Why You Can Be Great at Work That Completely Drains You | Molly Graham

Key Takeaway

Run a one-week energy audit of your calendar: after every meeting, rate it from 0 to 10 based on whether it energized or drained you. Then look for patterns and make one small change—delegate, decline, redesign, or schedule more of a high-energy activity. This will not make every job joyful, but it gives you evidence about where your best work and sustainable motivation actually live.

Episode Overview

Molly Graham and Dan Harris explore how to build a career that is both ambitious and emotionally sustainable. Graham explains “career emergence,” a less plan-driven approach built on local decision rules, relationships, calculated risks, energy awareness, and saying no; they also discuss finding more meaning in imperfect jobs and approaching AI with curiosity rather than panic.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Why You Can Be Great at Work That Completely Drains You | Molly Graham from 10% Happier. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Today, we're talking about how to actually like your job. I personally consider myself to be in the top .00001% in this regard. I love what I do. I get to do what I want most days, and yet there are still some days where I'm kind of just dreading the fact that I have to bulldoze through my to-do list or I'm fearing being a failure. Work is hard, even if you love what you do, and many of us don't actually love what we do.

So I'm very excited to talk to my guest today, who is Molly Graham. She's the host of TED's Work Life podcast. She's also the author of a sub stack called Lessons, where she writes about stuff she has learned inside fast-growing startups like Facebook and Quip, and she is here as part of an occasional series we do called Sanely Ambitious, where we talk about how to succeed without losing your mind. Molly Graham, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, Dan. I'm really honored to be here.

I'm such a fan of your work and the conversations you put out in the world, so it's a real honor. I really appreciate that. And I also want to give you kudos for being a podcast host who records in front of her bed. That is podcasting done right. I appreciate you saying that because I constantly feel a little bit embarrassed about it. But you know what? We're being real over here. I mean, I think that's the whole beauty. I'm actually recording today from a proper studio.

Often I record from a closet in my house, but I think the beauty of podcasting is people want to get a sense of what do you actually like and what better place to do that than from your bedroom. And I think you're like dogs with you. It's all good. It's all natural. My dog is locked out of the room and is really mad about it and is trying to break down the door. Okay, let her in if you want or him unless you think she or he's going to bark.

We'll keep her out, but she appreciates the invite in total honesty. I love dogs. Okay, Molly. Let me ask you a serious question. You have this concept career emergence. What is what's that mean? I got this incredible gift in the last year of being asked to take over the podcast work life from Ted and it's something that you're I think you're having a guest on Adam Grant's who he and Ted built that podcast together for a bunch of years and then he decided to stop doing it and they asked me if I wanted to do it and work life has been this wild journey just even in the first year and I bet you have some of these same experiences where it feels like I've gotten to go to school again, you know, and so what happened that led me to this idea of career emergence was that I had a conversation with the YouTuber Mark Rober which he's very famous.

He has over 75 million followers on YouTube. And if you don't know who he is like ask any eight-year-old he does this incredible content where he makes science really accessible to kids and adults on YouTube through these really elaborate beautiful videos and I basically had a conversation with him about how he's been doing that for 15 straight years. He basically has published one video a month for 15 years and in it, he basically explained to me that he's never had a long-term plan. My question was sort of like you must have a long-term plan because you're working on this algorithm that like it's constantly giving you pressure to do different things and publish every day and you're not doing that but his point was that he actually just only focuses on what the next step is and he said to me it's kind of like emergence and I was like, what is that?

And he was like nature has this concept of emergence, which is that there's all these different entities. So like starlings are an example, you know, those murmurations that you see where there's all these beautiful pictures that it feels like the starlings are intentionally painting when they fly together. That isn't by design. It's actually just every individual starling making decisions on their own path based on a set of rules that you know, it's sort of like don't bump into your neighbor, etc. But through those sort of micro decisions, it paints this beautiful picture same thing with bees making a beehive every bee.

There's no design the bees all just make individual local decisions and then ultimately this beautiful thing emerges on the other side and Mark's point was that that's how he manages his career. He just only focuses on the next step. He has a set of what he calls local rules to help him decide what next step might be right and then he just sort of has faith that like the thing that's going to emerge is more beautiful and more powerful than anything. He could like predict or design and I was listening to him explain this to me and I was like, holy cow.

This is how I've managed my career. I you know, I've never had any kind of long-term plan and I worked for Sheryl Sandberg a bunch of years ago who is the CEO of Facebook and she told me you should basically have like a two-year plan and a 20-year plan and and her point was like don't worry about the stuff in the middle don't over design the middle ground and I could kind of get behind the two-year plan, but I've really never had any sense of the 20-year plan and I think I felt kind of like broken because of that I was like everybody has a plan shouldn't you have a goal of where you're trying to get but Mark made me feel like oh actually the thing I've been doing which is essentially just figuring out what the right next step is and believing that it'll take me somewhere awesome or beautiful is actually a completely valid way to manage your career.

So that is what career emergence is and makes a ton of sense to me and it reminds me a little bit of I think it's an AA expression like just do the next right thing always and that will get you where you need to go and you probably actually you don't know where it is you need to go. So that's an illusion thinking that you can make some long-term plan that all makes sense to me. However, as somebody who is congenitally anxious, it feels like a hard thing to do.

