Summary: How to have a fulfilling career that does good

Here’s a TL;DR that offers a quick summary of the guide: to have a fulfilling career that does good, do what matters. Build useful skills and use them to help others.

Instead of expecting to discover your passion in a flash of insight, your job satisfaction will grow over time as you learn more about what kind of work fits you, gain valuable career capital, and use it to tackle pressing problems.

Move through these three career stages over time:

1. Explore: investigate your key uncertainties to find the best paths rather than “going with your gut” or narrowing down too early. Make finding options that fit you best your key focus until you feel ready to bet on one for at least a few years.

2. Build career capital: look for jobs that let you build valuable skills, and also your reputation, connections, character, and financial runway, to increase your career capital and accelerate you towards your longer-term vision. At the same time, invest in your personal development.

3. Deploy: use your career capital to tackle pressing global problems and secure a job that meets your other personal criteria.

When considering what to aim for over the longer term, here are three key things to look for in order to have a positive impact.

First, look for problems that are the biggest in scale, most solvable, and most neglected. Today, we believe those are issues that pose the biggest risks to both present and future generations, especially those that could arise from advanced AI. These include the risk of losing control of AI, AI-enabled concentration of power, engineered pandemics, and a longer list of emerging issues.

Second, think broadly about all the ways you might contribute to solving those problems, including by spreading ideas, community building, donating, research, changing policy, organisation building, and by thinking carefully about what the problem most needs. See our full list of career reviews here.

Third, focus on the roles with the best personal fit for you. Although many efforts to help others fail, the best can be enormously effective, so aim high. To find your fit, think like a scientist testing a hypothesis: make a best guess, clarify your key uncertainties, then go and investigate them with cheap tests.

Early in your career, you should consider trying out several paths, including options outside your normal experience, and those you’re unsure about but which might be amazing. Have ideas about the long term, but put most of your effort into finding the best concrete next step.

To find the best next step, work backwards from your vision to find the most efficient route to it. But also be opportunistic about especially exciting opportunities and doing whatever maximises your rate of learning.

For career capital, consider roles at smaller, growing organisations, entry routes into policy, and short projects that give you verifiable skills or impressive achievements, as well as positions at larger organisations known for high performance. Consider graduate school, but don’t drift into it.

Eliminate options that pose unacceptable personal risks, might cause significant harm, or compromise your character, even if you think they could do a lot of good overall. Make sure you also have a backup plan B and plan Z. Check with your gut and review your career every 1–2 years.

To actually get a job, don’t just send your CV to random listings, speak to as many people as you can and get as close as possible to actually doing the work, since that’s what’ll teach you the most about your fit and most convince employers to hire you. Once you have offers on the table, compare them in terms of immediate impact, career capital, personal fit, exploration value, supportive conditions, and any other important personal criteria.

Focusing your career on tackling the world’s most pressing problems isn’t always easy. If you’re not able to change jobs right now, you can still have a lot of impact by donating or enabling others to work on the problems you think are most important.

Seek community with others who want to have an impact and inspire you to become a better person. By working together, in our lifetimes, we can end extreme global poverty and factory farming, prevent the next pandemic, and help usher in a flourishing future. And we can do this while having interesting, fulfilling lives too.

You have 80,000 hours in your career.

Don’t waste them.

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