Take BIG Bold Career Risks
Why fear is a signpost for learning, what 'hyperscale' really means, why 'Give Away Your Legos' is more relevant than ever, what is a 'Glue Person', and Mark Zuckerberg's untold superpower
Hello, it’s Ethan & Jason. Welcome to Level Up: Your source for executive insights, high performance habits, and specific career growth actions.
FYI, we have 3 upcoming events—join us live!
(Apr 2) Unforgettable Presence: Get Seen, Gain Influence, and Catapult Your Career. Jason & Lorraine K. Lee will discuss her new book and how to develop executive presence, virtual presence, and leverage LinkedIn. RSVP here.
(Apr 9) Make Better Decisions. Jason & Alex will discuss high stakes decision making with Annie Duke (bestselling author and former professional poker player). RSVP here.
(Apr 11) Biggest Mistakes L5s Make When Trying to Get Promoted. Jason & Sally Ivester share why hard work doesn’t speak for itself and how to be seen as a leader. RSVP here.
Take BIG Bold Career Risks with Ethan Evans & Molly Graham
Watch on YouTube.
You stand out and advance by taking career risks.
It's called "risk / reward" for a reason — risks generate reward. Playing it safe may give you a long, stable career, but if you want more, you have to make bold moves.
Molly was at Google when her department grew from 25 to 125 people in 9 months, then was early at Facebook (joined at ~500 employees and left at 5,500), then COO at Quip (a startup founded by Bret Taylor) through it's sale to Salesforce for $750 million, and then with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
She has pioneered and published many strong career ideas (e.g. ‘Give Away Your Legos’) and her recent TED Talk on "cliff jumping" — her process for taking big career jumps into new jobs where she was "unqualified" on paper.
I've met Molly at TED, on panels, and in a workshop.
She is "the real deal."
Molly now runs a leadership development community called The Glue Club for startup leaders which goes deeper and gets more involved than your standard newsletters, classes, and coaching.
Follow Molly on LinkedIn and checkout her newsletter.
And we want to hear from you. Share your one takeaway in the comments from our talk on taking risks, surviving failures, and The Glue Club.
Key Lessons
If you want growth, having a death grip on what you know and are good at will backfire and stunt you. The experience inside a scaling company is you are working on a small lego pile while someone else constantly dumps legos on your head — If you stay fixated on your little lego pile, you end up missing all the opportunity. You must get good at something, pass it off, and repeat (this skill is what gets you the next opportunity). Your job is to make yourself irrelevant (work yourself out of a job) — this is not a natural human motion and thus is very stressful. Molly ended up working in Communications, then HR & Recruiting, then Business Development & Partnerships, and then Product.
The ‘Give Away Your Legos’ (now more relevant than ever due to AI) metaphor is about evolution and embracing change. Get good at leaning into things you don’t know how to do. You will see organizations small and leaner than ever before because AI is about making us better and faster at our jobs — you don’t need an engineering team to automate your job. And if your organization is downsizing or flat, get leverage out of AI tools.
Hyperscale means how fast your business is growing AND how fast your job is changing (and thus how fast YOU have to grow to keep up with the company). It is no longer about employee headcount growth (outdated metric) — the new metric is how small your team is relative to the impact of your business. At Facebook, the key business metric was monthly active users (a very vertical graph for a long time).
Fear is a signpost for learning, know how to differentiate the different types to make your decision. One type is financial fear (I cannot support my family)—you must pay attention and do the math (monthly burn, runway). The other type is fear of failure (I’m not good at something)—this is a good sign because you will learn and prove to yourself what you are capable of. Figuring out how to do things you don’t know how to do (being relentlessly resourceful) is a superpower that makes you more equipped to handle a fast changing world.
A ‘Glue Person’ is someone who is always asking what they need to do to make this company successful regardless of what chair they sit in. View The Glue Club as a hybrid coach and adviser. A coach gives you frameworks, tools, and asks you smart questions to help you find answers for yourself to turn into a better leader. An adviser is someone who has done your job and has answers. The most powerful is combining the two.
The untold story of Mark Zuckerberg is, he’s the fastest learner you’ve ever met in your entire life. People underestimate how hard it is to do what he did, being a 19-year-old in a college dorm room to running one of the most important companies of the last 20 years. Just because you founded a company does not mean you’ve earned the right to run it forever — it requires being a constant student, willing to hire people better than you, and proactively seek learning from people smarter than you. Facebook is an amoeba (constantly morphing, changing itself, and addressing threats) because that is how Mark is. And, it is not possible to build important things without being controversial and creating negative side effects.
What people who attended the talk live said
“What an AMAZING Session!”
“Thank you for this great fireside chat!”
“Molly, love your perspective about differences in priority at different phases in your life. Also, love that you are going deep and not superficial.”
“Thanks for saying that. When you take bold leap, there is always set back. It depends on how you frame it.”
“Great perspective to handle FEAR - thanks Molly for sharing your perspective. Thanks Ethan and Jason for bringing to this community.”
“Love the perspective - failures turn into level-ups if you are open to learn from them!”
“Thank you Ethan, Molly, and Jason for taking the time and sharing insights!”
“So great to be learning alongside everyone.”
“It is the magic of turning that fear of failure into hunger to learn!”
“This is way more interesting than I had anticipated.”
“Thanks so much for this perspective about failure! “
“Glue club alumni here!! One of the best, most impactful trainings and communities I’ve been a part of. Grateful to Molly, Alice, and the rest of the Glue Club team for building such a unique and powerful space.”
“I have always identified as the glue of my team and organization. However, not every company values this.”
“This is a great perspective, it is easy for us to think about the positives and gains and not the perspective of pressure to achieve and grow, and become better and better.”
“+1 on Zuckerberg’s learning mindset. His openness to new things is so inspiring.”
Connect With Ethan & Jason
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‘Breakthrough to Executive’ course starts April 26: Rated 4.7/5 by 1,000+ alumni. In the past few weeks, leaders from Amazon, Airbnb, Google, Cisco, Meta, Hertz, EY, Atlassian, T-Mobile, Boeing, Adobe, and more enrolled. We’ve also added a new ‘Leading AI Adoption’ module. If you are interested, explore our course page.
Love the "work yourself out of a job" mindset. I have actually done this multiple times in my career (and said so real time). Every time, I was told it was idiotic. It doesn't get any easier. Arguably it even gets harder as the comp increases - yet I still haven't had a reason to regret any of these moves.
Regardless of how successful you were, death grip indicates resistance to growth, consciously or not. Let go and build more new legos!