You said have faith and I worry that I just don't have that kind of faith. I need to spend hours and hours of time compulsively planning every twist and turn of my future. Yeah, I mean very real. I actually wrote I started writing a little bit about career emergence and it's been really cool to get so many reactions to people saying oh my god, this is what I do, but I never had a word for it. So that's been really interesting but part of what I started writing about was what it actually feels like to do that because I think it's really easy to look backwards and say I did these cute experiments and it was so like and then they all like worked out, you know, and that's kind of what the retrospective looks like but the actual act of not knowing of just focusing on the next thing it feels pretty dark a lot of the times like my last four or five years, which is really I did not have a name for it.

But this is what I've done like a career emergence has been my jam like I felt lost most of the time I felt broken most of the time and I felt very determined to not give into that I guess like to not let the anxiety govern my life and send me screaming back to the safe, you know path or whatever, you know, the traditional path get a job and a fancy title or whatever and and but that it sucks a lot of the time and I think it's important to name that because it's not like oh I have this word for this thing and now it's like everything makes sense and it's perfect.

It's like no, it's actually just a way in a lot of ways. I think of it as a way to manage your anxiety because it's like it's a name for something that you're doing versus just feeling lost and wandering in a dark tunnel, which is what it felt like a lot of the time to me. So is it your contention that having a long-term plan is a folly? No, meaning I think that there's probably just different ways to do this and and I think it's been really interesting again on the work-life podcast to meet people that have literally had a plan since they were eight that they are now executing on, you know, there's this guy that I interviewed Astro Teller.

Who's the this the head of moonshots at Google X. So it's like Google's Innovation Factory and his grandfather ran the Manhattan Project and he says that since he was eight, he's basically had a dream of building a space where he could bring together scientists and innovators create a happy place where they could do their best work, which is literally what he has done at Google for the last 15 years. So I think to me there is a lot of power in just naming that there's different ways to manage your career.

I feel like the predominant message I was given was like you have to have a plan like if you don't have a plan something's wrong. And so part of the reason why this was so powerful for me and why I think it's helped other people as I've talked about it is that it's okay to not have a plan to and that that the only thing I will say against the the total planned people is like there's something about career emergence that you know, you believe a little bit in magic you believe that there's opportunities out there that you couldn't predict or design and I have seen friends and leaders that I work with make decisions very planfully out of fear, you know out of out of safety and I think sometimes over designing your career can actually prevent magic like prevent you from getting opportunities that you could never have designed.

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That's better help.com slash happier. And I know you're not saying that having a long-term plan is a folly and I'm not saying it either but to a certain extent given how little control we have over anything. Frankly, I think having a vision but navigating toward it with a lot of flexibility that that seems like a saner path or doing what you're describing career emergence, which is not having some vision at all, but being much more open to what emerges that's also very very compelling you said before that in order to do this you really need to have I believe you use the term local rules.

What is what does that mean? And by the way, Dan, I would love to hear if you feel like you identify with one of these like do you identify with like having a plan or really not? I identify with both. I'll give you an example. I'm I'm recording this today from a studio in Manhattan owned by the cable news network msnow formerly known as MSNBC and I retired from the news business five years ago. I did not have any plan of getting back into the news business, but the folks from MSNOW came to me and said, hey, would you be interested in producing some content with us that helps people cope with the news which is actually something I thought about for a long time but never really gotten off my ass to do and so I was delighted when they said you want to do this and I feel like I'm I was designed in a lab to help people do that given that I used to be a news anchor and now I'm focused on mental fitness and so I said yes and this was not part of my plan and actually I'm not sure if it's going to work.

It's just a total experiment. I have a kind of some vague sense of what it is. I'm trying to build but I really try to stay open and flexible about how I get there and and iterate on the vision all the time. I'll just say one last thing for me a crucial part of being able to do this is to be surrounded by people I like and trust so that I be coming constant communication with them because I don't trust my own judgment. I'd much rather do this in conversation.

Yeah, I resonate with a lot of that and you know, you asked what local rules means and I think one of the things I say is if you don't have a map you need a compass and I think like what you're describing is you kind of have a map you sort of know the river or the mountain you're trying to get to the other side of but there's a lot of different paths you could take to get there and I think you know you sort of said like hold the journey loosely which I think really resonates with me and so I think there's a lot of space inside this idea of like having a plan or not having a plan but to me the most important thing has been having a way to make decisions and this is something Mark Rober talked about.

as well, which is basically principles or local rules or a compass that says, what is right for me? And to your point about having people around you that you can trust, what's a compass you can trust? Because sometimes you do get voices in your head or just outside forces that are sort of like, you should do that. You should do that. It'd be really cool. Everybody would think you're really cool for doing that. But are those your best instincts? And so for me, it's been about having a clear sort of design principle or set of principles.

Like some people, it might be called values. I think some people have legit principles. In emergence, they're called local rules because that's what the bees and the starlings use. But for my journey, it's been about having a couple of words and some tools, to your point about having people and resources that I lean on to listen to that I know are kind of like really authentically trying to guide me on the best path to the other side, wherever that is. So one of my biggest words in the last four or five years, this part of my career journey, has been the word joy.

Because that really was not a part of the first 15 years of my career. I would say ambition or achievement was probably my word. Or useful is a word I used to talk about a lot when I was working inside these crazy companies. And I came out the other side, mostly convicted that I just didn't want to do that anymore. But I didn't know what I wanted to do. And so having this word joy, which came from a belief that if you could find work that made you joyful, it probably was the highest and best use of you.

