Stanford GSB Last Lecture 2024 - How To Live Your Life At Full Power
I recently had the privilege of delivering a Last Lecture to Stanford Graduate School of Business class of 2024. Below is a summary of the message I shared, or you can watch the full lecture in the link below.
A year into my first job after business school, in the middle of a three-day offsite in Napa Valley, I made a break for it.
I’d decided to take a “safe” corporate job when I graduated from Stanford GSB, and while I wasn’t that excited about it, I’d been toughing it out well enough. But this offsite did me in. We were sitting in conference rooms for hours on end, listening to presentations—the old-school kind, where the speakers read all 87 words on each PowerPoint slide at 0.5 speed. It was brutal. So on the second day, when we filed out for our morning break, I put on my suit coat, tucked my notebook inside it, and waited in a bathroom stall for everyone else to leave. After a few minutes, the absurdity set in: I was a 27-year-old vice president trying to escape from my own company in a men’s room. Nonetheless, I waited a few more minutes, just to be safe; went up the back stairs to my hotel room; and changed into my running clothes.
“I was a 27-year-old vice president trying to escape from my own company in a men’s room.”
It was 75 degrees as I headed out on the Silverado trail. My playlist was amazing. It was a glorious couple of hours. And then, at the very end of the run, one of my favorite songs, Eye of the Tiger—also known as the Rocky III theme—started to play.
As I passed a glass-walled building, I caught a glimpse of myself: no shirt, sweat pouring down, red bandana. I thought, “I look like Rocky right now!” Runner’s high in full effect, I started punching the air. I was feeling it—until I saw something move on the other side of the window. I took off my sunglasses and promptly realized that in the two hours I’d been gone, my team had broken for lunch—at a restaurant that just happened to be in this building. I was shadowboxing, shirtless, in front of my entire company.
That’s the first reason I’ll never forget that day. But the second is that during the run, I’d heard a voice say, “Graham, you don’t have to do this. It’s not what you’re meant for.” It wasn’t the first time that voice had spoken to me, but this time was more powerful. I promised myself I was finally going to listen—starting with leaving that job.
Energy vs. Fear
In two decades of teaching, I’ve realized there are actually two conflicting voices inside each of us. The first has been called many things: intuition, the soul, God, the universe. It’s the one I heard on that run. The other is our survival instinct. It’s the source of worry, doubt, and anxiety—where “fight or flight” comes from. It’s our inner critic. And most of the time, it’s the louder of the two.
If you want to live at full power, you have to learn not to listen to that voice of fear, because it will lead you to a life that’s too small. It’s the first voice, the voice of energy, that will help you find your path and reach your dreams.
“You have to learn not to listen to that voice of fear, because it will lead you to a life that’s too small.”
So how do you tap into the voice of energy—not just randomly on a run, but regularly and with intention? I suggest making three promises to yourself: One to get you unstuck, another to help you find your voice, and a third to help you follow it.
Promise 1: Take the Nail Out of Your Head
About a decade ago, a short video made the rounds online. It starts with a close-up of a woman talking about the pressure she feels. She has headaches; she can’t sleep. Then, as she turns to her partner, we see her forehead for the first time—and he says, “Well, you do have a nail in your head.” But the woman balks at his suggestion that removing the nail might solve her problems. She insists, “It’s not about the nail!”
So many of us do this. Some of our metaphorical “nails” are as obvious as the one in the video; others less so. But either way, when we don’t deal with them, we stay stuck.
Nails can be bad habits, unresolved past experiences, self-imposed rules and assumptions, or—most often in my case—fear. I’ve had the “fear of leaving my job” nail and the “fear of leaving a relationship” nail. I’ve had to pull out the nails of alcohol and caffeine. Lately, I’ve been working on one about death and mortality. Anything that’s paralyzing you and keeping you from doing what you truly want to do—that’s a nail.
“Anything that’s paralyzing you and keeping you from doing what you truly want to do—that’s a nail.”
Why not just pull them out? Sometimes, it’s because we haven’t even admitted there is a nail. When a friend of mine who struggles with insomnia went to a doctor for help, he suggested she quit drinking wine before bed. But because she hated that idea, she went to a few more doctors, and ended up with a strict early bedtime and a nightstand full of medications instead. She put her energy into protecting her nail—building a helmet around it—rather than speaking her truth and pulling it out.
At other times, we know the nail exists, but we don’t pull it out because of one universal truth: Everything we want is on the other side of “worse first.” Change is uncomfortable, and moving from one plateau to the next on the mountain of life usually starts with a downward climb. But remember, you will eventually get to climb up, too. So whatever your nail is, whatever you’re afraid of, that’s exactly where you should be focusing—because that is how you’ll grow.
To live at full power, take the nail out of your head.
Promise 2: Go Toward Your Energy
Every graduation speaker says some version of “follow your passion.” And I understand why—I’ve done things for which I had very little energy, and I’ve done things that give me tremendous energy, and there’s no comparison. You should do the latter! But I also know the advice to follow your passion can be intimidating at best and harmful at worst. It implies that there’s only one passion out there for you, that you should already know what it is, and that you should go do it for the rest of your career. I don’t believe any of those things are true.
“The advice to follow your passion can be intimidating at best and harmful at worst.”
