavyweight and the lightweight, and there's al- gonna be all these land warriors flooding the boathouse." So I get down to the boathouse, it's 6:00 AM. The first one there. I get on the rowing machine, I'm rowing. And by the way, it would turn out no one else would come down 'cause land warrior was really just a euphemism for, "You're cut, you dumbass." [laughs]

Speaker 4:49 [laughs]

Speaker 4:49 And, and so I'm rowing on the rowing machine, and about 30 minutes in this guy comes and he's, like, three rowing machines over, and it's not a student. It's, like, a 31-year-old guy. He's got this mustache. He's this massive guy. And he just starts hammering this rowing machine. I've never heard it make a noise like that, and it's... He's not doing it, like, one time. He's doing it for, like, f- an hour. And 15 minutes in I had turned this fan on. The fan is blowing the sweat that he's hitting into me and I'm thinking-

Speaker 5:14 [laughs]

Speaker 5:14 ... his sweat underneath him is starting to creep toward me and I'm thinking, "Am I supposed to move? What am I supposed to do here?" Anyway, so this goes on, this routine that we have, the two of us go down to the boathouse. This goes on for about a week. He never acknowledges me at all. I would later find out that this person was Mike Tatty, and Mike would go on to row in three Olympics and win a bronze medal, and then he would coach the US team in the 2004 to a gold medal. So he was a pretty big deal in, in, in US rowing. But anyway, he didn't even acknowledge, ack- acknowledge me till about a week in, and he, his, he acknowledged me by giving me kinda one of these, like this. And I played it... I, I was like, that... I played it really cool, so I gave him one of these.

Speaker 5:51 [laughs]

Speaker 5:53 And then [laughs] and then he kinda gave me one of these.

Speaker 5:55 [laughs]

Speaker 5:55 And, and then, um, that took, that set us back another couple weeks. But then-

Speaker 6:00 [laughs]

Speaker 6:01 [laughs] But then three weeks in, uh, we're sitting in the locker room and I think Mike's curiosity just got the better of him and he said He's like, "Who are you?" And, and I said, "I'm Graham. I'm a land warrior. Who are you?" [audience laughing] And he said, "Well, I'm Mike." And he said, "Well, Graham, what are you doing down here every morning? By the way, I s- also see you sometimes in the afternoon practice, like, what are you doing?" And I said-- "What are you training for?" Like, and I said, "I'm--" I, I said, "I'm, I'm a land warrior. I'm trying to make the third-string novice freshman lightweight team." [audience laughing]

Speaker 6:33 And he, and he said, "Well, Graham, your form is terrible, but I'll tell you one thing. If you keep training the way that you're training, you'll make the Olympic team." And I remember just this huge surge of energy came into me when this person I'd been watching, who was this Adonis of rowing, told me that. I love this quote by Daniel Burnham. He says, "Make no little plans, for they have no power to stir one's blood." The first blood that you need to stir is your own. And rowing stirred my blood, and being an Olympian, or even the idea of being an Olympian, stirred my blood. And so what I knew back then about goal setting, I learned from this guy named Brian Tracy. I listened to one of his audiobooks. I think he's one of the leading writers on goals. And what he said is, "Write down your three most important goals every day and write them in the present tense as though you'd already achieved them, and then write what you're gonna do to move toward it." So I wro- I had this green spiral notebook, and I wrote down every day, "I am an Olympian." And I wrote down the three things I was gonna do to move toward that goal. And a funny thing happened. I started-- A part of me started believing that I already was an Olympian the day that I set that goal and started writing it down. And every time I did one of those things on that list, which was typically workouts or eating well or whatever it was, I started assuming more and more of the identity of an Olympian. And when you choose a goal that stirs your blood, there's a part of you that will assume the identity of someone who's already achieved this goal, and this is an incredibly powerful force. And now, just writing your goal down doesn't make everything rainbows and unicorns. I lost more seat races than I won. I didn't make the team I want- the boat I want in my freshman year, my sophomore year, my junior year. And, and so it, it doesn't just happen overnight. My endurance didn't change overnight. My strength didn't change overnight. Um, but I did get a lot better, and by my senior year, I made, I made the varsity team. I was elected captain. Our team won nationals. And for one, uh, one moment, I had one of, if not the top, uh, 2,000-meter time in the country. So then I started thinking