And then it might also be the most lucrative or powerful version of yourself in the world. And that question of just like, what brings me joy every day? Not like, who am I trying to be in the world? Or what do I want to accomplish? It was just like, what makes my days joyful? That was my compass for the last five years. And there was a little more nuance to it than that. But that compass ended up serving me really well. It was hard to find sometimes.

But I think that's to your point about having people that you can call when you're like, I'm having a dark day. It's important. Joy is not, I don't think, a word that a lot of people associate with work. Couldn't agree more. I wish it was. How do you inject joy into your work, especially since I think a lot of us, you know, again, I'm not in this category, and I'm really grateful. But I think most people I've had these times myself are working because they just need to make a paycheck.

And so joy might seem like something for, you know, the 1%. I get it. And it sounds like that. Sometimes I think the word purpose might be a luxury good, too. You know, it's like, I just need to take care of my family. And I need to make sure my cat has food and that I have a house and a roof over my head. Like, that's why we work. That's why work exists. But when you zoom out, like, work is a lot of our lives, like so many hours in every day and every week and every year.

One of the beliefs that I stumbled upon was that instead of thinking of joy as a luxury good, as like, I can only have that once I've taken care of the money. What if you believed that the most money you could ever make would be on the other side of joy? And I think when you see some of the more successful people in the world, like, I think of Warren Buffett as one of these people, like that man and Charlie Munger, too. Like, they follow joy.

Like, you watch them on stage, you listen to them talk. Like, yes, they've obviously, like, merged joy with, like, their incredible skills as financial minds and brains and brilliant folks. But there's a lot of joy in what they do and a lot of clarity in that joy. And it probably sounds like overly optimistic or tiggery, but I think it's a question worth asking, which is, you know, is there a chance that if joy was a part of your work, it would be the highest and best use of you and that on the other side of that is the most money you could ever make?

Is it possible that even if you're stuck in a dead end job and you don't actually see a way out because of any number of life circumstances, you could still inject joy into the job you have? I mean, I'm guessing that your meditation practices say the answer to that is yes. But I think that to me, it was, like, really eye-opening when I hit various walls in my ambition journey, that journey, that journey of, like, title and achievement and all the fancy things that you're supposed to want.

It led me to some, like, really dark times, like some jobs that just genuinely didn't make me happy. And it wasn't necessarily the job's fault. It was more about just a total lack of alignment between me and the job. And before I took one of those jobs, somebody asked me the question, like, are you excited about the day? Are you excited about the hours in the day? And I remember really having a visceral reaction, like, uh-oh, the answer is no. But I had basically already taken the job, you know, so I had to kind of ignore that.

And I think that the truth is joy and the purpose of life, it comes down to the minutes and the hours, right? And that can come from the people you're spending time with, the interactions you get to have. And yes, maybe you feel trapped, you know, in a restaurant job or in some job that, you know, just feels, again, like a paycheck. But maybe there's joy inside the activities of that job that you can focus on. There's so many things we can't control in life, you know.

I think power comes from focusing on the things that you can. So I imagine that the answer to your question is yes. HOFFMAN My mom, who was not raised wealthy, five children, two parents and a grandparent all in one house with one bathroom. Her dad worked for the Yellow Pages and for you youngsters, the Yellow Pages. In the pre-internet era were these huge books that got thrown on everybody's front step and they were listings of all the local businesses. And then there were the white pages that were the listings of all the residential phone numbers.

And so that's where her dad worked. And she had a summer job at the Yellow Pages. And she just remembered looking at the clock all day long. It was miserable. And she got it in her head that, look, we all have to work. I just want to do a job, whatever it is, that I'm enjoying it in the minutes and hours as they pass. GOLDSTEIN Absolutely. And I think there's so many stories, you know, between my friends and the leaders that I've worked with over time of people chasing achievement, right, chasing titles, chasing money, and getting to the top of whatever ladder or set of stairs, you know, getting the CEO job, getting the job, you know, running the company that everybody's looking at thinking, gosh, that must be, everything must be perfect in your life if you're the CEO of XYZ.

But the person sitting in that chair, right, the person that's gotten to the top of that ladder is thinking, oh, like, I hate this, you know, or, oh, like, I have a friend that became a CEO. And she talks about experiencing like, getting to the top of the ladder and just being like, wait a minute, is this all there is? Like, this is what I've been striving for. And so to me, like, you know, if you're going to look beyond money when it comes to work, which I think is not a luxury good, like, it's too much of our time and too many of our hours to let it just be about money.

The question has to be, what do I want to fill my days with? And how and that can be maybe there's a constraint and you can't leave the job that you're in or something like that. But there's a different way to approach that job that can, you know, bring out the best in you or come from a place of choice versus a place of to your mom's point, like, feeling like a little bit of a slave. You know, I do think there are ways. I mean, again, I want to own my my lucky my position of immense luck and in that I have it like a job that is extremely joyful.

But I've had, you know, I mean, I started my work career at Dunkin Donuts. So I literally so I get it. There are all types of jobs and I've had jobs that I did not enjoy. I can imagine finding joy and we should talk about what the definition of joy is. So I'll ask you that in a minute. But I can imagine using lots of techniques to infuse whatever you're doing with joy or more or maybe and this might be more accessible. You mentioned it earlier purpose so that your days have both meaning and little hits of dopamine.

