J-Curves vs Stairs: Two Approaches to Career Growth
Hi! I’m Molly. I write about what it actually takes to lead inside growing, changing companies: the frameworks that help, the honest truth about what it feels like, and the messy work of shaping a career that actually fits.
Lessons is where those ideas live — both the writing and the conversations around it. (If you want to learn more about how Lessons and the community work, you can read more here.)
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.