Speaker 8:34 that night in October, I was looking back and saying, "Well, what are we doing at Alpine? You know, what, what's my equivalent of, of the Olympic goal, uh, at Alpine?" And what, you know, when, when things really weren't going that well. So this is what we were f- this is what we had been working on. [chuckles] "Generate attractive risk-adjusted returns while maximizing the probability of capital preservation." Let's go. [audience laughing] Who's with me? You know? Who wants to do-- And, and like, this is really-- It's humorous, but like, this is actually really, really scary. And, and, and this is a big part of what I'm trying to communicate today, which is what happens to all of us is that there's a point in our lives where we have these incredible hopes and dreams. We have confidence. You know, we wanna go take over the world. We have all these amazing things that we wanna do. And then life intervenes, and we might have heartbreak, we might have loss, we might have setbacks. You know, things don't go the way we want. We might have people in our lives telling us, you know, that we can't do things or we're not enough, or we might have a job where things don't go the way we want. And little by little, we start to lower our object- our goals. We start to not believe in ourselves and think maybe we're not enough. And so we end up with a goal like this. So rather than setting a goal of being an Olympian, we have the equivalent, which I would say this is, of hitting, of trying to make the third-string lightweight novice, you know, team, and we settle for this. And there's two huge problems with this. The first problem is you will assume the identity of someone who's working on this goal. And if you read this goal carefully, what it's really saying is try not to lose money. And so I assume the identity of someone who's, like, holding on tightly to Alpine. "We can't invest in this, and we can't do that, and we're never gonna, you know, we're n- we're not gonna be big, and we have to stay in this little box." And that was the identity that I had assumed and why we weren't winning, by the way. And the second big problem is you're setting off on a life journey that you don't care if you win or not. And that might sound really obvious, but it's not a winnable game if you're not excited to win the game. And so many people, that's the journey that you set off

Speaker 10:35 on. So we started asking ourselves a better question, and the question, if you've taken my class or seen any of my content, is, "What would you do if you knew you wouldn't fail?" And this is my favorite question. I would encourage you to ask yourself this question maybe every month at least and, and answer this question in all the different areas of your life. What would, what would you do if you knew you wouldn't fail? We had a hard time even answering this question. There were so many doubts and fears and limiting belief and past history and losses and things that kept clouding us that we c- almost couldn't even answer this question. It literally took us months to come up with an answer. But we came up with our equivalent, uh, of becoming an Olympian, and it was this: Be the number one performing private equity fund in the world and deliver 5X on every single fund. And just to give you an idea of the 5X, the top twenty-five percent of private equity firms in any vintage deliver about 1.8X to 2X, so we are gonna be several standard deviations better. This was our equivalent of make the Olympics. And by the way, at the time when we set this goal, it was the equivalent, equivalently aspirational of me setting the goal of being an Olympian when I was a 135-pound mullet-sporting novice, uh, who'd never rowed from Ohio. That's kind of where we were at the time we set this goal. And a funny thing happened. We started showing up as though we were the people that were capable of achieving that goal. We started investing in different kinds of companies. We started attracting different people to the, uh, who wanted to come with us on the journey that we were on. And it hasn't been rainbows and unicorns. We've had lost money on deals. We've had people leave. We've had CEOs not work out. We've had everything you could imagine. But we

Speaker 12:08 delivered 5X on the four funds that we invested subsequent to setting this goal, or f- three of them, and f- the fourth is on its way And we did it our way. I've been writing my goals down now for 40 years, and I wanna share the most important thing that I learned, and if you take nothing else from today, I want you to either take a picture mentally or physically of, of this, which is you will have a higher probability of achieving an aspirational goal that you're excited about than you will of a more moderate goal. There's a reason for this. It's because you will show up differently. You will assume the identity of someone capable of achieving that goal. You will crowd out unnecessary distractions. You will attract different people on your journey, and most importantly, you will stay with it a lot longer. Ironically, when you think you're playing it safe by setting a more modest goal, you actually have a lower chance of hitting that goal. Um, I wanna just address one thing. I, I think because I post a lot on social media about setting goals, on my feed, I get all these people talking about manifesting. [chuckles] I don't know if you get that on your feed or not, but I do. And these people will say things like, "Close your eyes and say, 'Money comes freely and easily to me,'" and then they're gonna see dollar bills everywhere, and money's just gonna start... And I'm just like, "I don't know what these people are talking about." [audience laughing] This is not what I'm saying, for the avoidance of doubt. What I am saying is have a North Star in your life that gets you out of bed. Have something that is your definite purpose that you're excited about, that is where you're aligning your calendar and your goals and your emotional energy toward. Have something like that that you're excited about in your lifetime, and you'll see your energy align behind it. If you want to play a winnable game, choose a goal that stirs your blood. Step two is design your own game. So