So the purpose, you know, just even if you hate your job and your boss is a dick can really tune in to why you're doing what you're doing, even if it's just as simple as earning a paycheck to feed your cat or your kids, because that's genuinely meaningful purpose. And then the joy can come from the connection to your coworkers or the customers, any number of things. And I'm not saying this is doable in any context, but I think it may be more doable than people who hate their jobs think.

And again, I don't want to be Pollyanna about about this. But I do think there is a level of doability here that that might be underrated. But let me go back to joy for a second in terms of your definition. Like, what do you mean specifically? You've used joy as a North Star as part of your career emergence. It got you, you know, it it helped you focus on things that were less ego based, like ambition and title and salary to get you to more meaningful positions.

What do you what does joy mean at the level of your brain? Yeah. So for me, the definition I started with was what's something you would want to do, even if nobody would pay you for it. And the most joyful people I've spent time with are people who, they can't stop working, you know, because they're just like, this is what I love to do. My brother is works in Hollywood. And they're a screenwriter, director, like they do all the different things. But they can't stop working.

Like they are always working, like even if it's that is powerful to witness. Because I'm like, don't you want to break? And there's something in it for them. That's like, there is a break, you know, there's a break, because there's joy in the work that makes them happy. But I've always been envious of that. I was like, I did it work feels like something I have to escape from or I'm exhausted by and I you know, I run away from and I was like, what would it look like to never want to put it down, you know?

So that was where I started. And then at a micro level, it really became about the hours in the day. Like, my goal was literally just like, to be happy at work 90% of the time. And the purpose there was like 10 you're not gonna be happy all the time. That's not a thing. But can we shoot for most of the time? You know, can we shoot for more of the time? And my coach a million years ago gave me this exercise to literally, for one week to rate every single meeting on my calendar on a scale of zero to 10 in terms of whether it was energizing or not.

And in the job I was in at the time, it was really eye opening because it was all ones and 10s. Like there was nothing in the middle. And there was, you know, plenty of ones and but there was also plenty of 10s. And it was, it was really eye opening just to realize what was energizing and what was draining and then ask myself inside of that job, how could I do more of what was energizing? Was there space for that? So it's sort of a micro example of just like getting pretty tactical about the joy.

And then using that as a compass because there was information inside of the 10s also inside of the ones about what what did bring me joy and what therefore felt like the highest and best use of me. And I would say there's actually a direct line from that because so much of the 10s for me at the time were my one on ones with people and moments when I got to coach or sponsor someone. And I just thought of that as management. But there's a direct line from that work to the work that I do today, which is like building communities to support leaders and help them feel less alone and more confident, which, you know, is sort of like when you break it apart, essentially, like a form of management and sponsorship and and all that.

So I think exercises like that can be really helpful. And again, at the time, I could not leave that job, but I could ask a lot of questions about how I could change my time or my days or my work or my team so that I could do more of what made me happy. So you went from somebody who was really focused on upward mobility, title salary in major corporations to actually doing this terrifying thing of following your joy, which was one on one career development, helping people succeed.

You followed that and ended up becoming somebody who builds communities that where executives and others can get together and figure out how to build careers they love. Yeah, exactly. And the build to here. So I will say I had a conversation a couple of months ago with a venture capitalist that was invested in a company that I worked at 10 years ago. And he looked at me. He like I ran into him in a hallway and he looked at me and he was like, what are you doing right now?

He's like, why aren't you at OpenAI? Shouldn't you be at OpenAI like running part of that company? And I was like, yes. And I it's not for me. You know, it's just not who I am anymore. It is absolutely probably where I would have gone if I'd stayed on that path. But it was a really hard right turn of just realizing that I was great at that work and it just drained the shit out of me like I was just exhausted by it. And that, by the way, can be very confusing that you can be great at things that drain you.

But I went on a really bottoms up journey. Like, you know, if I tell the story backwards, it looks really thoughtful and strategic, but a bottoms up journey of just like, OK, I know the things I don't want to do. What are the things that I might want to explore? And it was a series of experiments. I spent the first six months trying to get to like an answer so that I would have an answer at a cocktail party when people said, what's your job? And at some point I realized there just like wasn't going to be an answer that was clear, that it was just going to keep feeling like a series of experiments.

But through that, I found. I accidentally started two communities, both cousins of each other. One is focused on leaders inside of fast-changing companies and helping them feel more sane and more confident, helping them have a place to grow and folks to lean on. And then the other is a community for women leaders in the middle of their lives. And they are both just about creating safe spaces where people can feel supported and seen. And that turns out, I could not have told you that five years ago.

But all I did was follow the like, what feels meaningful to me compass. And over time, this crazy thing put itself together because I was also writing on the side for on Substack and on LinkedIn. And all of a sudden, a year ago, Ted offered me taking over the work-life podcast and it was as if someone turned the lights on. I was like, oh, I'm a creator that has communities and I create content and I build communities that make people feel less alone and more confident.

And now I have an answer at the cocktail party to what I do. But it was four really confusing, super dark years of just believing in the compass. So you haven't used this word, but the word that's coming to mind as I listen to your story is courage. I mean, that took guts to do what you did. I guess so. Yeah, maybe. I think sometimes it doesn't feel like that, though. I didn't feel brave. I felt forced. I was so done with that path. I really walked out of the ambition path knowing so much about what I didn't want to do, but very little about what I wanted to do.

