Graham Weaver, Lecturer in Management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, speaks on “Your Life as the Hero’s Journey” as part of the GSB Last Lecture Series. Recorded on June 1, 2022.

Hi, I'm Michelle Klein, member of the GSB Alumni Association Board, and I'm pleased to welcome you to this production.

Change lives, change organizations, change the world.

Well, thank you for the awesome introduction.

I was super nervous and then you all started filing in and I was like, these are all my great friends that I've made over the last 2 years.

And so I'm just so honored to be here And I am so grateful that you are entrusting me with this last lecture.

It's something that I take, it's just an incredible honor.

It means the world to me, so thank you for that.

I want to say congratulations to all of you, Not just on the last couple of years, but really on your whole lives.

The 25 years, 30 years leading up to getting to Stanford and everything you put into it, the incredible intensity, work, the sacrifices you made, the decisions you made, and the grit that you showed to get here, I hope you feel like you earned the seat that you're sitting in and you belong here.

And I just hope you'll, over the next couple of days, appreciate really what you've done, because it's really impressive.

I said, this is my last lecture I'm ever going to give, what am I going to say?

I'm going to try to tie in things we talked about in class, things I talked about in wellness, and I'm going to talk about even stuff we did during lunches and stuff like that.

So I turned 50 this year, And as many of you who know have had me in class, I'm a pretty reflective person.

And I've thought about what have I learned over that time?

As Drake said, I've been on many journeys, had lots of failures and some stuff go well.

And What I realized at the end of all that is that life is really the most challenging journey of all that we're all gonna have and that all of you will have.

And then what I realized over 50 years is it's really an internal journey.

It's 1 that you're gonna really be wrestling with yourself over that time.

And there's a quote that I love that summarizes this journey better than anything I could come up with from Michelangelo.

And Michelangelo sculpted the David and he painted the Sistine Chapel.

People had never seen this intricacy and detail in this angel before.

And they asked him, how did you sculpt this angel out of this block of stone?

And Michelangelo said famously, I saw the angel in the marble, and I carved until I set it free.

The reason that quote is so important and that it's my favorite quote is that we, all of us, we're the angel in the marble.

And that we, at our core, are these beautiful, infinite, incredible beings.

We have power beyond our wildest imagination.

And that The real journey is to sculpt away the stone that we're encased in.

And most of the most constraining stone that we have, we're actually, it's self-erected.

It's the constraints we put on ourselves.

And it's things like, here's what my parents think I should do, here's what my roommate's doing.

I compare myself to this person and I compare myself unfavorably.

I can't do this, I don't know how to do this, I'm not sure I'm going to make it.

It might not work out, I might fail, and I'm not ready, I'm not enough.

And really that's what's underneath a lot of that is I'm not enough.

So that's the stone that we kind of place on ourselves.

There's a subtle part of this quote that I want to make sure come, that I make not subtle, which is that Michelangelo didn't sculpt the angel or the David by going out and finding a head and gluing it on.

And then finding wings and then welding those on.

And that really, if I had a gift I could give to you, it would be for you to just give yourself permission to be your true selves over the course of your lives, that would be the gift I would give you.

That's what I've learned over my 50 years, is that when you give yourself that gift, you tap into this energy source and this joy and happiness and really power that you can't access any other way.

You can't access it by trying to be someone else.

So what I'm going to do today is take you on a little bit of a journey to hopefully help you unlock your potential, kind of carve away that marble over the next 25 minutes or so.

And I'm gonna use my own story to tell you a little bit about this.

So I grew up in a small town in Ohio, and actually my parents and my wife are here who are from that same town.

the time in class and she's actually not snuffleupagus, she's real and she's here.

And anyway, so I grew up in this small town and I had a lot of marble around me.

I would have described myself as having pretty average abilities, athletic abilities, average intellect really.

And I would say the town I was in was average, and that was my identity.

And so I had these pretty firm stone walls.

And then When I was about 13, like a lot of us, I wanted to feel like it mattered.

And so in Ohio, 1 way to do that was through athletics.

So I tried out for basketball and I got cut, and I tried out for football and I was too small.

And wrestling, you could be any weight class.

My first 3 years, seventh and eighth and ninth grade, really the only way to describe my career would have been forgettable.

It was just, and that, by the way, is a very optimistic description of those 3 years.

So I got to ninth grade that summer, and I said 2 words that I'd been saying my whole life to that point.

I'm not the right person, now's not the right time.

I go on walks with some of you, and you'll tell me about something you're excited about, and I'll hear you say those words.

That summer, though, 2 things happened for me.

And this was the 1980s version of your iPhone.

And this was magical, just as magical as the iPhone was.

And I was at the library 1 time checking out some music and there was this program and it said, Think and Grow Rich.

