Last Lecture Series: “How to Live an Asymmetric Life,” Graham Weaver

Graham Weaver 0:00 Change lives Change organizations Change organizations Change the world. [on hold music] [audience clapping] Thank you. 20 years ago, I'm in this meeting. I'm in this huge co- There's this huge conference table that seats 20 people, and I'm the only one there. I'm in the 29th floor in the financial district. There's this window, I can see the entire bay, and Alcatraz and everything. And again, I'm about your age at this time. It's a conference room of my largest investor, this guy, I'll call him Joe, and Joe is this bigger than life person, hedge fund magnate, household name. And I'm sitting there, and I am petrified. I am shaking. And my, my throat is dry, and I can hear Joe walking toward me. And then I hear the, the knob turn, and he walks in as he always did, just huge personality. "Graham!" You know, he's all excited, and I'm sitting there, and he sits down, and he can see something's, like, really wrong. I tell Joe that his investment in my firm is down 50%. He's lost half his money, and it wasn't his firm's money, it was his personal money. And I can just see the energy drain out of him, and the worst part is he's trying so hard to be positive because he knows if he says the wrong thing, like, he's just gonna crush me because I, I was, I was so fragile, and he was my... You know, he's my largest investor. I had been told no by over 100 people raising my first fund, and there were about five or six people like Joe who said yes because, not because I had any track record, 'cause I didn't, but 'cause he believed in me. You know, just me. He was investing in Graham Weaver. And, uh, that's what I had to show for him. I ga- I lost half his money, and it was the worst day of my career at that point and even to this day. The

Graham Weaver 2:02 thing that I thought I knew about investing back then, it was all wrong. What I thought I knew at the time was rule one, don't lose money, and rule two, never forget rule one. So I spent all that time, [laughs] I spent all that time just playing for, like, playing small, like, just trying to protect my downside, trying not to lose really hard. So we bought businesses, like, at a discount to their net asset value, and even when things went right, it didn't go that right. But there were three times I wrote literally in an investment memo that it is mathematically impossible to lose money on this investment, and we lost money all three times. [laughs] [audience laughing] So what I, what I learned is that it's kind of like, imagine you're, imagine you're, you start dating, and your only purpose of dating is not get your heart broken, and you're gonna have one foot in and one foot out. And even if you have a, even if you have a good date, it's not gonna be that great 'cause you're not really in it, but the more likely outcome is you're gonna guarantee the very outcome you're trying to avoid, which is you're gonna get your heart broken. And so I started deciding o- over the, over the next 30 years, I started realizing that that was 180 degrees from what I should be doing in investing, that no matter what you do in this life, like, if you're gonna invest, there's gonna be downside. You- you're, there, you're never gonna get that to zero. You can reduce it maybe a little bit, but the more valuable part and the magic is what can you do on the upside. You know, what, what can go- when it goes right, you know? At, at class, I write assume success. What happens if things go well? In 30 years of being a professional investor, I can summarize great investing in a single word, which is asymmetry, and you are looking for the biggest possible outcome relative to your risk, and your risk typically is just losing one times your money. That's all you're gonna lose. So you wanna be stacking criteria on top of each other where it becomes asymmetric. So for example, i- if you have the criteria of an amazing management team that is gonna work super hard and hire well, and they're gonna be in this industry that's got infinite capacity, and they can re- redeploy capital at high rates of return, and, and, and, and you can hold it for 10 years, and they wanna keep going, and you stack those on top of each other, they don't stack linearly. They stock, they stack logarithmically and, and you can have an almost infinite outcome. They're, you're not playing for one and a half or two times your money as we were in the early days. You can be playing for 10, 20, 50, 100 times your money with that, with that criteria, and you don't have to do many of those investments in your lifetime. So as I started realizing that this was w- how I was living my life invest- investing, it also was how I was living my personal life, and I was just