And I tell people this when they come to me sort of with a similar set of concerns, that I feel like I really walked begrudgingly into this sort of foundry path that I ended up on, almost dragging my feet. I had ruled out taking a big C-level job at one of these fancy companies. I had ruled out being a CEO and taking over someone else's company. And it felt like the only thing that was left was to build my own thing. But it wasn't from a place of like, woohoo, I'm so excited.

It was more of a like, okay, I guess this is what we're doing now. So I didn't feel courageous. I felt like it was the only option left. And there was a lot of times when I was very tempted to run back, particularly to those C-level jobs, because that was what I was known for and what I kept getting called about. I honestly almost did, at least twice. And but something just kept saying, I had a lot of really good friends around me, you know, Dan, like you said, who, it was so fascinating when the people that I didn't know were like, you should absolutely take that job.

And the people that like knew me and loved me, including like, I've had a coach basically the whole time, were like, do not take that job, you know. So there was a real distinction in knowing which voices to listen to in that. And again, I would just say, it didn't feel like courage to me. I think maybe looking back, it feels brave, but it just felt necessary. I get it. I totally get it. I do want to acknowledge again, because I think some listeners are probably having this thought that, oh, am I just listening to two people who are just extraordinarily lucky?

And you are. Yeah, absolutely. And yet, there are things to learn here that I think are applicable in almost any scenario. Which brings me to a list that you created that I think might be really helpful for people. These are, and you'll tell me if I'm saying this correctly, the five universal principles that increase your surface area for magic. Am I saying that right? Yeah, totally. And these are inside of the Career Emergence article. Not long ago, my wife had an interior design dilemma. She's been researching a book for a while, and in order to do the research, she's been ordering a lot of books that she is then reading.

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These five principles are the way you've written about them on your sub stack. But I read these principles as ways that we can all learn to like our job no matter what our scenario is. How does that track for you? Yeah, I think they are powerful compasses no matter what for thinking through like where might the best use of me be and also like um what are tools that I can put in my backpack you know that are gonna sort of like be a jet jet fuel you know to help me um on whatever journey I'm on yes yes things that you have learned throughout your career and coaching that can boost the possibility of success however you want to define success yeah okay so let's go through them the first is be the person everybody wants to work with again yeah totally so this is something I talk a lot about when I um talk inside of companies because um I think it's like literally the most important currency you can build in a career is being the person that after someone has worked with you they're like oh I want that person on my next project in my next company um I think I always say the two things you leave jobs with are learning and relationships hopefully you also leave with money and stability and security in some form or another but um really what you take with you when you leave a job is people and whatever it is that you learned and got to do and so the relationships part of that we sometimes undervalue because we're sort of like busy in our our work tunnel and our we're busy being a robot you know sending all the emails that we can but the the currency of a career is often actually built off people and so much of where that comes from for the most successful people I know is people you've worked with in the past and those people having you on their mind right when they go do something fun or interesting they're like you know who I want to call Dan because he was so awesome at that last thing that we did together and it's been super powerful for me you know I had I was super lucky early on to stumble my way into Google and then into Facebook stumble stumble stumble but both of those were just incredible hotbeds for people who then went on to do all sorts of crazy things and some of them were like oh I want to take Molly with me on that journey um so to me that is like a such a powerful way to increase like opportunity and sort of like what I call the surface area for magic in emergence um which is just the number of people in the world that are thinking of you as someone they desperately like to work with again I love that and I I can just say from personal experience I devalued the importance of relationships in a work context to my own uh detriment uh repeatedly and it's only something I've learned in fits and starts as I've gotten older yeah I think a lot of people have that experience and let me just say like what I tell people that feel like they're drowning is just make a tiny goal like one lunch a month with someone you work with that you find interesting or um that you've learned a lot from that you just want to get to know better like the way you build real relationships at work is by getting to know people as humans um but you do sometimes have to kind of like step out of the day-to-day and find like just a coffee or a lunch to connect with people and the other thing I'm just I think is important to name is like do not screw this up on your way out of the company like people burn houses down when they leave and most of the time not all the time but most of the time that's actually just a waste um because you've built all these powerful relationships while you're there you know yes it's tempting to light everything on fire if you're mad but like sometimes it's just not necessary and I think that because again it's this powerful currency that you can't always anticipate where these people are going to go and what they're going to do yeah I remember in some movie I saw in the 80s when I was a kid there was this line men are not mountains um human beings move around so you're likely to um encounter them again yeah uh the second of your five principles is work with brilliant people not brilliant companies that seems related yeah I mean this one in some ways is controversial because there's this whole verbiage in the technology industry about focusing on rocket ships like find the company that's going to take off um my argument these days is like the rocket ships are pretty hard to predict they've gotten way way harder to see and believe in a lot of them explode so the much easier thing to do is to focus on the person you want to follow that that that a powerful great manager both creates like a happier work life that all the data in the world says that you know but also it's a much more predictable and dependable thing that if you follow someone you really admire that you really want to learn from that is a compass that you can like actually set your course to um if you're chasing you know success and money that stuff is it's oddly more ephemeral than it feels like it should be right the company that seems like it's a sure thing today particularly these days um is is a little bit less of that than you would wish um and so I think it's just it's kind of an additive to the compass point of like if you're looking for how to make the next choice uh compass I think people is a really good one I love that um the next one is take risks I think you call them cliff jumps yeah yeah I did I did a whole TED talk on this I think the the point there is um I think a lot of us were raised to believe careers are a ladder or a set of stairs that you climb up right that um that you get inside a successful company and then you just stay there and you are a successful industry and you stay there you focus you get promoted every two years or five years or whatever and um a the world is a lot less stable than it was like where for my parents you know working inside the same company for 40 years was like both totally doable and very much normal um here uh I think these days that is not a the standard path and be a guarantee just because again there's so much change going on in the world so I think it's super important to learn how to be uncomfortable to learn how to test yourself and dare yourself to do things that you're scared of that you don't know if you're going to be good at because on the other side of that is a lot of magic like I it's something I stumbled into early in my career um was sort of saying yes to a job that I felt highly unqualified for and there were many things about that job that were terrible and hard but on the other side of it I knew so much more about myself and who I was um in terms of like what I was qualified for what I loved doing every day what I hated doing every day and what no one should ever hire me to do and that knowledge is super powerful particularly in a world that's full of change but it requires you know managing your way through a very uncomfortable phase of falling which is why I call them cliff jumps like you spend six to nine months feeling like an absolute idiot and like what what were you doing and like why did you take this job and uh you're so desperate in some ways to run back to the safety of what you know and what you are known for um but I think the the benefit on the other side is that you again discover things that you wouldn't have ever predicted that you're good at or that you like doing um.

