Nine Lives Exercise
List nine lives you'd be excited to live — all starting today — then pull the best one into your current life.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 95%
A lower-stakes alternative to finding a single life purpose. You enumerate nine distinct lives you'd genuinely be excited about, each starting from today, then identify the one with the most energy and begin pulling elements of it into your present life. It reframes purpose from a single irreversible bet to a sequence you can sample and eventually live through.
Origin
Graham Weaver's exercise, used to make the intimidating 'what's my passion' question feel more approachable for his students.
Core principles
- 01You don't need one life purpose — you can have most of your nine lives sequentially over a full lifetime
- 02Constraint one: every life must start from today, not from an imagined earlier point
- 03Constraint two: you must be genuinely excited about every life on the list
- 04Pulling a high-energy life partially into your current life raises your energy everywhere else, independent of whether you ever go full-time
How to run it
- 1
Write life one as your current life
Start the list with the life you have right now — your job, location, and situation as it stands today.
- 2
Generate eight more lives under two rules
Add lives two through nine (founder, author, professor, creator, actor, etc.). Every life must start from today, and you must be excited about all of them.
Watch out Don't smuggle in lives you feel obligated toward but aren't excited about — the excitement filter is what makes the list useful.
- 3
Identify the highest-energy life
Find the life that gives you the most energy — the one you'd choose if you knew you wouldn't fail.
- 4
Pull it into your current life
Begin doing a piece of that life now, part-time, alongside your existing obligations — e.g. a podcast every other week while keeping your day job.
Pro tip Even if it stays a side pursuit forever, the act of pulling it in gives you energy across all other areas of life.
In the wild
Weaver has had the corporate job, been a founder, a professor, a writer, and made videos — bringing most of his nine lives into his current life over time.
→ He argues you can have nearly all nine lives, just not simultaneously, if you live long enough.
Lenny was a product manager but loved podcasting, one of his nine lives. He pulled it in as a side hustle rather than waiting to do it full-time.
→ It grew into a career earning far more than his Airbnb PM role, with less stress.
Common mistakes
Believing you must pick one lifelong purpose
Treating career as a single irreversible identity makes the choice paralyzing. Following whichever life gives you energy at each stage is a better compass than committing to one purpose forever.
Is it for you?
Best for
People who feel pressure to find their one true calling and are frozen by it.
Not ideal for
Someone who already has strong conviction on a single goal and just needs to execute.
From the transcript
“you basically come up with nine nine lives”
“first rule is all the lives have to start from today”
“second rule is you have to be excited about all these lives”
“pull that life a little bit into your current life”
“you actually can have pretty much all nine lives you can't have them at once”
From the episode
How to break out of autopilot and create the life you want
Graham Weaver (Stanford GSB professor, founder of Alpine Inv