"I like being scared": Molly Graham's frameworks for rapid career growth

You snorkel before you scuba. 80% of problems on teams actually happen because of structural issues or dynamics issues.

Growing more than 100% every year is a bad idea. The happiest growth rate is 50%, 100% is manageable. Anything more than doubling and you are signing yourself up for a world of pain.

Your only goal as a manager, if you do nothing else, is clear roles and clear expectations. That's it.

All advice is just someone telling you what they did. I've made every single mistake in the book. And then I got to the end of the book and I started inventing new mistakes.

80% of the culture of a company is literally defined by the personality of the founder. Our job as operators or as leaders is to help articulate the culture that they're creating.

You have to grow as fast as your company is growing if you really want to take advantage, both learning to give away what you've gotten good at and move on to the next shiny pile of Legos.

Graham was discussing how in rapidly growing companies, skills become obsolete quickly due to constant change, using a visual gesture to indicate a steep upward growth curve.

What you know today is way less valuable than what you can learn by tomorrow. If you're inside of a company where the growth curve is like this, what you know today is irrelevant.

Strategy should hurt. If you're not making trade-offs that are painful, you are not actually helping people prioritize their time.

No company needs more than three company goals and the point of company goals is to help people know what the most important things are to success.

Learning to embrace being a professional idiot. Being the one that shows up at the meeting and is like, 'What are we talking about? What does that word mean?'

Winners and losers have the same goal. Goals by themselves are not enough, you have to have a process by which you follow up on the goals.

Strategy should hurt. If you're not making trade-offs that are painful, you are not actually helping people prioritize their time.

Escalation is a tool. People get stuck. As soon as you are stuck, escalate. Go together, go make your case to whoever it is.

Firing people is as important as hiring people. Getting good at identifying when someone does not belong or someone is not going to work out is actually a skill.

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.

All advice is just someone telling you what they did. I've made every single mistake in the book. And then I got to the end of the book and I started inventing new mistakes.