How to break out of autopilot and create the life you want | Graham Weaver (Stanford GSB professor)

You are ostensibly a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business and you shared that when people come and 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 gonna 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- 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? 'Cause some things are just not worth it.

I think the time to quit is when you can no longer... (music)

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 the Nine 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. This episode is brought to you by Merge. Product leaders, yes, like you, cringe when they hear the word integration. They're not fun for you to scope, build, launch or maintain, and integrations probably aren't what led you to product work in the first place. Lucky for you, the folks at Merge are obsessed with integrations. Their single API helps SaaS companies launch over 200 product integrations in weeks, not quarters. Think of Merge like Plaid, but for everything B2B SaaS. Organizations like Ramp, Drata, and Electric use Merge to access their customer's accounting data to reconcile bill payments, file storage data to create searchable databases in their product, or HRIS data to auto-provision and de-provision access for their customer's employees. And yes, if you need AI-ready data for your SaaS product, then Merge is the fastest way to get it. So, want to solve your organization's integration dilemma once and for all? Book and attend a meeting at merge.dev/lenny and receive a $50 Amazon gift card. That's merge.D-E-V/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Persona, the adaptable identity platform that helps businesses fight fraud, meet compliance requirements, and build trust. While you're listening to this right now, how do you know that you're really listening to me, Lenny? These days, it's easier than ever for fraudsters to steal PII, faces and identities. That's where Persona comes in. Persona helps leading companies like LinkedIn, Etsy and Twilio securely verify individuals and businesses across the world. What sets Persona apart is its configurability. Every company has different needs depending on its industry, use cases, risk tolerance and user demographics. That's why Persona offers flexible building blocks that allow you to build tailored collection and verification flows that maximize conversion while minimizing risk. Plus, Persona's orchestration tools automate your identity process so that you can fight rapidly shifting fraud and meet new waves of regulation. Whether you're a startup or an enterprise business, Persona has a plan for you. Learn more at withpersona.com/lenny. Again, that's withpersona.com/lenny. Graham, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.