Graham Weaver 4:33 playing small. I was playing not to lose. I was just trying to, just trying not to lose. And so what I'm gonna share with you today is how to live an asymmetric life, and there are four principles, and if you get one of these principles right, you will, you will dramatically, dramatically improve your life. If you get two or three right, you'll have this magical, incredible life. But if you can run the table on all four, you can have literally an infinite life. You can have almost anything that you want, and you can live with joy, and you can

Graham Weaver 5:03 sustain, and you can have energy, and you can sustain that for decades, and I can tell you this from experience. Principle one is do hard things. So we have this view, we have this thought that life is supposed to be easy, and that there's, and that, and that comfort is where we're gonna gain, uh, happiness. So you can order Harmony Bowl from Sweetgreen on your, on your app. You can ha- you can s- you can bin- binge-watch Succession and Ted Lasso, and you can have, you can have, you can have a life of ease and, and, and that will give you a quick hit of dopamine. But make no mistake, that is not the path. It is exactly the opposite. I rowed crew in college, and the way you measure progress in rowing, and the way you kinda determine what boat you're gonna, as, as Logan was saying, is you, you have an erg test. You sit on a, a rowing machine. You row 2,000 meters as, as hard as you can. And the saying is, "If you get done with that erg test and you can pull one more stroke, you didn't pull hard enough." So it's gonna hurt no matter what you do. It's gonna hurt. Well, throughout the course of the, the season, like the day that I'd show up, which would be like September 1st, from that date all the way through March, I would improve my erg time by 20 seconds roughly. From the first day that, with all the conditioning, everything we do. But, so a, a big part of that would be rowing, stadium stairs, uh, weight- lifting weights, and on and on. And it was grueling and it was, it was a lot. But all that stuff I just said would take about six months, and only 10 seconds of that 20 would come from that. The other 10 seconds would come in the first two weeks. You're like, "What?" So what happened in the first two weeks to give you 10 seconds? I'll tell you what didn't happen. You didn't change your cardiovascular fitness. You didn't change your strength. You didn't change your VO2 max or your technique. All you changed is your comfort to be uncomfortable. You realize that you could push yourself a lot harder than you thought you could. That's all that changed. That was half of the gains I would get all year, would just be me reminding myself that I had a lot more than I thought I did, and that at 750 meters

Graham Weaver 7:05 with [laughs] when my heart rate's 175 beats a minute, I'm not go- you know, I can keep going. This chart right here shows our lives, and this is what happens. We get kind of complacent, you know, or we, or we get, we get comfortable, and if we wanna move forward and get to the next peak, the magic of, um, is to understand that your life will, is almost always gonna get worse first. Any change that you wanna make is almost always gonna get worse first. So if you're in a relationship and you have to have a hard conversation, that particular night your life is gonna get a little worse, and then you're gonna come out the other end and it's gonna get better. Or if you need to leave a relationship that you shouldn't be in in the first place, your life's gonna get worse first. If you wanna change careers and you wanna learn something new, you're gonna go down the learning curve. Your salary's probably gonna go down. You're gonna not be good at your job when you first start. Your life's gonna get worse first. You wanna start a new habit, you wanna take a cold shower, you wanna meditate, you wanna start exercising, it's gonna get worse first. And you're gonna, and you're gonna follow this pattern, but you need to realize that the thing that's keeping you there is the first move is always gonna be worse. And eventually, you're gonna... Eventually, what's gonna happen is these, these, uh, downward curves are gonna get a lot shallower. Because you know what the biggest part of that curve is? It's just fear. The biggest part of that curve is just fear. So the more you put yourself in situations where you do hard things, the shallower and shallower those divots are gonna get because, because you're gonna remove that fear, just