Turns out that book wasn't at all about thinking and growing rich.

But I became addicted to these self-help, for lack of a better word, audio tapes.

Listened to Zig Ziglar, Tony Robbins, Dale Carnegie, Stephen Covey.

So I had a job over the summer, that summer, every summer in Ohio, which was mowing lawns.

I attached this walkman and I'd put in Tony Robbins.

And then mowing lawns is pretty straightforward.

You walk in a line in the sun, and then when you're done, you get to the end of the row, you turn around and you walk back.

That's how, pretty much, I just taught you how to mow lawn.

And I did this for 6 hours a weekend for my entire high school.

And I brainwashed myself with these tapes, basically.

And my parents had just gone through a divorce, and I wasn't really part of a friend group, and athletics wasn't really working out for me.

So this became something for me to grab onto.

I was really impressionable, And I grabbed onto these with everything I had.

So I'll summarize, literally I added up the hours 1 time and it's thousands of hours I listened to.

I'm gonna summarize it for you in about 2 minutes.

about 99% of people never actually figure out what they want.

There's a lot of activity, they spend all this time, they're running around, they're busy, they're going all these directions.

But they actually never take the time to figure out what is it that they want.

And they said, you will be the top 1% if you could just figure out what you want.

The best exercise that I know to figure out what you want, I've done with many of you in class.

But I'm sorry I'm going to do it again because this is my last lecture.

Imagine you rub a magic lamp and a genie comes out.

And the genie says to you, I can't give you any wish, but what I can give you is that whatever you throw yourself into with your life, whatever you really commit yourself to, that that is going to work out amazingly well.

It's going to be way harder than you think.

It's going to take longer than you think.

And when you fail, you're going to think that I've abandoned you, but I haven't.

But it's going to be the journey of a lifetime.

What would you wish for from that genie If you really had that power, if you really had that blessing.

That's my favorite prompt that I've come up with, and I've shared that obviously with many of you.

The second thing that happened that summer was, there was this movie called Vision Quest.

Vision Quest is, so for those of you who don't know, can't believe you haven't seen it, Vision Quest is

It's kind of like Rocky for wrestling, that's the best way to describe it.

There's this wrestler named Loudon Swain, and he decides he's going to cut down 2 weight classes and he's going to wrestle this defending state champion, Brian Shute.

And his buddy, who's on kind of his friend that goes on this journey with him says, how do you know you're on a vision quest?

Well, this is a B movie probably by any standard, except if you were a 15 year old wannabe wrestler from Perrysburg, Ohio, which case it was my anthem, And I still to this day have seen that movie more than any other movie I've seen.

I can say pretty much every line in the movie.

So anyway, those 2 things conspired and I go back to wrestling my tenth grade year.

And I'm standing in the wrestling room and I'm looking up at the wall.

And I'm looking up at the wall and there's a list of all the starting wrestlers and I'm not 1 of them.

And my buddy comes up and he puts his arm around me and he says, weaver, only place you can make that weight, make the starting line up is at 125 pounds.

He punches me in the gut, like literally and figuratively punches me in the gut.

So to give you an idea, well Anyway, so I look at this and I have a decision to make, and I'm eating this piece of pizza, and I throw the pizza in this trash.

And I had this ceremonious moment where I said, all right, I'm going to go on my own vision quest.

I'm going to drop to 125 pounds, make the starting lineup.

Now this story is not end the way that Vision Quest does.

I do make the weight, by the way, just to give you a sense of 125 pounds.

I was at the same height as I am now, I weigh 185 right now.

So when I decided to cut the weight, I was 150, and then I cut another 25 pounds from that.

So it was, to this day, 1 of the hardest things I've ever done.

But that moment when I threw the piece of pizza in the trash would turn out to be the turning point in my life.

And the reason is that I basically drew a line.

I didn't do this figuratively, but I did this kind of in my head.

And this line, on this side of the line is where I was.

And on the other side of the line are the things that I really wanted, the thing I wanted to be, the goals that I had.

And up till that point in my life, I'd always been tiptoe and putting my toe over on the other side of the line.

But I really never believed it, I never committed, I never stepped fully on the other side.

And that was the first time in my life where I knew when I threw that piece of pizza away that this wasn't going to be something I was going to do for a week.

It wasn't something I was going to do for a month.

This is something that I was committed, and I was going all in, and I did.

My story today is I'm going to share 5 things with you.

5 ways that you can free yourself from the marble.

And I uncovered 2 of them that I'll kind of highlight for you in that story.

The first 1 is that these walls that we have around us, and we view them as stone, and they're the most dangerous when we don't even realize that we have them.

And those are the stories we tell ourselves, the assumptions we make, the things that we say we can and can't do.

