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
It was really cool. I just got done reading the stories that Dan Gable, is that the guy's name?
Yeah, he's incredible.
What is it about wrestling? Like it seems, we'll talk about rowing too, which I know you did a lot of as well. What is it about, maybe those two are similar, the extreme nature of those sports? It seems like it has a lot to teach, maybe even more so than other sports.
Dan Gable is one of my favorites. He has a great quote. He says, once you've wrestled, everything in life is easy. I think that's dead on. It's dead on. So I think that wrestling is just the most primal sport. In our high school, wrestling was a big sport in the Midwest, in Ohio. They would turn a mat light on. The gym would be packed. People are yelling and screaming. There's a mat light on.
The lights are off in the whole arena. And it's just you and one other person. And you're trying to defeat the other person. I mean, it's crazy. It's a pretty intense sport. And then the weight loss and the training and everything. Hardest thing I ever did. I think it's something about just the primal nature of that.
Can you say maybe one degree more about this idea that you can just choose? Sounds so simple, but I've experienced that same thing. And every time I do it, I'm amazed how powerful it can be. But I want to understand the contours of it from your perspective. What does that mean? What does it feel like to choose? What do you choose? What was the process? Whatever else you can say about this.
The first thing I'd say is that if you watch most people, they're kind of asleep or unconscious. I am too sometimes. Imagine you get up, whatever your routine is, you brush your teeth, you get ready for work, you commute to work, you have a tough commute, you get to work, you have a couple of meetings.
Some Zoom calls, then you eat, then you return some emails, you have a few more meetings, you get home, return some emails, watch some Netflix, go to bed. There's all this busyness. You're just kind of doing today what you did yesterday. You're doing tomorrow what you did today. And you're stringing together that and calling it a life. So there's this real level of unconsciousness about it.
So the first part is step back. And just make space. And I do this with an executive coach. You can do this with a journal. You can do it with a friend. But just step back and just make space and then ask really powerful questions in that time. My favorite question of all time is, what would you do if you knew you wouldn't fail? I'll actually build it up a little bit better.
On one of the audio tapes I heard, this guy said, okay, imagine there's this genie that comes out of this magic lamp and he says to you, hey, Patrick, I've only been in here like a thousand years, so I can't give you the traditional three wishes. But what I can give you is that whatever you throw yourself into with your career, your life, vocation, like it's going to work out amazingly well.
And you'll have ups and downs. It'll take a long time, but I'll be here to bless you with that. What would you wish for? And then the punchline is, go do that thing. That's your life path. That's what your soul really wants to do. And that's what you would do if you get out of your head and get out of your fear of failure. So that's one great question.
Another one would be like, if you didn't have to worry about the how. So relax the how you're going to do it. The coaching quote is, the how is the killer of all great dreams. Make space, ask these really provocative questions.
And it's not like you're going to answer them right away, but you might two days later in the shower, you might answer that question and then you'll really know you're going to feel it when you really know it. And then it's really, really tough to go do it. It takes a lot of courage and sometimes the path isn't clear.
But I think that's where the real fun of life is, is really trying to get in touch with what your answer is to some of those questions.
So maybe pick another thing in your high school or early years, something you wanted, and then the steps you went through these days. Sure. Yeah. Just picture you walking around this bottom or like, well, I want to make sure I go to college because I thankfully turned onto these tapes early.
I did really well in high school and I got to go to Princeton. So I was, I think the first kid in my school to ever even apply there, let alone go. So I go to Princeton and all of a sudden I literally felt like Forrest Gump in that scene where his braces come off and he's running because I didn't have to
be like at my mom's house from this time and my dad's here and high school at this time and all this. I had like all this space. And so I literally was like, oh wow, now I can really let go with these goals. I set three goals going into Princeton. I was going to be the valedictorian. I was going to be the number one rower in the United States, even though I'd never rowed before.
I didn't even know that the boats went backwards. And third, I was going to start a business to pay for school. To skip the end of the story, I didn't actually achieve any of those goals, but I came really close on all three. And so rowing is probably the simplest one to explain.
So I show up, I'm a novice, I'm 130 pounds from the wrestling, and I got my ass kicked because there's kids who'd rowed for six years and they knew how it worked. So I got cut my freshman year, but they didn't cut anyone. Instead, they said, okay, if you don't make a boat, you're going to be a land warrior and you can use the rowing machines. I still remember that.
When they posted the boats and my name wasn't on there, I did the math and I said, okay, women's, heavyweight, I was a lightweight, lightweight. And I did the math on how many people got cut and how many rowing machines there were. And so I was like, okay, I got to get here really early because all these people are going to be using the rowing machines. I show up the next morning.
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