Graham Weaver 8:37 like I mentioned in the rowing example. I had no fear at 2,000 meters then I, or at 1,500 meters. Everything that you want in this life is on the other side of worse first. If you wanna have an asymmetric life, do hard things. Second principle if you wanna have an asymmetric life, do your thing. Do your thing. When I graduated from school, probably like many of you, I had a choice to make. There were two, basically two options. There was, uh, there was a firm that came to recruit on campus, and I knew I could do it as what I did before business school. It was a big private equity firm. There was a, a c- number of my classmates went with me. There was a salary and a bonus and free lunches, and it was, it was really clear and, and then there was, there was another path, which is I'd done these, as La- Logan said, I'd started doing this crazy stuff in business school with buying companies on my credit cards and, like, but I was like, "I don't even know how that's gonna work." Like, I don't, I don't know what that looks like. I don't know how to get started. I don't know how to raise money, whatever. So, so I chose, I chose, uh, the path of, of going to the big firm. Let me tell you what happened during that time. My boss is like, "Here's what you need to do to be vice president." You know, "Here's your goalpost." So I'm gonna, like, sprint like hell to those goalposts [laughs] as fast as I can, as all of you are, right? Because you're competitive and you wanna go there. So I got on early flights and, you know, would start bidding on businesses, and they'd tell me which companies to go to, and I would do those, and I would, I would throw, I threw myself in with everything that I had. And if I had kids at the time, I would've been home late, and I would've, you know, missed Little League games. And the thing is, Buddha figured out something 2,800 years ago, the first principle of Buddhism, which is called dukkha, which is that there's gonna be suffering [laughs] either way. There's no easy path. There's no safe path. There's no path of ease. There's no path that's, that's gonna be, that's gonna make everything right. You're gonna suffer either way. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you that. But I'm 20 years out of school, and it's, it's the truth, truest thing I'm probably gonna say today. Life is suffering, and so choose something worth suffering for. The other thing you're missing in this equation of your expe- is, is you're gonna do an expected value calculation, right? But there's one thing you're not factoring into that equation, which

Graham Weaver 11:08 is you're not factoring in you when you're turned on. I went to this dinner in New York, and it was a bunch of other private-- It wa- it was ridiculous, this dinner. There was a whole bunch of private equity people there, and, uh, we go to this restaurant in New York. It's one of those restaurants that has, like, the ice, and the fish's heads are, like, in the ice. And you can, like, go up and you point to the fish that you want, and for the privilege of doing that, you pay, like, four times more for the same fish. [laughs] But y- but they're in the ice, and then, like, we had a reservation at, like, 8 o'clock at night, and then even with a reservation, we still didn't get seated till, like, 9:15, which is, like, my bedtime typically. [laughs] And, and then we're at the dinner, and this one woman comes in from, with a, with a, um, a driver and everything, and she's from the Hamptons. She's-- If I had a counter, she said the words Hamptons probably 13 times at dinner. [laughs] I was like, "Just out of curiosity, do you happen to have a place in the Hamptons? 'Cause I'm kinda confused." [laughs] And, uh, but, but there's this one guy there, Dave, okay? And Dave is in the same business. He's in the same role as me. We're in the same... He's a c- at a competing firm, and Dave starts going off. Dave is like, "I just won this deal. You won't believe this. Here's what happened. There was this debt co- this is what we did on the debt covenants. We didn't step them down. We had the debt to EBITDA that didn't step down for two quarters. We're gonna save 50 basis points on our interest, and we used pro forma adjusted trailing 12 months yesterday EBITDA times 365, and we therefore we're, we're getting an extra quarter of a turn of debt, and that's gonna help our..." And he's going on and on and on, and I'm thinking, "Dave thinks he's colonizing Mars, you know? He's so excited about this."

Speaker 12:43 [laughs]

Graham Weaver 12:43 Like, he's, in his head, you know, he's colonizing Mars. And I'm thinking to myself two things. I'm thinking, first, Dave is gonna kick my ass-

Speaker 12:54 [laughs]

Graham Weaver 12:55 -because I don't care at all about any of this stuff. And, and the other thing I realized is that this is what Dave had written his business school essay about. He was living it. He was doing the thing that he wanted to be doing. And what, what... Y- you're not, you're not gonna win doing someone else's dream. You can survive for a little while, but you're not gonna win. If you wanna live an asymmetric life, do