And again, I just think it's a very important skill for people to get comfortable with and good at in this world. I used to think of it as more of a luxury good, like a choice. And now I think, you know, you either jump off the stairs or you are more likely these days to get pushed off, which wasn't true for a long time. And I, so to me, it feels like more of almost like a necessary skill. If you're going to get better at the skill of taking risks or jumping off of cliffs, I think part of that skill is being comfortable with the fact that you may go splat, you may fail.

Yeah, I think I get asked that question a lot, which is like, have you ever made a decision that you regret or taken a risk that you wish you could take back? And I think there's a couple of things. Like first is when you're choosing whether or not now it's time to take a risk, it is good and worth it to ask yourself, there's no way you're not gonna feel a bunch of fear standing on the edge of a cliff, but there's the kind of fear you should listen to, which is sort of like, I would say the financial fear or something that's gonna fill your backpack with anxiety.

If you're putting your whole financial health at risk to take this jump, like maybe not the time, you know? But if the fear is I'm scared I'm gonna fail or I'm scared I may not be good at this or I'm scared, you know, of those kinds of things, I think of that as a green light. Because even if what you discover on the other side of this risk is, oh, not for me, like, oh, that I'm good at these things, I'm not good at these things, I thought I loved this, I actually don't, that is powerful information for what to do next.

And the sort of like other option is to stay on the stairs and sort of stay in this very, what feels like sort of safe and secure environment. But what I've seen in a lot of careers that have managed for safety is that you really do hit a wall there too, you know, that you sort of suboptimize like both your self-knowledge but also your ability to challenge yourself and your ability to deal with things that are deeply uncomfortable. And that can really kind of like hurt you later in a career.

So to me, even the choices I've made where what I discovered on the other side was like, whoops, shouldn't hire me to do that, that was like powerful knowledge. Now I know like this type of job is me, this type of job is not me. Oh, these things are important to me that I didn't really understand before I jumped off that cliff. Next principle is learn to distinguish ego from energy. Woof, this one was hard earned, but I think, you know, this is obviously something that you've talked a lot about.

I think one of the hardest lessons for me was learning which parts of myself to listen to when I was making decisions about what was next. And I think the ego is powerful. Like I worked with a coach many years ago who had this metaphor that was really helpful, which is she was like, I want you to think of sort of your brain and your psychology as a car. She's like, there's people in the front seat, people in the back seat and people in the trunk.

And she was like, we're just gonna do an investigation of like, A, who's driving, right? Why are they driving? What's going on? But also who's in the trunk, you know? And how'd they get there? And it was super interesting for me because it helped me realize that the voices that had been driving my career, that had helped me a ton really early on, the ambition, the achievement, the push to learn what you're good at and to prove that you're good, maybe weren't serving me as well anymore.

Because a lot of what she did was take people out of the trunk and say, oh, your creative self is in the trunk. Like, what if we put them in the driver's seat, you know? And all that that taught me was that sometimes there are these very loud voices when we're staring at a decision. There's a thing I call a LinkedIn crush where it's like you're thinking about taking a job and all you're imagining is like the moment when you get to post it, the moment when you get to tell your parents about it, the moment when you get to post it on LinkedIn.

But you're not actually thinking about doing the job. Like, you're just imagining, almost like having had the job, not doing the job. That is ego, right? That's the ego saying, this'll be so cool and everybody will think I'm awesome. Because you're not thinking about your days. You're not thinking about your hours and what it'll be filled with. And I think learning to distinguish those two things, like when is it really sort of that egotistical voice that maybe doesn't have your days in mind, right? They have your brand or something.

And is that a voice you actually wanna listen to? Is that the voice that you wanna let guide like whatever it is that you do next? It seems this learning to distinguish ego from energy seems linked to the energy audit that you referenced before. Like the energy audit seems like it would help you in this mission. Yeah, absolutely. I think anything you can do to understand what brings you energy every day or what brings you joy every day at work is giving you information about sort of like authentically what is a good choice for you.

Not like what are other people gonna think and what are my parents gonna think and my grandparents and whoever is in your head. It's about like what is it that when you do it every day or most of your days that sort of fills you up and makes you feel like you could do it forever. And I think there's a bunch of different versions of that. I mentioned one of them, which is just auditing like your hours in your day. But I think just those questions of like, what would you do if no one paid you?

