The end: A cheery final note – imagining your deathbed

We’re about to summarise the whole guide in one minute. But before that, imagine a cheery thought: you’re at the end of your 80,000-hour career.

You’re on your deathbed looking back.

What are some things you might regret?

Perhaps you drifted into whatever seemed like the easiest option, or did what your parents did.

Maybe you even made a lot of money doing something you were interested in, and had a nice house and car. But you still wonder: what was it all for?

Now imagine instead that you worked really hard throughout your life, and ended up saving the lives of 100 children. Can you really imagine regretting that?

To have a truly fulfilling life, we need to turn outwards rather than inwards. Rather than asking “What’s my passion?,” ask “How can I best contribute to the world?”

As we’ve seen, by using our fortunate positions and acting strategically, there’s a huge amount we can all do to help others. And we can do this at little cost to ourselves, and most likely while having a more successful and satisfying career too.

The entire guide, in one minute

To have a good career, do what contributes. Rather than expect to discover your passion in a flash of insight, your fulfilment will grow over time as you learn more about what fits, master valuable skills, and use them to help others. (Part 1)

To do what contributes, build useful skills and apply them to meaningful problems. Here’s the three key stages to focus on over time:

1. Explore and investigate your key uncertainties to find the best options, rather than “going with your gut” or narrowing down too early. Make this your key focus until you have enough confidence in some longer-term options to bet on one (Part 8).
2. Build career capital to become as great as you can be. This means looking for jobs that let you generally improve your skills, reputation, connections, and character, and that most accelerate you towards your vision, as well as investing in your personal development. Do this until you’ve taken the best opportunities to invest in yourself (Part 7 and Part 9). Then, use your career capital to…
3. Deploy. Use your career capital to effectively help others. Do this by focusing on the most urgent social problems rather than those you stumble into — those that are big in scale, neglected, and solvable (Part 2, Part 4, and Part 5).

To make the largest contribution to those problems, think broadly: consider research, communicating ideas, community-building, organisation-building, and government and policy careers, or earning to give, as well as the direct helping careers that first come to mind. (Part 6). And focus on the paths that have the best personal fit. (Part 8).

Although many efforts to help others fail, the best can be enormously effective, so be ambitious. But don’t forget you can have a big impact in any job (Part 3).

While doing the above, keep adapting your plan to find the best personal fit. Think like a scientist testing a hypothesis: make your best guess, clarify your key uncertainties, then investigate those uncertainties. Have some ideas about the best longer-term vision, but then put a lot of attention into finding the best next step (both working backwards and forwards). Eliminate any jobs that do significant direct harm, even if it seems like they might let you have a greater impact. If you keep learning more and improving your skills with each step, you can build a better and better career over time. (Part 8 and Part 10).

Seek community and apply widely (with both stretch and back-up options) to be more successful. (Part 11 and Part 12).

By working together, in our lifetimes, we can prevent the next pandemic and mitigate the risks of AI, we can end extreme global poverty and factory farming, and we can do this while having interesting, fulfilling lives too. So let’s do it.

You have 80,000 hours in your career.

Don’t waste them.

Get help making your plan by speaking to our team one-on-one

Now that you’ve completed the guide, our advising team may be able to help check your new career plan, as well as introduce you to mentors and find job openings and funding opportunities to help you put it into action. (It’s free!)

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