Graham Weaver 13:25 hard things and do your thing. The, uh, third principle is do it for decades. And, and this is a, this is one that probably a lot of people don't wanna hear. So like I have conversations with a lot of you, and the conversation will go something like this. "My roommate's sister's friend Megan is trading Dogecoin and made $2 million, and that could've been me, you know, 'cause I, I just wasn't in the right place at the right time. And her friend Kristen is tr- day trading Bored Ape NFTs and, like, makes $30,000 of passive income and all this stuff, right? And, and that's, that could've been you if you were just in the right place. But you're all behind, you know? You're not there yet. You're just, you're, like, way behind where you should be." And I thought that same thing when I was here. When I was here, it was internet 1.0, B2C, like petfood.com. My classmates all went into that. And if Dave at that dinner had asked me, although he, Dave was not a good conversationalist, so he never asked me, but-

Speaker 14:25 [laughs]

Graham Weaver 14:25 Had [laughs] had, had Dave asked me about what I was excited about, I would've talked about building this bus- this little label business. I would've talked about the culture we were trying to build at this company. I would've talked about how we punched way above our weight, and we hired this person for their att- his attributes, and no one thought of this, and we p- pulled him from this public company, and then we were putting lean manufacturing in the plant. We were building a culture where people wanted to stay and spend their lives, and we were training people from high school to be press operators. And and and and and and. And Dave would've been like, "Graham thinks he's freaking changing the world, you know, with this little label business."

Speaker 14:57 [laughs]

Graham Weaver 14:58 Um, but what, so what we didn't factor in at the time was I was willing to just keep going because I loved it. If you think of the equation for returns, it's one plus R to the N. N is quadratic. The N is the number of years you, you, you compound. That's the most powerful part of the equation is N. And, and so if you think of me, my rate of growth, it almost doesn't matter. I'm growing every year. Year three, I'm a better CEO than I was in year two. In year five, I'm better than I was in year four. But year 23, I'm in year 23. And if you, if you take that R, which is how ra- how fast you're improving, and you can work on that R a little bit with executive coaching and writing out your goals and meditating and trying to work and be good at your job, and now you put a 23 on it. You can be the best in the world. It's just about the, it's just about how long you're willing to do it. That's the most powerful factor. And there is no obstacle that will not yield to you excited

Graham Weaver 16:00 about something for a decade or longer. If you wanna have an asymmetric life, do hard things, do your thing, and do it for decades. The fourth and final point is the most important of all. In 2008, we had just started. We'd finally got going at Alpine. Things are star- you know, we're starting to get going, and bam, we just got flattened by the recession. I mean flattened. We were not well positioned. It turned out we wouldn't raise a fund for five years. Drained my savings account to make payroll. We had seven companies in default, including our largest business was in default at the time w- uh. So for some reason during that time, I had, I had lunch with this, this guy named JP Flaum, and he was an executive coach. I was like, "What the hell's an executive coach? That sounds..." I, I had no idea what that even was. But he was super, he was super persuasive, [laughs] and he's like, "Hey, let me level with you. It ain't going so great in the executive coaching business right now either." [laughs]

Speaker 17:07 [laughs]

Graham Weaver 17:08 "So I'm gonna give you this, you know, incredible thing that I just pitched you for half price," which was still a ton of money for me, which I'd just dr- drained my savings account, and I just was... And, and I don't know why to this day that I said yes. I don't know why. But I did. I said yes. So I hired my first ever executive coach. I would not know it until much later that I, I actually hired probably one of the best coaches in the world. We start talking about the largest business that we have and, and how it's not going well. And he's like, "Well, what, you know, what, what's going on? You know, what are you doing? How, how's this going?" I said, "You know, JP, have you not seen the news in, like, the last, you know, year? The market's down 50%. Lehman Brothers blew up. Merrill Lynch just got bought. Banks aren't lending. Like, that, you know, like we're, we're toast, you know?" He's like, [sighs] "Well, it sounds like you're, you're just kind of helpless then, Graham." And then he's like, boom. You... Sorry.

