J-Curves vs Stairs: Two Approaches to Career Growth
👋Hi! I'm Molly. This is where I share the lessons I’ve learned from building fast-moving, messy, ambitious companies. For more from me, you can also find me on the WorkLife Podcast, on LinkedIn, and in Glue Club, a community for leaders who care about building great companies.
For my first two years at Facebook, I worked on the People team. I worked on big, complicated, hard projects, learned a ton, and had a great manager. For all intents and purposes, I was happy and growing. I was planning to stay there for a while.
Then Chamath came to me and said, “We’re going to build a phone. Come build it with me.”
After a lot of deliberation, I decided to join him, and in doing so, I took the first big J-Curve leap of my career.
A J-Curve is what I call a risky career choice with a potentially big payoff. It’s a choice where you bet that you can transfer the skills you currently have to a completely new environment and the upside, if you do it successfully, is that you get to prove you are capable of more.
To me, the J-Curve is the alternative to taking the Stairs: staying in your comfortable role and getting promoted every 2-5 years, walking up to (hopefully) somewhere great. Growth is slower, but the stairs are a safer bet.
We can make a conscious choice to take J-Curves or stairs or a combination of the two throughout our careers. I personally think everyone can benefit from one or two J-Curves in their career, though I’m biased — my whole career is a sequence of J-Curve jobs.
