Zainab Ghadiyali’s career has been anything but conventional. While her recent resume is impressive — spanning a rise up the engineering ranks at Facebook, her current role as a Product Lead at Airbnb and a side hustle as the co-founder of Wogrammer — the inclines and contours of her unlikely path to Silicon Valley are far more remarkable.
Her journey has been formed by striking transitions: At the age of 19, Ghadiyali left her hometown of Mumbai to study chemistry at a small college in South Carolina. Her work for a public health nonprofit took her to some of the remotest parts of Peru and Nicaragua, before a fortuitous turn of events led her to an engineering interview at Facebook. “I didn’t even know Silicon Valley existed until I was 25,” she says. “Across all of my life experiences, I was just hungry to learn.”
As Ghadiyali chronicles her extraordinary journey to tech, she identifies the key skills needed to excel in any role. She offers advice on the questions you should ask yourself before transitioning to a new role, and gets tactical on how to surround yourself with supporters. From pushing past imposter syndrome to powering up a side hustle, her insights have illuminating takeaways for entrepreneurs at any stage of their career.
AT EVERY CROSSROADS, LEAN INTO CURIOSITY
When Ghadiyali was growing up, the tech industry seemed worlds away. “I grew up in a middle-class family in India,” she says. “My parents didn’t graduate from college, so they were very supportive of my education.” Deep in the stacks of Mumbai’s libraries, Ghadiyali pored over autobiographies, captivated by the lives of luminaries whose experiences were so removed from her immediate surroundings.
Between those pages, Ghadiyali discovered the guiding principle that would drive her course for the rest of her life: curiosity. “Books instilled the desire to learn about worlds that were very different from mine,” she says.
While many people are similarly inspired by books in childhood, all too often it becomes harder to protect that spirit of curiosity as pressures to plot out career decisions mount. Here are the strategies Ghadiyali used to nourish that creative spark:
Leverage a creative — not reactive — mindset to overcome uncertainty.
Putting curiosity in the driver’s seat inevitably ensures that uncertainty will be a passenger along for the ride. But Ghadiyali learned early on to embrace the unknown. “People always tell me, ‘It was so brave of you, going to college in a new country with $100,’” she says. “But bravery requires fear, and I wasn’t afraid; I was excited by the possibility.”
To push past the temptation to give in to apprehension, she draws from a framework inspired by Bob Anderson’s work on The Leadership Circle, that has helped her to differentiate between two distinct ways of thinking about uncertainty: the creative mindset and the reactive mindset.
“The reactive mindset is driven by fear. You think of a problem, you see it as a threat, then you react to it. This leads you down a spiral of anxiety, in which you focus on all the reasons why you can’t do something,” Ghadiyali says. “By contrast, the creative mindset is driven by possibility. Instead of fretting over a problem, you emphasize what’s possible. The creative mindset inspires curiosity and passion, which leads to action.”
To shift from a reactive to a creative mindset, Ghadiyali begins by setting an intention. “If I know I’m about to enter into a difficult situation or conversation, for example, I’ll remind myself of the outcome that I want,” she says. “After all, if you’re focused on a positive outcome, you’re implicitly acknowledging that it’s possible. Then, instead of worrying about fear, you can start to brainstorm ways to reach that end goal.”
Picture your career as a painting, not a ladder.
Ghadiyali found she was in better position to embrace her inquisitive impulses the moment she let go of the notion of a “career ladder.” This traditional concept implies that a career should be thought of as linear, a neat progression along a narrow track. But that metaphor leads to a rather limiting focus on upward growth. In reality, opportunities abound in every direction.
For instance, when she began her career, Ghadiyali didn’t have the luxury of following a straightforward career path. She had studied alternative medicine in Berlin during college and considered becoming a doctor, but winced at the cost of med school. She also graduated in 2009, in the thick of the recession, which limited her options even further. “I applied to over 200 jobs online and got rejected everywhere,” she says. Without a clear next rung to place her foot on, Ghadiyali set off in different directions to hone in on her interest in healthcare in another way. She left the U.S. to work for the public health nonprofit the Foundation for International Medical Relief of Children, which took her to far-flung villages in India and South America. After close to a year, she decided to go back to the U.S. for grad school, to study health economics.
