Forget the corporate ladder — winners take risks with Molly Graham | from TED Talks Daily

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 wanna 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 wanna 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.

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 wanna 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 wanna 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.