Molly Graham

speaker

2,011 appearances 36 recordings 6 series first heard Jun 2022 last heard 6 Jul

Molly Graham’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 15 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 4.

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TED Talks Daily · Forget the corporate ladder — winners take risks | Molly Graham (re-release and interview) · 9 May 2026 podcast

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.

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