The J-curve career beats the staircase every time

The much more fun careers are like jumping off cliffs and you do fall, but then you climb out way beyond where the stairs could ever get you.

I think the way you get extraordinary returns is you do extraordinary things, right? You have to take bigger risks, and have more interesting shots to have this kind of extraordinary result in your career.

Over the course of seven years, I went from my first job, which was basically this entry level sales job at Microsoft, working on Microsoft adCenter to SVP of marketing at SurveyMonkey, leading a global team. And when I reflect back on what works across my early career, it really comes down in a nutshell to this career concept of explore and exploit.

There is no linear success. There's no up-and-to-the-right perfect chart where it's just one line. I don't care who you are. Apple doesn't have one. No one has one.