Forget the Corporate Ladder — Winners Take Risks | Molly Graham | TED

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 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.

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.

To get good at jumping off cliffs, you have to get good at three things.

The first is actually jumping off the cliff.

(Laughter)

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 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.

The third thing you have to get good at in order to get good at jumping off cliffs

is becoming a professional idiot.

(Laughter)

I can tell you that this is one of my greatest strengths.

I am comfortable sounding like a moron.

I am great at sitting in rooms with brilliant people

asking very dumb questions.

But what that actually means

is that I have become an extraordinary learner.

My favorite phrase is, "Sorry if this is a stupid question, but."

When you ask it that way, everybody wants to make you feel better.

They're like, "No, no, that's not a dumb question."

And then they would love to teach you what they know.

People love being teachers.

It makes them feel smart.

The other thing you discover is that most stupid questions

aren't actually stupid.

So many people are afraid of sounding dumb

that the world is littered

with important questions that never got asked.

Questions like,

"Can you define that word for me?",

"Why are we doing this?",

"Why are we having this meeting?"

(Laughter)

Embracing being a professional idiot

often actually makes you the most valuable person in the room.

There's a last thing, part of the illusion of the stairs,

that becomes really obvious the more cliffs that you jump off of.

And that is the idea that there is one set of stairs,

one definition of success.

I have a lot of friends that have climbed up the stairs

to some version of the top --

a fancy title, a lot of money, fame --

and then they've realized that they're miserable.

One friend described becoming CEO of her company

and immediately thinking,

"Is this all there is?"

You know what she did next?

She jumped off a professional cliff.

She went from being the CEO of a marketing agency

to helping people who were dying in hospice.

Success is not the same for everyone.

I know that what I'm talking about isn't easy.

It takes bravery to trade the known for the unknown.

It takes courage to do something

that might seem like a step sideways or backwards to someone else.

But you will never really know who you are or what you are capable of

until you learn how to try.

Thank you.

(Applause)