- Alpine Investors CEO Graham Weaver teaches at Stanford, where he helps students chart a career path.
- He uses something he calls a “genie frame” to guide them.
- Weaver said in a recent podcast interview that interest and persistence are the keys to success.
Alpine Investors founder and CEO Graham Weaver often finds himself teaching students in his Stanford class about more than just strategies for growing a business.
The private equity CEO said students often come to him not with questions about business, but about life — specifically, what to do with theirs.
Weaver said on a recent episode of “Lenny’s Podcast” that he often describes a series of exercises that previously helped give him clarity on his goals. Their boss is asking himself the “genie question”.
Weaver said a typical meeting on the topic consists of a student laying out possible career paths and talking about the pros and cons of each.
Weaver said he often watches as students consider option A, which they see as more practical, and try to talk themselves out of option B, something they’re committed to.
“First, I try to let them know that their real energy is for B. Just let them feel it and understand it,” Weaver said. “And then secondly, I try to understand — what are the limiting beliefs that they have? What are the fears? What are the obstacles?”
His students are often held back by outside pressures, whether it’s a desire for stability or simply a fear of failure, he said. Then they end up going after what they think they should, instead of what they want.
Getting into a career you’re not passionate about leads to a life lived on autopilot, the CEO said. Rushing into a familiar daily routine, with no time to consider what you’re doing or whether you want to do it, can lead to an increasing degree of anxiety and friction, he added.
“But once I got into the path of what I was excited about, that’s when I felt my energy change dramatically,” Weaver said. “And I developed almost like a superpower in that thing because, you know, I had more energy. I was willing to work longer, I was willing to do it.”
It instructs participants to imagine that a genie is giving them a helping hand—guaranteed success in whatever career they pursue.
“If that were true, and you had that genie to bless you with that wish, what would you wish for?” Weaver said. “And then students come up with an answer that’s really close to their heart. And it’s what they would do, without fear of failure. And then the second part of the exercise is — this is what you should do.”
Weaver said he understands there may be limitations, often manifested in financial need. To help demystify them, he recommends writing down the problems rather than actively ruminating over each limitation, thereby reducing obstacles to a series of manageable steps.
“When you put it down on paper, you almost immediately strip that limiting belief of a lot of its power and a lot of its terror,” Weaver said. “Because now it’s just something like, like, ‘How would I finance this?’ So the second thing is that a lot of that fear just becomes a task to do.”
But Weaver says success isn’t just about overcoming fear. The key variable in Weaver’s “formula” is time. He has found that people’s expectations are often skewed in favor of an unrealistic immediacy.
“You have to go in at the beginning with that mindset and the structural ability to stick with it for a long period of time,” Weaver said. “So the missing ingredient in most people who fail is time.”
Without patience and courage, he said, his success would be a museum of failures. Weaver’s philosophy is that the pursuit of improvement is always uncomfortable.
“The first move is negative to get in shape, the first move is negative to get out of a bad relationship, to get into a career that you want to be in,” Weaver said.
We only have one life, Weaver said. He thinks it’s best to start using it as soon as possible – before “not now” becomes “never”.
“Take the time to really understand and answer the question, ‘What does a wonderful, amazing, incredible life look like?'” Weaver said. “And just be as clear as possible about this.”