TED Talks Daily
Forget the corporate ladder — winners take risks | Molly Graham (re-release and interview)
09 May 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu.
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.
That's company and community builder Molly Graham. In 2024, she gave a popular TED talk about why the best careers are built by people willing to take risks, embrace being a beginner, and keep going even when things get messy. Today, she's stepped into a major new role. She's taking the helm of the TED podcast Work Life at a time when the future of work feels especially uncertain.
We caught up with Molly earlier this month to look back at her talk and what it's like to jump off this new proverbial cliff. We get into the emotional side of work, how to tell the difference between good fear and bad fear, and what it means to reinvent yourself at midlife.
Not enough people talk about the emotional side of work and that so many people are experiencing the emotional human reaction to change. And I think that's even more true today because there's so much going on. And there's just not enough people out there saying, hey, this shit is hard and it's emotional.
We also get into mentorship, the stories we inherit about who we're supposed to be and how Molly is thinking about all of this as she begins this new chapter. The talk is first and then the conversation. It's all coming up after a short break.
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Chapter 2: What are the key skills needed before taking career risks?
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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.
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Chapter 3: How does Molly Graham define the emotional side of work?
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.
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.
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Chapter 4: How can mentorship shape our career paths?
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. 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? 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.
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Chapter 5: What distinguishes good fear from bad fear in career decisions?
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.
Don't go away. My conversation with Molly Graham is coming right up.
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Join 15 million customers internationally. Be smart. Get Wise. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. You know, every day on Up First, NPR's Golden Globe-nominated morning news podcast, we bring you three essential stories. At the heart of each story are questions. What really happened? What really mattered? What happens next?
At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and to follow the facts. Follow Up First wherever you get your podcasts and start your day knowing what matters and why.
Molly, welcome to the show. Thanks, Elise. I'm happy to be here. Listeners just heard your talk again, so they know the general framework and the new season of Work Life with you as host just launched. You have spoken openly about the fear that you felt taking this on, but that it was also a risk worth taking. Why?
Oh, I mean, I think most risks are worth taking, unless there's some like real fear that you should listen to. But like, I think most risks are worth taking just to say it. And then this one, like when I got the offer, it really triangulated for me on like, is this the work I do? You know, is this the thing that I want to spend time and energy on in the world? And I
Is it a kind of learning that I want? And for me, those two things together, like it was such a powerful combination because the work that I do right now, the thing that I love is helping people feel less lonely, more sane, more seen, and also more confident at work. And then I think for me, it's like, I just love doing things that I feel highly unqualified for.
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Chapter 6: What does it mean to jump off a metaphorical cliff in your career?
financial anxiety, right? Or anything that attacks, you know, what I would call like the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, like I'm scared I can't feed my family, I'm scared I'm going to lose my house. Those are things where you're not going to be good at taking a risk if that level of anxiety accompanies it. And I think that kind of fear is might be telling you, hey, like now's not the moment.
You know, now's not the time to quit your job or challenge yourself in this way. And there will be a moment, but maybe now's not it.
You've also talked about having to sort through which voice in your head is talking. Like, is this an ego-driven decision or is this an authentic sort of soul-driven decision? How do you help folks be able to tell the difference?
Woof. It's the work of a lifetime, just to say it. And I did a lot of this work or started on this work because I made a career decision that ended up being a mistake. And sort of on paper, it was perfect. The job was fancy, and I thought I'd always wanted that job. And
If I reflect backwards, I would say that there was a very strong voice that was ego driven, what I would call my like achiever voice saying you should do this like it's shiny and everybody's going to think you're cool and you're going to put it on your LinkedIn and everybody's going to be like, woohoo, you know, it was like almost so excited about having had the job.
that I never stopped to ask, are you excited to do the job? And eventually a friend showed up that said, are you excited about the day? Like, are you excited about the hours in the day? And I remember that he asked me that at a bad time. Talk about a misplaced mentor piece of advice. It was like two weeks before I started the job.
But I remember having this sinking feeling of like, oh, I'm not sure I am excited about the day. But it caused me to do a bunch of work to try to sort out these voices in my head of like, What are they each doing? And I had a coach at the time who gave me this really great metaphor of like, it's like a car and you have voices that are in the front and they're driving, right?
And you have voices that are in the backseat and they might be shouting things, but they're a little softer. And then there's voices in the trunk.
And she literally had me do these amazing exercises where I took people out of the trunk and talked to them about why they were there and how they got put there and also talked to the people in the front seat about what was important to them and why they were driving. But it's like piecing apart these different parts of yourself and realizing that they have very different motivations.
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Chapter 7: How can we survive the emotional rollercoaster of career changes?
Like, how do we get wise?
I just want to say I have to put my hand in the blender. Like, I feel like, you know, a lot of people will tell me don't do this or whatever. And sometimes I just have to like I would say I have to touch the stove in order to realize that it's hot, even if you told me. even if there's a sign above it that says that it's hot.
But you know, I think that for me, the mistakes are part of who you are, right? And they're part of how you learn. And that's, you know, I don't really have, I don't really believe in regret, just because I think you are who you are, because of the things that got you there, mistakes and successes.
There were some decisions I might not make again, knowing what I know now, but I only know what I know now, because I'm Made those mistakes, you know, but I think that people gain wisdom from lots of different things. Like there's lots of different types of learners in the world. I'm an experiential learner. I need to like experience things in order to like truly internalize them.
Yeah.
Some folks can really learn from a book or learn from a podcast and decide not to do the thing. But to me, more what I find with listening to other people's stories or watching folks that I work with in my communities, learn is like, it's so valuable to hear other people's stories because... Often, it sort of helps you orient yourself like a little bit of a compass.
Sometimes you're in a little tornado and you're like, I don't know which way is up or down or sideways or north or south or east or west. And somebody tells you a story of a time that they were in a tornado. And it might not be exactly the same tornado, but it just lets you be like, oh, I know which way north is all of a sudden. So it isn't to say that it saves you.
It's more that it helps you make sense of your own experience, I think, sometimes, at least for me.
it's less isolating I think it makes us feel less alone to know that we're not the only ones going through things but that we all have this bias or negative bias that you know I'm the only person on earth who has ever gone through this but it's just giving you that like relative sense of you're not the only person that's ever gone through this somebody else has gone through something and you can learn something from that but to your point like you can feel seen because of it you know so
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