Stressed, Anxious, or Drained at Work? Here's How To Follow Your Energy, Take Smart Risks, and Find Work You Actually Like | Molly Graham

Dan Harris (0:03)

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 0.0001% 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 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 WorkLife podcast. She's also the author of a substack 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 Insanely Ambitious, where we talk about how to succeed without losing your mind.

Molly Graham, welcome to the show.

Molly Graham (1:02)

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.

Dan Harris (1:11)

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.

Molly Graham (1:21)

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.

Dan Harris (1:27)

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.

Molly Graham (1:46)

My dog is locked out of the room and is really mad about it, and is trying to break down the door.

Dan Harris (1:52)

Okay. Let her in if you want, or him, unless you think she or he is going to bark.

Molly Graham (1:58)

We'll keep her out, but she appreciates the invite in total honesty.

Dan Harris (2:03)

I love dogs. Okay, Molly, let me ask you a serious question. You have this concept, career emergence.

What's that mean?

Molly Graham (2:11)

I got this incredible gift in the last year of being asked to take over the podcast WorkLife from Ted, and it's something that I think you're having a guest on, Adam Grant, 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 WorkLife 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 bee hive, 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.