What Does It Feel Like Inside a Rapidly Growing Company?

Molly Graham says being inside a rapidly growing company feels like being inside a tornado. The work is so absorbing that things fly at you all the time and everything keeps changing. It is easy in that state to lose the forest for the trees, get bogged down, obsess about a person or a piece of the work, or feel undervalued.

In the Lego speeches, the advice is to zoom out and choose the story worth telling on the other side. A title matters less than having been there and having helped build the company. The picture is a giant Lego sculpture that everyone pretends is a tiger. People build the feet, help build the face, rebuild the butt three times, and then realize it was a whole zoo. Rapidly changing companies feel like that from the inside.

Five or 10 years later, the same people will tell the story to a new generation of graduates: what they thought was right, what they thought was wrong, the first thing they said, and where they were so wrong. The question to sit with is what part of the story to own, and how to tell it. The stretch is hard and full of change, and a crazy fun story is waiting on the other side, even though nobody knows what it is yet.