The most constraining walls that you will have are the ones that you have made in your mind for yourself.

Those are the ones that will cause you the most problems.

And those walls are not actually made of stone, but if you push them, they're malleable.

And 1 way to push them hard is to commit, to step over and not look back.

And then those walls will start to give, and they'll start to yield, and you can push, and they'll move.

And so when I pushed on this wall, about first, I had a wall that was my athletic ability.

I have a wall of intelligence, my wall of who I fit in, my friends, all that.

But I started pushing on this athletic wall and it moved and it gave.

And eventually, I cleared it out altogether, and as Drake said, I became captain of a national championship rowing team, having never rowed before.

And I realized there was no wall there at all.

And the same was true with my view of my identity for intelligence and many other things is that they weren't walls at all.

So my first takeaway is, almost any wall that you can imagine will yield to you with time.

It will yield to you when you're committed.

Second takeaway I have is, has to do with your identity.

So we're going to behave today based on how we perceive ourselves.

Well, your identity comes from your subconscious mind.

And your subconscious, 95% of all the things you think are in your subconscious mind.

And so your subconscious is really powerful.

Another thing I learned from these tapes.

And you've heard the expression, we only use a fraction of our minds.

How many of you have heard that expression, right?

We only use a little bit of our, so I would say it differently.

I would say only a small fraction of our mind is working for us.

And the other 95%, it's all over the place.

And more often than not, it's working against us.

So our identity comes from when our subconscious is picking up cues all the time.

It says, you're not that good at this, you're not that good at that, you're not comparing well to this person.

I'm not, and that's our identities coming.

So really our identities coming from our past.

What happened is I started developing these genie goals and having something, having something I actually wanted.

And 1 of the things these tapes would say is visualize it, write it down, talk about it all the time.

And in a very short period of time, my identity started becoming my destination.

So if you want to free yourself from the marble, consider having your identity be where you want to go, not where you've been.

It'll completely change the way you look at the world.

So Vision Quest follows the arc of a very common architecture of stories.

Joseph Campbell identified this arc, and he called it the hero's journey.

So the hero's journey goes something like this.

It says, once upon a time, once upon a time there was a hero, and that hero felt something inside of them.

They felt that they had this power that they were ready to give to the world.

And yet, this hero lived in this ordinary world and they'd experienced the power at times, but not fully.

They weren't really 100% able to express this.

And then the story goes on and says, and then 1 day, until 1 day, something changed for that hero.

They heard some call to adventure, some call to action.

They're not sure if they should answer this call.

And I want to argue this is where many of you are right now.

You are, make no mistake, you are the hero.

You have this power inside of you that you felt that you know is there.

You've had this power that you've expressed at times in your life that is incredible, and you felt it.

And I know from having, from teaching you, having lunches, coffees, dinners, drinks.

I know that each of you also is hearing a call.

The call could be that you, there's a problem that breaks your heart, that you want to be a part of the solution.

The call could be that there's something you want to introduce to the world, a product, a technology, something like that.

The call, it could be something more subtle.

It's not what I think, it's not what your neighbor thinks, it's not what your roommate thinks, It's what you think.

Your call could be that you want to be a teacher.

Sometimes for some of you it's really loud, that call.

You're in the reluctant hero part of the story, at least from spending time with you.

I was the reluctant hero too when I graduated.

If you would have asked me any time in the 2 years I was at Stanford, what are you going to do?

I said, I'm going to go build a firm that's going to unleash people, and it's going to be built around talent.

And then when it came time to graduate, I listened to all my fears and my doubts and my limiting beliefs.

I had this decision to make between these 2 jobs, or doing what I really wanted to do.

I made a decision the way a lot of you make a decision, which is like this.

I made it in my head, you know, and I got, and I said, well, here's a list of the pros, and here's a list of the cons, and here's the good things, and here's the bad things.

I even had a spreadsheet of expected value.

And this is the way I know you make decisions, because I talk to you about it, and you all kind of go like this.

And then I asked 37 different people for advice, thinking the 37th was going to have my answer for me.

I'm usually the 37th on your list too, by the way.

So I made this decision, and then of course with all this stuff, I went to the well-lit, well-worn path because that seemed more logical and more straightforward, and that's where all that analysis led me.

I went to a firm and when I showed up, honestly, a little bit of me died.

And a little bit of me died each day I was there until, and I was, so I, I kind of was like that hero looking out the window, and I'm kind of like waiting for someone to come rescue me and take me on this journey.

But after a while I stopped looking out the window and I just became my environment.

Their values became my values, you know, their goals became my goals.

Once again in my life I had said, not me, not now.

I had another catalyst come in the form of sort of a very tragic event, which is a close friend of mine.

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Last Lecture Series: “Your Life as the Hero’s Journey,” Graham Weaver