What would you do? And the time just flies by. Those are the kinds of things to pay attention to because they have nothing to do with your ego. Fifth principle is saying no is as important as saying yes. Whew, this is a skill I'm still working on. Me too. I'm a people pleaser. So I like making people happy. And yes is part of that. Oh, it's interesting. You're saying yes because you're a people pleaser. I'm saying yes because I'm so afraid of missing out on opportunities.

It's coming from a different flavor of anxiety, not worrying that people won't like me. It's worrying that I'll be living under a bridge. This is great. I actually really want to do a work-life episode on saying no. Partially because I just want someone to come in and teach me all the strategies they have for saying no. But you're giving me more fodder for all the different reasons why it's a skill that you need. Because I think basically the principle of saying no is that if you learn to say no to the things that either are motivated by a weird kind of anxiety or just aren't the highest and best use of your time, what you make space for is the things that are really worth it, right?

And the worst feeling in the world is when someone says, hey, do you want to do this thing, whatever it is, opportunity, and you can't because you said yes to something fucking stupid, you know what I mean? Or that just doesn't actually bring you joy. And I think that, again, real work in progress over here, but I had the experience a couple of years ago where I turned down a speech that sounded fancy and fun, and I just didn't feel right. And again, sounds like first world problems, and it is, but ultimately saying no to it, which I felt pretty uncomfortable about, opened up the space for six months later when I got the offer to give a TED Talk, I was able to say yes with my whole body.

And there's just a million examples of that. It can be on a daily basis as much as on a sort of yearly basis. But that compass of learning what to say no to, to me is, it's a shockingly hard discipline, but it's so valuable. Indeed. My calendar is a war zone of unfortunate yeses. I was gonna say. That is a beautiful statement of exactly what mine feels like. Yeah. It's like I always look at it and I'm like, who made this decision two months ago? Oh, me?

Like, past me, fired. Future me, like, gonna be better, and then not actually better. It's hard. It's really hard. Couple more things I wanna ask you about before I let you go. Anytime we're talking about work these days, one of the big stressors for people is AI. It could be worries about AI taking your job. It could be worries that your employer is forcing you to use AI in ways that don't make sense, and it's making you miserable. It can be just a general dread about this new powerful technology that seems like it could eat us all.

It could be just not wanting to embrace change. There's just so many reasons to be freaking out about it. What's your stance on it, and what are you recommending to people in terms of having a healthy relationship with this technology, which, like it or not, appears to be a part of the landscape now? A new part of our lives. Yeah, so I've spent almost 20 years in the technology industry, and first I'll say, AI is real. It is a huge platform shift. Most people in the tech world are talking about it as big or bigger than the internet, right?

That means it's bigger than the mobile phone, and a lot of the platform shifts we've had recently. But I will tell you from experiencing a lot of those platform shifts that everything takes way longer and is way less dramatic than whatever the hype is about that technology. And this is the thing that is sort of driving me nuts right now in the world of AI, and I spend a lot of time talking in the communities that I'm in about, is the predominant narrative right now about AI is fear.

It's basically like, I always say this is like, our conversation around AI is like, hey, this is the smartest employee that you've ever met, and they're smarter than you, they're prettier than you, they're better than you at everything. I want you to onboard them. I want you to tell them everything that you know. You know what I mean? Teach them all your wisdom that you've built up over however many years in your career. Oh, and in six months, they're gonna take your job. That's the narrative right now.

First of all, who the fuck wants to do that? Do you know what I mean? No one. No one wants to onboard that employee, and so like, that does not create a space for people to be in a positive or creative or welcoming frame of mind for this new technology, which is really what we need. Like, platform shifts like this are immense opportunities for creation. Like, so many companies get created, let alone jobs because of those companies, because of platform shifts, because things are possible that weren't possible a couple of years ago.

I wish that the narrative was as much about all the opportunities and possibilities with this new technology as they are about the doom and the new robot friends that are coming for all of us. So to me, that's like my number one thing. The second thing I'll just say is like, I get that all the news articles out there are saying this thing is like, you know, in six months, I think it's gonna take all of our jobs and destroy everything about us. And basically, I do some of this on Work Life, and I do a lot of it in the communities I'm in.

Everybody would tell you it's happening way slower than that. Like, yes, there are lots of changes, and yes, the technology is evolving really, really quickly, but there's a wide gap between what the technology is capable of and what the humans using it can actually make it do. And so if you're like, I'm too late, and I've missed the boat, because that's what the narrative is telling you, the answer is that that is a lie. Like one of the guests on Work Life who came on said, you know, everything changes every six weeks.

So like, if something didn't work six weeks ago, try it again. But also like the gap between being a beginner and an expert in AI is actually very small. Like it just comes down to using it and trying it and playing around with it. So the harder thing to me is like, how do you make space for that when we all have jobs and lives and families? And the last thing I'll just say is like, find the thing that drives you nuts. Like find the thing that makes you or your team or your family sob every day because you have to do it.

Any repetitive task that makes you feel physical pain, that is a great place to look to just play around, to learn about this technology and what it can do for you. But the last, I mean, I guess the sort of final point there is the future is gonna be defined by the people that sort of lean into this, right? It's very easy to be angry or in denial or fight change like this. I am actually a late adopter, despite being in the technology industry. I sort of believe technology should convince you to use it, not the other way around.

