Graham Weaver's Life Advice: Go Where Your Energy Is, Not Your Fear

Imagine you work in accounting. The job is fine and the pay is good. But on the weekend you coach a youth football team, and those are the hours when you feel most awake. Every few months you think about changing your life, and every time a voice in your head lists the reasons not to. Which voice should you listen to? Graham Weaver gave a clear answer to this question in a talk at Stanford in 2024.

Who is Graham Weaver, and what talk is this about?

Graham Weaver founded Alpine Investors, a private equity firm. A private equity firm buys companies, tries to improve them and sells them later. Weaver has also taught at Stanford Graduate School of Business for more than twenty years.

In 2024 the school asked him to speak to the graduating class as part of its Last Lecture Series. In these talks, a teacher speaks to students about life rather than about business. Weaver’s talk is called “How to Live Your Life at Full Power”. The video is on the business school’s YouTube channel, and Weaver published a written version on his own blog. He gave an earlier Last Lecture in 2023 called “How to Live an Asymmetric Life”. That is a different talk, and this essay is only about the 2024 one.

What are the two voices Weaver talks about?

Weaver says that every person hears two inner voices. The first is the voice of energy. He also calls it intuition or your soul. It points you toward the life that fits you. The second is the voice of fear. It is the survival instinct that produces worry and doubt. About this second voice he says:

It’s our inner critic. And most of the time, it’s the louder of the two.

His main claim follows from this. If fear makes your big decisions, you end up with a life that is smaller than it could be. Weaver tells his own story as an example. Years ago he was a young vice president at an investment firm, with a good job by any normal standard. A year into that job, during a company meeting in Napa Valley in California, he heard the voice of energy very loudly. He later left the job and started his own business.

Back to the accountant. The voice of fear says, “You cannot afford it, and you are too old to start again.” The voice of energy says, “Your best hours are on the football field.” Weaver does not say that fear is always wrong. He says that it should not be the voice that decides.

To make this practical, Weaver asks the students to make three promises.

What does it mean to take the nail out of your head?

The first promise comes from a short comedy film called “It’s Not About the Nail” by Jason Headley, which spread widely online in 2013. In the film, a woman tells her partner about her headaches and her bad sleep. The camera shows a nail stuck in her forehead. When her partner mentions the nail, she gets angry and says that it is not about the nail.

Weaver uses the film as a picture of a common habit. Many people have one obvious problem that keeps them stuck. Instead of removing it, they build their life around it. In his talk, a “nail” can be a bad habit, a painful experience from the past, a rule you made for yourself, or fear itself.

Why do people keep their nails? Weaver’s answer is that removing them usually makes things worse first. If the accountant starts training as a coach, he earns less for a while and feels unsure of himself. Weaver puts it this way: “Everything we want is on the other side of ‘worse first.’” A plan that never allows a worse phase will never reach the better one.

How does the nine-lives exercise work?

The second promise is to go toward your energy. To find out where your energy is, Weaver uses an exercise with nine imagined lives. It works in four steps:

1. Imagine that you have nine lives to choose from. All of them start today, and none of them lets you go back in time.
2. Life number one is the life you are living now.
3. Lives two to nine are things you would be excited to get out of bed for.
4. Write all nine down, so that your energy becomes a list of concrete options instead of a vague feeling.

For the accountant, the list might include coaching full time, teaching sport at a school, or running a football camp in the summer.

Then Weaver offers two ways forward. The first is to keep life number one and bring parts of the other lives into it. The accountant could take a coaching license while he keeps his job. The second way is bolder. You ask which life you would choose if you knew you would not fail, and you start moving toward it.

Weaver also explains why he speaks of energy and not of passion. Many people think they must first find their one true passion before they can act. Energy is easier to notice. You only have to ask which activities make you feel more alive right now. Weaver adds that energy is not used up the way willpower is. In his experience, following it creates more of it.

Carl Jung made a related point. He saw that in the second half of life, old goals often stop moving people. Read more in Carl Jung on a Fulfilled Life: Five Conditions and No Guarantee.

What does “go all in, now” ask of you?

The third promise is about timing. Weaver tells the story of a student named Sarah. She asked him how he had dealt with his fear of failure when he started his business. They talked through her own fears. At the end she told him that she wanted to go all in, for as long as it would take. A month later she wrote to him that she had raised the first money for her company.

Weaver calls “not now” the two most dangerous words he hears from students. People rarely say no to their energy directly. They say “later”, “when the children are older” or “when I have more savings”. Then they try to live the old life and the new one at the same time. Neither of them gets their full effort.

For the accountant, going all in does not have to mean quitting on Monday. It means making a real decision with a date. For example, he could apply for the coaching course before the end of the month. The idea then stops being a plan for some day in the future.

Where does the advice need a second look?

Weaver’s talk is honest and useful, but it has three limits.

The first limit is the audience. Weaver spoke to graduates of one of the most famous business schools in the world. Most of them have strong networks and many options. For a single parent with debts, the voice of fear may be giving accurate information about rent and food. The question “Which life would I choose if I knew I would not fail?” leaves out the real cost of failing, and for some people that cost is high.

The second limit is that energy can be a mood. Something can feel exciting because it is new, or because the current job had a bad week. The nine-lives list is more reliable if you test it over time. Notice which items still give you energy after a month, and which ones fade.

The third limit is that Weaver is a successful investor telling the story of a decision that worked out. We do not hear from the people who followed their energy and failed. This does not make his advice wrong, but it means his own story is not proof of it.

These limits point to a careful way of using the talk. Weaver’s strongest tool is the question of which voice is making the decision. You can ask that question without quitting anything. Often the first way forward, bringing parts of other lives into your current one, is the wise start. It lets you test your energy at a low cost before you go all in. The Stoic idea in What Is the Dichotomy of Control? adds a useful point here: your effort and your choices are up to you, but the result is not.

So the accountant does not need to know today whether he should change careers. He needs to know whether he is saying “not now” because of a real reason or because of fear. Weaver’s three promises help him find out, and the nine-lives list gives him a concrete first step.