Speaker 14:10 we, by the way, for the avoidance of doubt, when we set that goal of five ex- we had absolutely no idea how we were gonna do it, but we did know one thing, which is there's no way we were gonna hit that by doing what everyone else was doing. So we needed to design our own game. The crowded path that is clearly marked is almost never where you're going to find your winnable game, and yet the world will conspire to have you play exactly this game because it's crowded and well-lit and clearly marked. If you think of the people that you admire, authors, musicians, uh, poets, entrepreneurs, what you'll notice if you look carefully is they all played their own game. They found a game no one else was playing, and in doing so, they lived into who they were, and that's what I'm gonna invite all of you to do. Most games you'll find have very few rules. When we started thinking about the rules in private equity, there's all these conventions, all these things. You back existing management, you do this, you sell the companies, you hold it this, and none of that was actually true. It turned out we only came up with three rules, which is investors give

Speaker 15:10 us money, we have to give them money back at some point, hopefully more than they gave us [chuckles] , and in between, we wanted to act with eth- ethically and according to our values. And those are the only three rules that we came up with. All the rest was just conventional wisdom. So we started asking some questions to try to unearth places that no one else was looking. We wanted to find diamonds in the rough. So here's some questions we came up with. What do customers hate about this industry or experience? And there were a lot of things on that list. What are your competitors unwilling to do? What's a problem that breaks your heart? Uh, what assum- assumptions are you making? Uh, and finally, what do you believe to be true that not that many people agree with you on? And when we started unearthing these questions, we found all kinds of diamonds. We found green shoots everywhere that, where, of places that no one else was looking. And then we came up with our most powerful question of all, which is, what are your bright spots? What's going well? So we are all loss-averse, and we, we tend to look at what's broken and wanna fix it. We look at our weaknesses and wanna con- correct them. But the real magic is not in any of that. Probably 90% of all the great things we've done at Alpine have come from scaling the things that are working. So we looked at our portfolio and we said, "Well, what's working?" And, [chuckles] and, and, uh, we, we cut the data every way you would imagine, growth rate, leverage, mo- all the stuff. And the only thing we could find, our three best deals had seeming- seemingly nothing in common except one thing, which is that they happened to have, uh, gone so poorly that we took someone from our own team and put them in to run the company, or someone from our network, and those ended up being our best companies. By the way, they were also the most fun, 'cause we're sitting in the board meeting with someone that we in, you know, that we had put in and we're together, we had the same values, and we're talking about how we're gonna build this incredible business. So it was, it was the, b- it was not only the, the most, uh, the, our best deals, but it was also the most fun. So we said to ourselves, "Well, what if we just did that? What if we backed our own teams every time?" And then we get this flood of conventional wisdom. You shouldn't change management. It's hard. By the way, we don't have management. We don't know how to source deals. And so we kinda, like, let it go. We said, "Well, we can't really do that." And

Speaker 17:12 then the realization we had was that's the work. You know, that's the work. The work isn't to play the game everyone else is playing, only better, faster, harder. The work is in using your creativity to create the capabilities to play the game you really wanna play. And so we spent a lot of time on that. And then when we on- started doing that, we realized the world needed this too. 80% of companies didn't have a succession plan for management, so they needed someone to come in and run those businesses. When you can find the intersection of a problem that the world, that needs to be solved and a place that gives you energy, that's where you're gonna find your edge, and some might even call this your purpose. But this takes a little while, and you have to look for this, and you have to spend time on it. We spent a full day a week outside the office for about six months to come up with this idea. If you wanna play a winnable game, choose a game that stirs your blood and design your own game. Step three is play the game with