Speaker 17:58 [laughs]

Graham Weaver 17:58 He's like, you know, oh, oh, you know? So I was like, "All right, well, what do we do?" He's like, "All right. Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna write a story, okay? And there's three rules to writing this story." The first one is it's gonna take place five years from now. We're gonna get out of the fog of war. You're right, uh, you can't, you can't look past where you are six inches in front of your face. Let's go out five years. The second rule is, let's start with nirvana. I don't wanna hear something that's mediocre. I wanna hear what would happen, what would you do if you would, knew you would not fail? What would be your genie goal, as, as Logan said. And third, he said, "The how is the killer of all great dreams. Forget the how. I don't care about the how right now. I just wanna hear about the dream." Turns out, with those three rules, it's pretty fun exercise. [laughs] Yeah, I, I get to say ex- I get to go out five years, I don't have to worry about how I'm gonna do it, and I get to pick anything I want. Like that, who doesn't wanna do that? So we s- put in place

Graham Weaver 18:58 this, this plan for this c- this one company. We just started with one company. And what we basically said is, "All right. We're gonna hire this best CEO you could imagine in the world. This CEO's gonna build this incredible team. Our technology's gonna be better than anyone else, and therefore we're gonna have better uptime, we're gonna hire the sales team, we're gonna start winning contracts. We've never, [laughs] you know, we've been losing all of [laughs] them. We're gonna, uh, you know, and then we're gonna start buying competitors because they're down too, and we can do add on, like, you know, and, and, and, and, and." We had this incredible thing, and I was like... And that was really fun, and then I started saying, "Well, that, that was great, you know, but that, that, th- there's no way we're gonna do that." Like, it, it was just so aspirational. Aspirational, by the way, is a euphemism for how the hell are we gonna do [laughs] that? No way that's gonna happen. It was j- it was aspirational. So he's like, "Well, what's the first step?" First step is hire a CEO. It turns out in 2008, a recession, that's a pretty good time to hire a CEO. We spent six months and we brought on the best CEO. His name's Mark Strauch. He's b- and he, he, he's a great friend of mine now. He's a partner at Alpine now. And so we brought him on. We started doing exactly what we talked about. We started building the team. We started building the technology. We had better [laughs] uptime. And then when Mark and his team got going after 18 months, we won every single contract that came up in that business for the next two years except one, and we just started stomping on pe- [laughs] our competitors. And by the way, what didn't... Uh, the industry didn't change, the market didn't change, our competitors didn't change. We changed. We just changed our story. That's all we did. We changed our story. You know, don't write a story about what happens. Write your story and then make it happen. And there's so much magic in this. You, you put out the thing in the universe that you want to happen, and the universe responds. And it does, and that sounds like woo woo. You're like, "Oh, God. Here we go. Universe responds." But what, what, what's really happening? What's really happening is you're putting on blinders to where you wanna go. You're making goals. You're aligning your day to where you wanna go. You're attracting people that wanna go to

