Read the full transcript of Molly Graham’s talk titled “Forget the Corporate Ladder — Winners Take Risks” at TED Talks conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Illusion of Career Stairs
There’s a lot of pressure around what it takes to build a great career. And it all comes back to this idea that you’re supposed to know what you want to do. It’s an idea that I like to call the stairs. Here’s how the stairs go.
You show up in college, and you’re supposed to know what you want to major in. That major is supposed to lead you to your first job, and you’re supposed to be a good student. That major is supposed to lead you to your first job.
And then you get another job, and you get promoted and promoted and promoted forever. The best part about the stairs is safety and security. It feels like you know what you need to do to get ahead. The worst part of the stairs is that it’s like a weird video game that you can get stuck inside of for years. The stairs will make you feel like your self-worth is tied to your title or your last performance rating or your next promotion.
But the truth is that the stairs are an illusion. These days, excellent careers are not built by excellent stair climbers. Said differently, one of the most important things you can get good at in your career is taking risks. Or, as I like to call it, jumping off cliffs.
Taking the Leap: A Personal Story
Let me explain what I mean with a story. When I was 25, I got offered a crazy job. I had spent a couple of years climbing the stairs in human resources at Facebook when the leader of another department came to me and asked me to help him start a new project, doing something that I knew nothing about. It was a long-term project. It was risky, and a lot of people told me it would probably fail.
I was intrigued, but I was also scared.
So I talked to a bunch of different people, and I have to admit, a lot of them told me not to take it.
But there was this little voice inside me that just kept saying, “I wonder. I wonder if I can be capable in this completely new environment.”
So I took a risk, and I took the job.
Now, I’d like to say that what happened next was that it was obviously a great decision, and I was immediately successful.
But actually, the first nine months on this project felt a lot more like falling off of a very steep cliff. I had gone from feeling competent and capable in HR to feeling like an absolute idiot all the time. I was sitting in rooms with brilliant people asking very dumb questions. Six months into this job, I got the lowest performance rating of my entire life. I had so many moments when all I wanted to do was run back to the safety and security of the stairs.
But about nine months in, something interesting happened. I had to lead a meeting. It sounds simple, but it was a big meeting. It was a complicated debate about a nuanced part of this project. I was successful, and I so vividly remember walking out of that meeting feeling like myself again. I had gone from feeling like a beginner in this new environment to feeling confident and capable. I spent another three years on this project learning and growing, and on the other side of it, I was a completely different person.
I was offered jobs that no one would have offered me if I had stayed in HR. That’s the thing about jumping off cliffs. It doesn’t just take you a couple flights up on the stairs. It’s like a weird elevator that takes you to a whole new place. Cliff jumps teach you who you are and what you are capable of in ways that the stairs can never.
The Three Keys to Jumping Off Cliffs
To get good at jumping off cliffs, you have to get good at three things. The first is actually jumping off the cliff. After many years of coaching people through career decisions, I know that sometimes it is just not the right time to take a risk.
But I can also tell you that most people do not stay stuck on the stairs out of necessity. They stay there out of fear. The trick is to learn to tell the difference between the kind of fear that says, “I’m scared I might run out of money,” which you should actually listen to, and the kind of fear that says, “I’m scared I might fail,” which you should take as a giant, green, flashing light to jump. Cliff jumps teach you what you are capable of in spite of fear.
The second thing you have to get good at in order to get good at jumping off cliffs is surviving the fall. Jumping off a cliff is taking a giant step backwards into the land of being a beginner again. That means it’s a very big learning process, and with that comes a huge emotional roller coaster. Daily, weekly, sometimes hourly.
All of my life, all of my jumps have involved vacillating wildly between feeling like, “Oh, maybe I’m going to be good at this,” and then immediately feeling like, “Who the hell even gave me this job in the first place?” All of that is normal, and it doesn’t actually mean that anything is wrong. You have to learn to expect the roller coaster and ignore it at the same time. The most valuable mantra for me in this phase has been, “Give it two weeks.”
A lot of people will tell you to sleep on it. I can tell you most of these emotions don’t go away overnight. Two weeks is a great barometer for things that you should actually pay attention to.