Speaker 18:13 people you admire. My first job on Wall Street, I had this boss, and I will just, to protect his name, I'll call him Larry. And one Saturday night, it's 8:30 PM, and I'm, I'm working on a financial model. By the way, it's a financial model for a company we didn't own for a deal we were never gonna do for a vice president who didn't ask for it. Probably you all have worked on something like that. So it's 8:30 at night, I'm working on this. Larry is standing about three inches behind me, and he's barking out commands at me, "Graham, make that line thicker. Make that column narrower. Helvetica font. How many times have I told you?" [chuckles] You know, it, and this is literally the relationship that La- this was our date night on Saturday nights.

Speaker 18:50 [laughing]

Speaker 18:51 And, um, and this br- and I put up with this, you know, this is kind of our normal thing, except this particular night, I was really bummed because my mom was in town. And my mom and I are really close, and she had driven out from Perrysburg, Ohio, and she was a single mom at the time, and she had picked out some restaurants that she wanted to hang out with, and I'm picturing her being at one of those restaurants while I'm making lines thicker for Larry. So it's not a great evening. Fast-forward to the end of that year, and I'm, it's time for bonus. Larry completely dings me on my bonus. Like, he gives me, like, a 25% haircut, and I said, "Larry, what the heck? You know, I worked so many hours. I worked 80, 90, 100 hours. I did everything that you ever asked." He said, "Well, you know, Graham, it wasn't really your work. Um, it wasn't your hours. You know, those were all fine. It was, I just wanted to send you a message. You know, I wanted you to be hungrier. Because if you were hungry, you wouldn't have asked to leave during an analysis to go have dinner with your mom." So that was my first experience out of work. That was my first year. So fast-forward to starting Alpine, and I, around the time I started Alpine, I also had my first son, Chase. And so two years in, Chase is two, and I, I don't really know what I'm, how to be a dad or how to, I was just a f- new, new dad and a new founder. Um, so anyway, my ch- ch- my wife would take Chase to this program called Side by Side, and it's, like, pre-pre-pre-pre-K. I mean, he's two years old. The agenda's, like, snack time, story time, recess. And, and, and, and she's like, "Graham, you have to do this. It's so much fun. It's the cutest thing ever. You've gotta, you gotta come." And, like, at this point, I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Like, am I-- Do you take time off work to go to do this in the middle of the day? Like, I'm trying to figure all this out, right? I'm a new, I'm a new dad. So on Monday, just so the Side by Side was on Tuesday, so on Monday, we have our partner meeting with all the partners at Alpine and, and we get through all of our business, whatever, and we have, like, 15 minutes at the end, and I'm, I'm kinda, like, poking around to see, like, what, what's gonna happen. So I'm like, "Well, you know, there's this, there's this thing. It's Side by Side. It's tomorrow. The, you know, they let dads go," and I'm kinda like testing the waters, and I'm really nervous about doing this 'cause I have some scar tissue from, from Larry. And, uh, and my partner Billy just interrupts me and he says, "Graham, you mean they let dads go? [chuckles] That's awesome. Yeah, I'll take your meetings. Like, that, that'll be so much fun. You know, send me pictures. I can't wait to hear all about it." And I just remember this wave of, like, relief just came over me because I'm like, "I don't know how I'm gonna navigate all this stuff, but I know who I'm gonna do it with, and I know I'm gonna do it with people that really care about me as a person." And it's been the most amazing journey ever. And Billy would go on to have kids of his own and coach them and travel around the country, uh, with, with his kids playing sports. I would get to go to, uh, all my music recitals of my kids and pa- parent-teacher conferences. I took all three of my kids to Side by Side and went to lots of sporting events, and it's just been an amazing journey. And my, my two boys are in college now, so I don't have as many of those opportunities, uh, but I wouldn't have traded, there's, there's nothing I would trade for those opportunities. I look back sometimes, and I think to myself, "What would that conversation on Monday have been like with Larry?" You know, how would that have gone? And I, I, I, I can tell you how it would've gone, which is I never would've had it. Instead, I would've just played through, and I would've worn it as a badge of honor, that I could just play through these, these things that were going on in my life and, and prioritize work. And the reason that I know that is because I stayed on Wall Street for two more years after that, and I played through. You know, I, my mom didn't come to visit again in the next two years, so I didn't ask for time off to go see her. My girlfriend got promoted, had a promotion, and her roommate threw her a surprise party. I played through. I had m- multiple friends of mine have big birthday parties, and I played through. I didn't go to those, and I even missed two of my best friends' weddings. So life would've been a lot different had I aligned my life with people that had very different values than I did. That's not the worst part. The scariest part is I started to become Larry, and I wonder if I had stayed on Wall Street for another year or two, if I would've been the associate telling an analyst that they couldn't have dinner with their mom when she came to town. The people in your life will shape your goals, your values, and ultimately your identity, so choose the people with whom you share your life very carefully. If you wanna play a winnable game, choose a game that stirs your blood, design your own game, and play with people you admire. My final point is play now. The