Graham Weaver 21:00 the same place that you wanna go. So it's, it is the universe, but it's actually there's some mechanics behind it too that make it happen. After that experience, this... I was, like, onto something. I was like, "This is magic, pure magic." We started writing stories at Alpine about everything. We wrote stories about how we could have MBAs become CEOs it, r- right when they graduate. We wrote stories about building cultures where people would wanna l- spend their whole careers, where, where people could feel like they mattered and feel like their, their, their life, you know, had meaning and that they were contributing. We wrote stories about companies. We wrote stories about sourcing, and just pretty much every single thing we ever wrote came true from that point on. I had the privilege of meeting with Joe very recently from the very first story I told you. And this, Joe, Joe, this is 20, 20 year, 20 years after the first story, and Joe stayed. I didn't tell you what... Joe, Joe was incredibly gracious. I could tell how hard it was for him to do that, but he was gracious, 'cause he too had had some struggles in hi- in his, his early days, and he understood that things take time and that they're hard. So he stayed with us, and he was a supporter of us for, for the last 20 years. So Joe left the hedge fund and, and he devoted his life to climate change. So we sit down, we s- and then we had an hour meeting. We spend the first 55 minutes hearing all about climate change and all the stuff he's working on, and he's just bouncing off the walls, he's so excited. He was doing his thing. And then as we do every single time that we meet, you know, I give him our, our DAC and our performance sheet. And Joe's been a big investor of ours and, you know, his foundation that does climate change is, is our investor. And he looks at this sheet and he, uh... And he just, he just looked at me and he just said, "You know what, Graham? You did it. You did it, you know, 20, 23 years later. Like, this is amazing." He said, "Thank you." And, you know, just like back then when I had to have that meeting over and over, I had the privilege of having this meeting over and over. And I meet with college endowments and boards that are like, that, that will say literally, like, "You've helped us fund 10 years of financial aid for our school." Or another, another university, like, shows us that th- this is gonna go a huge part of the budget toward the buildings that they're building. Or k- you know, we have investors that are running cancer foundations and are doing cl- uh, climate change work and [sighs] it's, it's been, it's been a long ride, but a really glorious one. And, uh, I go back to that meeting with Dave who said, "You know, Graham's buying these stupid label printing companies and thinks he's changing the world." And I'm maybe having a little, hopefully a little bit of an impact. So where does this leave all of you? All of you right now are about to graduate, and a lot of you have pic- have chosen jobs and careers. And each of you has an opportunity, no matter where you are in your life, whether you're, you know, a parent who's even watching here tonight Like, you have an opportunity to write the story you wanna have. You can write any story that you want. You just have to start writing it. And if you wanna have an asymmetric life, do hard things, do your thing, do it for decades, and write your story. I

Graham Weaver 24:38 thought I'd end with a catalyst that I had in my life, probably the biggest turning point. So I rowed crew in college, and, uh, as I'd mentioned before [laughs] and, uh, I, I had a nickname in cr- in rowing, which was Dream Weaver. And my last name's Weaver, and so my friends called me Dream Weaver. And, like, what a great name, right? 'Cause sh- I mean, like, who doesn't wanna be Dream Weaver?

Speaker 25:01 [laughs]

Graham Weaver 25:02 So the person who gave me this name was a guy named Monty Razor. And, uh, my sophomore year, he was a senior, and, like, you know, I was not... I didn't make this, make the boat, as, as Logan said, and I wasn't very good. And he was, he was in the first... He was amazing. So but anyway, I could still picture, like, I would walk into the rowing room, and Monty would just say, "Dream" like this. And, like, I would just get this surge of energy, and, like, the name just stuck. Everyone started calling me Dream. It was awesome, and it signified who I was back then. Well, a few years after I graduate, um, I'm sitting down, and my friend calls me on the, the phone and says, "You know, hey, sit, uh, you need to sit down." Which nothing ever good comes of, of that first intro on a phone call. And he says, "Hey, your friend, you know, Mon- Mon- Monty's gone. Um, he, he was killed in a plane crash." He was 23. And, uh, I, I was just like, I couldn't even process this information. I was just like... It, it just couldn't register. I, I, I was just devastated, but also, I was kinda, like, just not dealing with it. And, uh, so along I go with my life, year after year. And as I said, I worked at this firm. And a little bit of me was, you know, I, I, I was... That, that Dream Weaver character that, that Monty had found in me was, was nowhere to be seen. And so around that time, right at, right at, right as I was in this large private equity firm, I flew out to New York. And I ended up having dinner with a bunch of, uh, our colleagues who, who had rowed crew with Monty. And we ended up talking all night. And I think all of us kinda needed to process, uh, what, you know, what had happened, and none of us had really done that. And, uh, so we start talking all night, and w- and we're drinking, and we're telling stories about Monty. And this went on pretty much all through the night. And it was awesome. We needed it. You know, we needed to, we needed basically to kinda clear this out and, and, and, and, and deal with the, this loss that we had. So the next day I get on a plane to go home, and, uh, I just lose it. You know, I'm, I'm in one of these [laughs] huge planes going from San Francisco to New York, and it has two seats and then five seats and then two seats. And I'm not right in the middle, I'm like one over, but in the middle, and I'm just bawling hysterically. And, like, people on both sides of me are, like, trying to help me and tell me if I'm okay, and the flight attendant keeps bringing me water, and I'm like, "I'm good," you know?

