Why you should take a risk every day with Julie Zhuo | from WorkLife with Molly Graham
How to Be a Better Human
TED
4.1 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 May 2026
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When you think about risk, you probably think about big, dramatic moves: quitting your job, moving across the country, saying something controversial. But the people who are actually good at taking risks are the ones who practice small challenges every day. Julie Zhuo was one of the earliest product and design leaders at Facebook, and is now the co-founder of Sundial, a company that uses AI to help organizations make better decisions. In this episode, Molly and Julie dissect what it actually means to take a risk and how you can build your risk-taking skills through daily practice. Julie reflects on her own risk-taking journey, the ways she has honed her abilities to challenge fear, her thinking on when you shouldn’t take a leap, and the important distinction between courage and fearlessness.
WorkLife is a podcast from TED where host and company builder Molly Graham and her expert guests talk through the messy feelings we all experience at work. Ambition and failure, joy and burnout, confidence and self-doubt — this show digs into it all to help you build a career without losing yourself. Listen now: https://link.mgln.ai/9sBEHV
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everyone, Chris Duffy here. |
| 0:06.3 | Today, we are sharing an episode of a podcast that we think you are going to love. |
| 0:10.2 | This has been handpicked by the TED staff, and we think that as a how-to-be-a-better human listener, |
| 0:15.4 | you are going to come away with a fresh idea and a totally new perspective. |
| 0:19.3 | So, enjoy this episode and head to the link in the |
| 0:21.8 | description afterwards to hear even more. Most of us think about risk taking at work the wrong way. |
| 0:30.4 | We imagine it as this big, dramatic thing. Quit your job, start a company, say the thing that could get you fired. |
| 0:39.2 | And yes, I will admit that I have probably helped cement that version of risk in my own TED Talk. |
| 0:44.9 | Sorry. |
| 0:46.7 | But that way of thinking about risk has a side effect. |
| 0:49.7 | It becomes all or nothing. |
| 0:51.8 | You're either a risk taker or you're not. |
| 0:55.8 | If we think about risk taking that way, a lot gets left out. The question you didn't ask in the meeting because you were |
| 1:01.2 | worried it would make you look stupid, the feedback you've been sitting on for two weeks, |
| 1:05.9 | the boundary you've been meaning to set, we don't call those risks. We just call them things we didn't do. |
| 1:13.3 | And here's what I've come to believe. The people who are actually good at taking risks |
| 1:18.9 | didn't get there by making one giant leap, or even by taking big risks over and over again. |
| 1:25.8 | They built a practice, small uncomfortable swings over and over again. They built a practice. Small, uncomfortable swings over and over, |
| 1:30.9 | not until it stopped feeling scary, but until the fear stopped getting in the way. I know |
| 1:37.1 | that's been true for me. So today I want to explore how do you actually get better at taking |
| 1:43.5 | risk? And is it something that anyone can do? |
| 1:51.0 | I'm Molly Graham, and this is Work Life, a show where we untangle the messy human side of work. |
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