Why success is never linear with Claire Hughes Johnson
6/16/202633 min
It’s easy to look at successful companies and other people’s successful careers and assume the path was obvious. The reality is that success feels messy. Claire Hughes Johnson, former COO of Stripe, joins Molly to explore how difficult moments distort our perspective and why some of the work we're proudest of often felt like failure while we were living it. Together they discuss resilience, uncertainty, leadership under pressure, and how to make decisions when you can't yet tell whether you're struggling or succeeding.
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First 90 secondsMolly Graham· Host0:06
One of the hardest things about work is that when it feels hard, we assume we're doing it wrong. And yet, when we look back at the work we're proudest of, it almost always felt hard in ways we didn't expect. It's only later that we can make sense of that struggle. I was talking to a friend recently who was in that low place, full of self-doubt. At one point she said to me, "Honestly, it kinda feels like everything I've ever done has been a failure." This is not someone you would look at on paper and think failure. But I nodded and said, "I actually feel that way about my own career all the time, like everything I've ever done is a failure too." And that's true. If you're even a little self-aware or a little self-critical, it's remarkably easy to tell the story of your career from a place of failure instead of success. You can look at the exact same facts and come to very different conclusions. Since then, I've thought a lot about how easy it is to look at other people's careers from the outside and think they look smooth and intentional, while yours feels messy and full of near misses. Like everyone else's success was inevitable and yours was accidental. The same is true of companies. The truth is