Molly's TED talk: Jumping Off Career Cliffs
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.)
As some of you know, I gave a TED talk in October at TEDNext. Today, it’s live on the internet! You can go watch the official talk. I’m also including both the graphics and the script for the talk below. You’re welcome to compare and contrast what I actually said with what I meant to say 🤪
Feel free to skip down to the actual speech, but I also wanted to take a second to document what the experience was like and what I learned from it for those who are curious.
Here are 6 things I learned from the experience of building and delivering this TED talk:
The process of building a TED talk is intense! If you’re going to say yes to a TED talk, you need to have the capacity for overarching anxiety and space for a lot of work in the months before the talk. I signed up to do my talk in May/June of this year, and the conference was held in October. Every speaker has a curator (or a team). Mine was the incredible pair of Valentina and Whitney. I met with them monthly, and then sort of bi-weekly, and then basically weekly? I don’t know, but it was a lot! These two are as responsible for my talk as I am (well, all the good parts). They gave me very active feedback from the beginning to the end. I mean it... For example, in June, I sent them a list of 5 options of topics for the talk, and they picked risk-taking in careers. Five days before the talk in October, I called them in a panic because I practiced, and the talk was 2 minutes longer than it was supposed to be (8 mins). They listened to it and helped me cut out the fluff in such a beautiful way. It was a meaningfully better talk after every call with them. Curation at TED is an art form, and Whitney and Valentina are pros. Make no mistake, though, taking on a TED talk is like taking on another job. I probably spent 100+ hours on this cute little 8-minute talk between writing, iterating, editing, memorizing, and practicing. Talks at TEDNext were given without a teleprompter and mostly without notes or notecards. TED doesn’t like the word memorization, but whatever you call it, you need to be able to deliver the talk from memory without any prompts. I think I practiced this talk one hundred times? I practiced in my bedroom alone, videotaped myself and forced myself to watch it, practiced while walking the dog, made members of the Glue Club listen to it twice, practiced in the shower, on the plane, in multiple Ubers... Alllllllll of that said, I’m so glad I did it.