But in this case, like I think there's a lot of reasons to lean in and to give the change a chance because I think there's ways that AI can amplify us that can make us be able to do more of what we love doing and less of what drives us nuts. And that's a cool opportunity, that is worth exploring. I wanna be careful here because people are so pissed off and freaked out about AI. So I'm not gonna use the word should in what I'm about to say.

I'm just gonna talk about how I relate to AI. I have all of the same fear and dread and sometimes outrage about AI that anybody watching and listening this probably has. The same time, I have this strong suspicion that this technology is gonna be with us in increasingly prominent ways for the rest of our days, if it doesn't kill us prematurely. And so my attitude is I'm going to embrace it, not like to a ridiculous extent, but I'm gonna try to be literate in the technology and in the discourse around the technology, A, because it's interesting, and B, because I think it sets me up for success, not only personal success, but for success in my mission in the world.

How does that land for you? It really lands in the sense, well, and I would say, like I said, I believe technology should convince you to use it. Like it should teach you like, hey, I'm worth your time. And I think the only thing that I've learned, because I was a skeptic on this for a long time, because just to name it, like AI has been around a long time. There's just sort of eras of AI. And for a long time, I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we've been talking about AI forever and automation has existed.

So what is different about this? And the thing that's genuinely different is how accessible it is, right? That any average person can play around with it, which was not true five years ago. And so to me, that accessibility is the point, which is just like, if we are on the edge of a change, which you can sort of feel all around you as you watch companies really struggle with what it's doing to their businesses, and things like that, then who do you want to be in that space?

Like, to me, I want to understand what's real and what's not. Because often what goes on in the world is like a lot of hype or a lot of chatter. And so much of the conversation we have inside the communities that I'm in is just like, is this, is anybody else seeing this? Like, is this what you're seeing? Because like, I'm hearing this, but all I'm seeing is, you know, again, I'm hearing that this super intelligent being and all I'm seeing is that it acts kind of like a stupid intern, you know, am I doing it wrong?

Like that, I think that kind of exploration, that kind of mindset is worth it. Because there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of talk out there right now about what it's going to be. And I promise that it will not be all of those things. Like one of my most fervently held beliefs is basically no one knows. Like no one knows actually what's going to happen and actually what's going to change and actually what's going to be real. So it's up to all of us to go out there and figure out like, what is this thing actually really good for?

And what is it not? Last thing to discuss here, we've got this new closing segment, we call it What's Good. I ask you like, what's one book, television show, movie, article, podcast that has crossed your path recently that you would recommend to us? And then I'll give you one from my side. Sound good? Yeah, that sounds good. All right. What say you? Okay. So I read a lot, partially because of insomnia, but I gave myself permission five or six years ago to only read fiction. Like basically to only read books that don't make me smarter, necessarily.

And I fell in love a couple of years ago with Kristen Hanna, an amazing historical fiction writer. I read The Women and then I proceeded to read literally everything she's ever written. And I love her work and I just honestly recommend it to anybody that's looking for both like an incredible read, like she's a phenomenal writer, but also you do learn a little bit about history from things like The Women and The Nightingale, which are two of her more well known books. Great recommendation. I haven't even heard of her.

But thank you for introducing me to her. Okay, here's mine. It's a record from a guy named Kevin Morby. And it's called Little Wide Open. And it came out a couple months ago, but I've been just listening to it and absorbing it and absolutely loving it. There's a song on there that I would recommend people start with called Javelin, which is both warm and lived in and also propulsive. He's a beautiful artist. I've been following him for years and highly recommend it. He's also married to a woman named Katie Crutchfield, who performs under the nom de music Waxahachie.

She is also amazing. Oh my gosh. So that's my recommendation. Javelin, Little Wide Open, yeah? Javelin is the name of the song. The dude's name is Kevin Morby. The record is called Little Wide Open. His wife records under the name Waxahachie. She also has another band called Snowcaps. It's kind of a cinematic universe, this couple. Just unreservedly recommend all of that stuff. Molly, it's been such a pleasure to get to know you a little bit. Thank you for doing this. Just want to remind everybody, if you want to learn more about Molly, you can go to her website, MollyGraham.com.

Is that right? Yep. And she also has a sub stack called Lessons. And of course, she's the host of Ted's Work Life podcast, which she took over from my friend Adam Grant, who will be on the show in two days to talk about his new book in the second part of our Sanely Ambitious series. Molly, such a pleasure to meet you. Thank you again. Yeah. Thank you, Dan. This was so fun. Also, a quick ask before I let you go. If you've got a minute, head on over to DanHarris.com and sign up for my newsletter.

It drops in your inbox on Monday mornings, often a busy and stressful time for us. I try to write a short essay that has a little bit of wisdom, actionable, practical wisdom that you can immediately weave into your life on Monday mornings. A lot of people find them helpful, and I hope you will too. You can sign up at DanHarris.com. It's totally free. Now to the credits. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show 10 percent happier is produced by Tara Anderson, Marissa Schneiderman, DJ Cashmere, David Hart and Hayden Broom.

Post production is handled by the great folks over at Greenhorn Creative and Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Thank you for listening. Deuces. Insurance is not one size fits all. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price tool for years now. With the Name Your Price tool, you tell them what you want to pay, and they'll show you options that fit your budget. So whether you're picking out your first policy or just looking for something that works better for you and your family, they make it easier to see your options.

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