Speaker 27:23 [laughs]

Graham Weaver 27:24 And like three hours I'm just... I could not contain... I just, like, I was exhausted too. That never helps. I had stayed up all night. So anyway, finally I kinda get my act together, and I'm going to, you know, splash some water in the bathroom. It's like three hours now into the flight. And I sit back down at this point, and I just remember thinking to myself... Uh, so I sit back down and, and, like, I close my eyes, and I can kind of still see that visual where Monty says, "Dream," when I walk into the, you know, the, the, uh, locker room. And I just remember thinking, "Monty would be so disappointed in me right now." [laughs] Like, I'm so far from the, this person that he thought I, I was, this Dream Weaver. Like, I'm, like, I haven't seen that person in years. I was just like... And then I started thinking, like, "What, what am I doing?" You know? "What am I doing?" Like, I, I, I am playing for this downside. I'm trying to protect the downside. Well, guess what? I had just seen the ultimate downside with my friend. And, like, there's really ultimately, there's no way to totally protect against loss or downside. And so I said, "From this point on, I'm gonna play for the upside. I'm just gonna go big." [laughs] And from that point on, I did. I made a decision right then that I was never again in my life gonna say, "Not me," or, "Not now." I was never gonna say those words again. So I landed. I ended my relationship, uh, that night. The next day, I walked in and handed in my resignation at my firm that I'd been working at. Left my accrued equity and bonus and everything. Didn't have any income coming in. And then a few days later, I packed up my car and drove out to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where my ex high school girlfriend, Cindy, was living, who's now, who's here.

Speaker 29:10 [laughs]

Graham Weaver 29:12 And my wife of 21 years.

Speaker 29:13 [clapping] Woo.

Graham Weaver 29:25 [laughs]

Graham Weaver 29:25 And in 20, in 23 years since that plane flight, I've never, I've never once again, I've never said again, "Not me. Not now." Never. And it's been amazing. And it hasn't been easy, as I've s- as we've talked about. So bringing it back to you all, the biggest thing that you're gonna face, um, as you graduate, for most of you, and through your lives, like the biggest obstacle you really have is gonna be fear, if you really boil it down. And fear is very manipulative, and it shows up in all these kinds of different ways. And it tries to disguise itself, okay? It disguises itself as being practical. "I'm being practical right now." It disguises itself as, "I'm helping you." It disguises itself as, "I'm saving you." And most of all, it disguises itself as, "Not me. Not now." What I have given you today is the antidote to fear. That's been my goal. The four things that we talked about are ways that you can tangibly and tactically, throughout your lives, look fear in the eye and say to fear, "Not today. Today I'm gonna play big. Today I'm gonna play for this asymmetric life." Now is the time to do hard things. There's something that you fear right now, that's exactly where you should go. You should be doing that thing. There's something you're putting off right now, you should be doing that thing. Everything that you want is on the other side of worse first. Now is the time to do your thing. There is suffering. [laughs] You will suffer, so pick something worth suffering for, and realize that you are underestimating yourself at your full power when you're excited about something. That's not going into your equation. Do it for decades, because you excited for a decade knows no bounds. There is no obstacle that will not yield to you excited for a decade. And finally, write your own story. No matter where you're starting, and no matter what your role you have after school or where, where you are right now, it doesn't matter. You can start today writing your story. Inside of you, you have, you have a-- you have magic. You have your own life. You have something that's special for you, and there's really only one question you need to answer, which is, are you gonna give yourself permission to lead that life, to live that life, and to let that out? That's a question you're gonna answer over and over and over in your life from now on. Are you gonna give yourself permission? It's permission you need. [sighs] So class of 2023, here we are. And class of 2023, you're about to graduate from Stanford freaking Business School. Stanford freaking Business School. You did not come this far to play small. You came this far to move the world. Now is the time. Now is your time. Thank you so much. [audience cheering] [audience clapping] Thank you. Thank you. [audience clapping]