Graham Weaver
speaker
351 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Graham Weaver’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We went through a really tough period in the recession. We didn't have a fund for a number of years. So we had three years to kind of work on our business and really do some deep thinking. I hired some executive coaches. We can talk more about that. But part of that was kind of the questions you're asking. Why are you doing this? What's your goal? What are you waking up every day to do?
And I think we wanted to create something that was going to get us just jumping out of bed in the morning. And so we said, hey, we want to be the number one performing fund of all time. So we looked at all the data that was public on some of the pension funds websites and information. And we said, hey, if we could deliver 3x net consistently on every fund, that would put us in the conversation.
We've been outperforming that. So we increased our goal a little bit.
What's underneath it? You're probably a person that could build a whole variety of different kinds of businesses. Why is high-performing private equity one that's interesting to you?
I never knew what private equity was until I graduated from college, so I didn't have this background. This was never a goal of mine when I started, but when I got recruited out of college to go into private equity, I just thought it was... I had a real burning interest in business, and I thought...
Once I learned what private equity was, I was thinking, wow, this is the best expression of building businesses. We get to do it over and over and over across a bunch of businesses. In terms of why I try to be the best, I guess ever since I was pretty young, I just never thought about doing anything other than trying to be the best in the world at it.
It's like, there's a great quote by Daniel Burnham who says, make no little plans for they have no power to stir one's blood.
What's the earliest that you can remember having that sensation or feeling?
so i was 12 years old my parents went through a really bitter ugly divorce we changed schools to a new school so i didn't really have friends so the ground beneath me was pretty unsettled grew up in a small town in ohio like in the rust belt outside of toledo and i mowed lawns i mowed lawns about six hours a weekend to make money that was the best paying job i had a sony walkman and i started to listen to books on tape
For whatever reason, our library had this self-help section. So I had these books like Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and Lead the Field by Earl Nightingale, Universal Laws of Success and Achievement by Brian Tracy. So there were only like three of them, three or four. So for the next X years, I just would six hours a weekend walk around. back and forth.
Literally brainwashed myself walking back and forth in the hot Ohio sun. And these authors, thank God, just had incredible content that I really needed at that. I was this young, impressionable kid that was having a lot of trouble in my life. And I had these frameworks to just hang my life on, for lack of a better word. And there were really kind of three big ones that came from that.
One was, hey, you don't get to be a victim. Yes, you have things that have happened to you, and they're not necessarily your fault. But you walking around blaming people and thinking, woe is me, that's not gonna serve anyone. You gotta take control of your life.
Now that sounds probably really obvious to you and me right now, but back then, like that was a new concept for me, grabbing control of your life. And then they were huge about deciding what you want and writing down your goals. And I got really into that. I would write my goals down three or four times a day, literally all through high school.
And then the third one was, you gotta make some choices. So you can have kind of any goal, You want, but you can't have 20. So you pick the one or two that you're really excited about. And then you have to kind of draw a bright line and give yourself permission to not do goals three through 30. Those are really the three concepts. I'm summarizing thousands of hours of lawn mowing.
So then what happened to answer your question, why I felt the first time I started feeling like this. I started applying this to really small things like getting an A on a test or running a faster mile or something like this. And it just worked exactly like all the authors said. I just kept pushing the boundaries of what I thought I could do.
And I never really ran into, and I still probably have yet to run into boundaries that you couldn't blow through.
So you said it worked. Like what specifically worked? Just writing it down and working hard or something more tactical?
The very, very first major thing that I ever tried to do was right after the summer when I started listening to these tapes. And it was, to this day, the hardest thing I ever did. So I wrestled. I was on the varsity team my sophomore year, and I wrestled at 155. I had a starting position. The captain dropped down to my weight class.
I looked up and down the lineup, and the only guy I could beat was at 125. Wow. So I'm six feet tall and I dropped 30 pounds and I wrestled 125. I was eating 900 calories a day. I was going on runs in the morning. It's like nine degrees outside. And I just powered through that. And all of a sudden I was like, wow, if I could do that, at least the other goals I set, I was able to eat.
And so I just got to feel this incredible power of being able to really change the trajectory of your life by just deciding you wanted to.
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