The Nine Lives Exercise
by Graham Weaver • Founder & CEO / Lecturer at Alpine Investors / Stanford Graduate School of Business
Graham Weaver is the founder of Alpine Investors, a top-performing private equity firm. He is also a lecturer at Stanford GSB, where he teaches the highly-rated course 'Managing Growing Enterprises,' focusing on entrepreneurship and leadership.
🎙️ Episode Context
Graham Weaver shares transformative frameworks for breaking out of 'autopilot' and aligning career paths with personal fulfillment. He discusses strategies for overcoming limiting beliefs, the importance of long-term commitment despite initial suffering, and how to define success using an internal scorecard.
Problem It Solves
Reduces the paralysis of finding 'The One' passion by exploring multiple viable paths.
Framework Overview
A brainstorming exercise where you list nine different lives you could live, starting from today. This reveals hidden interests and allows you to integrate elements of those lives into your current one.
🧠 Framework Structure
List 9 distinct lives/careers.
Constraint 1: All lives must start fr...
Constraint 2: You must be genuinely e...
Integration: Identify which life give...
When to Use
When feeling overwhelmed by the pressure to choose a single career path or feeling stuck in a linear trajectory.
Common Mistakes
Thinking you can only pick one. In reality, you can live many of these sequentially or simultaneously (via hobbies/side projects).
Real World Example
Lenny realized his podcasting 'life' (originally a side interest) gave him energy and eventually became his main career, surpassing his PM salary.
You actually can have pretty much all nine lives. You can't have them at once, but... you can have all of these things.
— Graham Weaver