On paper, Ghadiyali’s moves might seem like a series of missteps leading her astray from her eventual path to tech. But by drawing excitement and curiosity as a throughline, the connections between apparently erratic transitions begin to emerge. That’s why Ghadiyali encourages people to instead think of their careers as a work of art.
“When you look at a painting from a distance, you see a larger, cohesive picture,” she says. “But as you approach the canvas, you see that there are, in fact, hundreds of separate strokes that make up that picture. Think about your career as a work of art — expansive, independent movements that incrementally reveal a whole.”
Ask these questions to unlock omnidirectional growth.
The decision to ditch the career ladder opens up the possibility of pursuing other, more expansive areas of growth that are conventionally overlooked. More importantly, it gives you the freedom to define success and growth on your own terms.Careers aren’t just about rocketing upward. Expanding horizontally gives you a stronger foundation to pursue vertical growth.
Once at grad school, Ghadiyali began to reconsider her professional goals. “It occurred to me that while I loved learning about the subject, I didn’t feel excited about pursuing a career in health economics. I needed a change of direction,” she says.
“I knew that I wanted my next role to be something that I was passionate to learn about,” she says. “At every career crossroads, I ask myself the same two high-level questions: ‘What am I excited to learn next? What’s the next level of learning I want to reach?’ These questions helped me direct my decisions in grad school, and at every juncture since.”
This rigorous, guided reflection enabled Ghadiyali to determine her next play after grad school. “I recalled a question that had fascinated me in the past. When I was I working on the ground in the nonprofit sector, I saw the importance of communities in public health firsthand — specifically online social networks and the powerful impact they had on disseminating health information or connecting individuals in underserved regions. I thought, ‘How can we use a social network to advance healthcare and public health, at the largest scale?’” she says.
“That’s when I first realized I could make my impact in tech, the industry where these platforms were being created,” she says.
Probing questions aren’t just for setting course in a different industry. They’re also useful for all the micro-decisions that make up a career, whether it’s time to switch teams or pivot to a new function altogether. Even now, as she considers new roles and companies in tech, Ghadiyali leans on three targeted questions to assess her next move:
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Have I maximized my growth in my current role? While it’s valuable to follow curiosity to another role, there’s danger in moving on too prematurely. For example, when she was a production engineer at Facebook, she accepted a position that allowed her to make a lateral move into software. “At the time, I was eager to move on to software. But life as a production engineer enables you to truly understand how systems fit together, which is an invaluable skill. It’s easy to get caught up in a ‘what’s next’ mentality — take the time to pause and make sure you’ve soaked up all you can from your current role.”
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Does my next opportunity align with my values? To start looking for new opportunities, Ghadiyali recommends explicitly writing down priorities in order to make a decision systematically. “I create a spreadsheet and I’ll put all my options in rows, then I’ll list factors that are important to me in the columns,” she says. “I typically look for growth, financial stability, location, a good manager and room for creativity, and then I assign each factor a point. Then I add up which opportunity yields the highest point value. This way, I make sure I evaluate my options according to the values that are most important to me.”
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Do I want to expand laterally or dive deeper? When Ghadiyali felt satisfied as a Tech Lead at Facebook, she had to decide: Did she want to continue building expertise, or try out a horizontal move? She opted to try her hand at product at a new company, but is careful to note that horizontal growth is important even if you aren’t looking to switch functions. “I would argue that even if you want to go deep, there are horizontal skills you have to learn,” Ghadiyali says. “One thing I’ve noticed is that people can be held back by a lack of skills outside of their area of expertise. Take communication, as an example. You could be the most skilled engineer in the world. But if you don’t have the ability to communicate that expertise, or to influence people to adopt your ideas, then the actual impact of that knowledge is quite limited.”
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