Instead, I recommend you follow whatever’s currently giving you energy. Imagine you have nine lives to choose from—but you can’t go back in time. They all start today. The first life is whatever you’re doing right now. The other eight are things you would jump out of bed to do. When I was in that corporate job, for example, I might have put “be a founder,” “teach at Stanford,” “deejay in Vegas,” and “write” on my list.
Now that you know what gives you energy, you have two options. The first is to keep cranking away at Life #1, but pull in elements of the others. Write a blog, play a sport, take up the guitar. It will be like lighting a match that brings more energy into the rest of your life—and if you live long enough, you may be able to work your way through the whole list and then some.
The second option is to ask yourself: “Which life would I choose if I knew I wouldn’t fail?” Then go do it. By telling the voice of fear to be quiet, you get in touch with your most dear dream—and I would argue that’s the path you should be on.
To live at full power, take the nail out of your head, and go toward your energy.
Promise 3: Go All In—Now
My road to teaching started in 2002, when Stanford professor Irv Grousbeck and researcher Janet Feldstein wrote a case study about me. I was only a few years out of school myself and had many failures and very few successes, but I was thrilled—being a “case guest” was a dream of mine. I couldn’t wait.
In front of the students, though, I absolutely bombed. (Lest you think that’s false humility: My friends in the class told me that during the case recap days later, one takeaway was, “You don’t need to be articulate or have charisma to start a company.” Which is true, by the way!) The voice of fear was loud in my head the whole time: “What do you have to teach? Look at what other guests have done. Come back in 30 years when you’ve actually accomplished something.” And that would have been the end of it, if it weren’t for a student I’ll call Sarah.
I had the opportunity to talk with Sarah afterwards, and she kindly told me she enjoyed the case—but she also asked how I’d overcome fear of failure to start my business in the first place. And on that topic, I knew I had plenty to share.
I suggested Sarah write down what scared her about starting a company—because fears are most powerful when they’re stuck in our subconscious. Then we walked through each one. Sure enough, when we were finished, she was fired up. She said, “I want to go all in. As long as it takes.”
In 22 years of teaching, no student has ever said, “I’m not going to do the thing I’m excited about.” But what I do hear all the time are the two most dangerous words: “Not now.” We tell ourselves we’ll go for it as soon as we pay off our loans. Then it’s after the wedding’s over. Then once the kids are older. And before you know it, “not now” has become “never.” Goethe said, “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.” Yet many of us spend our lives hedging, with one foot in and one foot out.
“In 22 years of teaching, no student has ever said, ‘I’m not going to do the thing I’m excited about.’ But what I do hear all the time are the two most dangerous words: ‘Not now.’”
So I said to Sarah, “What’s to decide?” When you have you, energy, all-in, as long as it takes, that’s all you need.
Happily, Sarah didn’t say “not now”—a month later she sent me a note to tell me she’d just raised her seed round. And in that moment I realized, as I have many times since, that the advice I’d given a student, I was also giving myself. Instead of waiting decades to chase my dream of teaching, hoping for a perfect readiness that would never come, I committed to throwing my energy into it right away.
Case guests get a few minutes at the end of class to offer advice to students—and I decided the next time my case was taught, I was going to use that time to talk about overcoming fear of failure. I spent 60 hours writing those five minutes, editing again and again. But it worked. Students started reaching out for coaching; I was invited to do lectures and panels; and my case, which had been taught once per year, started coming up three, five, and seven times per year.
Today, the class where I bombed as a guest is now the class I teach.
When I went all in, the voice of fear was drowned out by the voice of energy. Of course, I didn’t stop hearing fear right away. Sometimes I still do. But I now spend far less energy fighting it—in fact, I have more energy for teaching now than I did when I started. Energy is not an exhaustible resource like willpower, endurance, or fossil fuels. It’s abundant, like love. The more you have, and the more you give, the more you get back.
To live at full power, take the nail out of your head, go toward your energy, and go all in—now.
The Meaning of Life
When my oldest child, Chase, went to college two years ago, it felt like someone had ripped out my heart. I thought back to the first time I held him, to the joy on his face when he took his first steps, to teaching him to ride a bike and throw a football. Now we were driving home from his dorm and seeing his empty room.
When my son Blake graduated this year, I learned it doesn’t get any easier, and I’m sure our youngest, Lily, will be just as tough. But like any challenge, this existential crisis has also been an opportunity.
After Chase moved away, my longtime quest for the meaning of life intensified. I went on meditation retreats, traveled to the jungles of Costa Rica and the Rural Cities of Mexico, and met with several executive coaches. I read what philosophers from Socrates to Alan Watts had to say on the subject. And I decided that with so many great meanings to choose from—from “love thy neighbor” to “seek truth”—the meaning of life that makes the most sense to me is that we each must find our own.
“The meaning of life that makes the most sense to me is that we each must find our own.”
For me, that meaning is to live at full power—by connecting with the voice I heard on that run all those years ago. When you remove the nail from your head, follow your energy, and go all in, you silence the voice of fear and let the voice of energy take the lead. Trust it, and it will constantly move you toward the next thing you should do with your one precious life—and show you how to direct those efforts to make the biggest possible impact on the world. There will truly be no end to what you can accomplish.
For a long time, I thought life was complicated—an endless series of millions of decisions. But now that I’ve been on this earth for 52 years, I’ve realized there’s really only one: Which voice will you listen to?