How to break out of autopilot and create the life you want | Graham Weaver (Stanford GSB professor, founder of Alpine Investors)

You are ostensibly a professor at Stanford Graduate School business and you shared That when people come ask you for advice, the most common question you get is, What should I do with my life? Imagine that you're walking home from work, you see this bright shiny object, and you realize it's a magic lamp, and you rub the lamp and this genie comes out and the genie says, Hey, I can give you one wish, whatever you throw yourself into with your whole life and your career. It's gonna turn out great. If that were true and you had that genie, what would you wish for? At some point in this one life we get, you wanna get yourself on that path of that journey. This whole exercise connects to something that you're a big advocate of of this idea of getting out of autopilot mode in your life. You're unconscious and you may not even realize why you're doing what you're doing or even realize what you're doing. So for example, I get up, work out, drive into work, fight traffic, commute, maybe I return some emails, fight traffic on the way home, rush through dinner, go to bed. It's not a day that is intentional. It's not a day where I've said, where do I want to be going with my life? What's important to me in this world. You have another quote which is everything that you want is on the other side of worse.

First. Pick anything. You want a better body. Okay, you're going to need to go to the gym. When you go to the gym the first few times, it's gonna not be that fun. The first move is negative. If I'm optimizing for tomorrow and I w I just wanna have a great day tomorrow, I'm gonna stay exactly where I am. So many people I see have this happen where they just They hit a plateau and they never move past it because they're not willing to have that. That hard day, month, week, year. When should you quit something? Cause some things are just not worth it. I think the time to quit is when you can no longer

Today my guest is Graham Weaver. Graham teaches a top-rated course at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. A course which is technically called Managing Growing Enterprises. But as you'll hear in our conversation, he ends up mostly helping students figure out What to do with their lives, and how to get out of the autopilot mode that most people are in.

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