Speaker 23:56 greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing you your life will start when. And I know many of you having lunch and coffees with you say s- very similar things to that I say all the time, which is, "My life will start when... I'll do this when. When I finally pay off my business school loans, when I finally get this promotion, when I get this new job, when I'm actually in the right job, when I have the right relationship, when I have kids, when my kids are older, when I pay off my mortgage," when, when, when, when. And for a long time, I always thought that there was something to be gotten through before my life was really gonna start. And what I've realized is those things that you're getting through, that is your life. And your life starts now, and, and it starts in those things. The two most dangerous words that students say, and I hear them all the time, are, "Graham, I have this thing I really wanna do. I'm excited about it." Just they never say, you know, in 22 years, no student has ever said, "I'm not gonna do it." They say, "Not now." Winnable games aren't found, they're designed, and you never know where you're gonna find them. I never thought I would find my meaning and purpose in a private-- running a private equity firm. So you don't know where you're gonna find it, so you might as well start looking for it right now. You don't need to start your own firm to start trying to design your own winnable game. But I can tell you where you're not gonna find your winnable game. You're not gonna find it on the sidelines. You're not gonna find it by being half in and half out. You're not gonna find it by waiting around for life to really start and being hedged. If you're not careful, you can spend your whole life there. And you're gonna find your passion by being passionate about the life that you're in right now, no matter what the situation is. So what I shared with you today are four steps to designing a winnable game, a game where you can combine something that you're really excited about, something that matters to you, a game you can win, and ultimately

Speaker 25:57 a game where p-- just playing the game alone allows you to be the person that you really wanna be. If you follow these steps and can find that alignment, I think that's what re-- winning really looks like. So class of 2025, let's play now. Now is the time to choose a game that stirs your blood. Ask yourself the question, "What would I do if I knew I wouldn't fail?" Ask yourself that often until the answer becomes really clear to you, and then write that down and start moving toward it, and you will assume the identity of someone who's already achieved that goal. Remember, you will have a higher probability of achieving a goal that you're excited about than you will of a more moderate goal. And playing big is the real you. Now is the time to design your game. Realize that most rules aren't rules at all, they're just conventional wisdom, and most games really have very few rules. Look for problems that break your heart. Look for places that other people aren't looking. Scale your bright spots, both your wins and the things that give you energy. When you can combine something that the world needs with something you're excited about, that's where you're really gonna light up. That's where you're gonna find your purpose. Play the game with people you admire. Find the people who give you energy and share your values and share your life with them, and avoid the people who don't. Your goals and values and ultimately your identity will come from the people with whom you share your life. And I can promise you when you look back, almost every single one of your favorite memories will involve one of-- someone that you really care about. And finally, play now. The two most dangerous words are "not now," and waiting on the sidelines is not where you're gonna find your winnable game. Waiting on the sidelines is just fear in another form. You never know where your l-- winnable game is, so you might as well start looking for it where you are right now. You will find your passion by being passionate about your life that you're leading. Class of 2025, you're ready. You are enough, and the game starts now. What game will you play with this one precious life of yours? Thank you. [audience applauding] Thank you. [audience applauding] [upbeat music]