What are you going to do with your life?
If you’re like most young people, you care about making a difference. But who’s there to help you with that? So much of the career advice out there today is unhelpful cliches. Here’s some of the most common career advice we’ve found over the last six months that you shouldn’t follow.
Are you new to 80,000 Hours, and wondering where to start?
We’ve put together this summary of our most popular blog posts from over the past year to make it much easier to get a quick overview of our key content and ideas. Even if you’ve been around the site for a while, you might might find something here you’ve missed or forgotten about!
“Follow your passion” is the stupidest career advice I’ve ever heard. Why? Because my passion in life is for singing bad karaoke. My friend Dodgy Dave’s passion is for dealing crack cocaine. Some of my friends have many passions. Most of my friends have none.
“Do what you’re good at” is better, but still stupid. It gets things the wrong way around. For almost all activities, being “good at” something is the result of thousands of hours of practice and learning (pdf). In choosing a career, you’re almost always making the decision about what to become good at, not the other way around.
How, then, should you find a job you’ll love?
A large and growing body of research suggests our reasoning is far from perfectly “rational.” This means that an important part of designing a process for choosing a high impact career has been looking into the extent to which these biases tend to affect peoples’ career decisions, and what can be done about them.
It turns out that we likely don’t know as much as we think we do, and our judgements can often be mistaken in ways that affect our career decisions negatively. Just being aware of this also doesn’t help much. Rather we need to be more sceptical of our decisions than we might be inclined to be, and take a more systematic and evidence-based approach to career choice.
80,000 hours is all about making a difference in an effective way and one of the most effective things you can do is donate to a cost effective charity. There has been some talk of matching donations and how it might not always increase how much money is ultimately donated. But there is a type of matching that can be very powerful.
Some companies offer large matching contributions and sometimes offer more than a dollar per every dollar donated. Some companies also offer grant money for volunteer hours or matching donations for participating in walks/runs/events for charity, and also match gifts made by retirees and/or spouses. If you’re pursuing an Earning to Give career, then a good matching scheme could be even more important than what industry you enter. In many cases it’s probably easier to find an employer who matches than to earn a much bigger salary.
How much could I earn during my life as a lawyer? How many people could this campaign reach? How long will it take to complete this research? Answers to questions like these would be extremely useful when planning your career, if only we knew what the answers were.
We can make estimates for questions like these by breaking them down into more manageable sub-questions and answering these instead. This post will take you through the best process for combining these estimates so that we can answer the bigger questions and then compare different options for important decisions.
Trying to answer questions about the impact of a career is difficult, and trying to decide between different career options is even harder. If I asked you ‘How many people will benefit from research into anti-malarial vaccination?’ or ‘How many malaria nets would a £1000 donation to the Against Malaria Foundation get?’, your first answer will probably be that you don’t know. After this you will probably try to google the answer, but in most cases the information that you need is either not easily accessible or it would cost you a lot of time and money to find it. Finally you might guess or estimate an answer.
But are some guesses or estimates better than others? In this post we will look at processes you can go through to make an estimate and how to make sure that your estimate is as good as it can be.
Recently we interviewed Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of the independent, nonprofit charity evaluator GiveWell. We recommend GiveWell as a leading source of information on where to have the largest impact with your charitable donations.
Our conversation suggested that GiveWell might be one of the highest impact career opportunities in the world. There’s reason to think that GiveWell has the potential to be an extremely impactful organisation, but they are short of some key types of staff. If you fit their criteria, then this is a position really worth considering. Read on for excerpts from our conversation on (i) what GiveWell does and why it’s important (ii) what kind of people will do well there (iii) how you can get a job there.
“After two decades of successfully applying the power of relationships in my own life and career, I’ve come to believe that connecting is one of the most important business – and life – skill sets you’ll ever learn. Why? Because, flat out, people do business with people they know and like. Careers – in every imaginable field – work the same way.”
— Keith Ferrazzi, Author of Never Eat Alone
Many business books and careers advice websites claim that networking is essential for career success. It’s something that many job-hunters think they should be doing, but is it actually helpful? The evidence suggests yes.
There have been several studies that show more workers find out about new jobs through their personal network than any other method. For example, a study of workers in the Quebec provincial government found that 42.7% of the 2553 people in the study had found the job through personal contacts despite the government’s efforts to formalise the application process. An unpublished study of 1780 people in the Philadelphia area found that 56% of those who weren’t self employed got their current job with significant help from another person.
A longitudinal study that questioned people on their networking behaviours and then recorded their salary over three years found that networking was related to salary growth. There is also some evidence that you’re more likely to find a job through your acquaintances than through close friends. Also, often as you become more senior in an organisation,
When you’re trying to have an impact, it’s useful to know how successful you’ll be in different careers so you can pick the right one. But how can you do this? There are a few predictors of success that have been studied by psychologists, but the results aren’t widely known. The scientific consensus is that the best way to predict someone’s career success is to assess their general mental ability (GMA), which is similar to what most people mean by “intelligence”. You might find this surprising, so I’m going to summarise the evidence backing it up. Then I’ll talk about:
Holden Karnofsky is the co-founder and co-executive director of GiveWell, an independent, nonprofit charity evaluator. We recommend Givewell as a leading source of information on where to have the largest impact with your charitable donations.
In 2012 GiveWell moved over $9.5 million to its top charities and the amount of money moved by GiveWell has so far been roughly doubling each year. GiveWell also recently formed a partnership with GoodVentures, a new multi-billion dollar foundation which aims to do as much good as possible. This has already had huge impact, for example at the end of 2012, Good Ventures awarded $2 million in grants to GiveWell’s top recommended charities.
Suppose we meet on the street one day and I tell you that, through no fault of my own, I’m having to live on just a pound a day for food and drink. Would you give me just 50p, knowing this could greatly improve my day without really affecting your own at all? I’m pretty sure you would.
Between the 29th April and the 3rd May, I and a number of others from 80,000 Hours and Giving What We Can will be “living below the line” – spending no more than a pound a day on food and drink. Admittedly we’re doing this out of choice, but those who live below the poverty line in reality do so by force of circumstance, and suffer a great deal more. So if you’d buy me something to eat, or give me 50p if I was doing this through no fault of my own, please instead make a donation to one of the charities we’re doing this to raise money for
For most people, having a career which is a good “fit” for their personality and interests is extremely high priority. Unsurprisingly, the notion of “person-environment fit” is fundamental to most careers advice. The general idea is that a) people have different personalities and interests, b) different types of people are suited to different working environments and c) finding the right working environment for your personality and interests is crucial to finding a job you’ll enjoy and be successful in.
However, despite several decades of research attempts, psychologists have failed to demonstrate that fit with the workplace has any substantial effect on job satisfaction or job performance. This suggests the normal approach of (i) working out your interests and personality and then (ii) finding a job to match them might be wrong – it doesn’t seem to help you find a job you enjoy or are good at!
This is surprising: it seems intuitively obvious that your fit with your work environment is important. It might be that the effect is too complex to be picked up in the existing studies, and that improved survey design would uncover a stronger connection. But we should also consider whether being a good fit with your work is less important than we first think.
After the shocking massacre in Connecticut it looks like gun control is going to draw a lot of attention from Obama and Congress this year. This got me thinking about how important gun control might be as a political cause. The potential good achieved by focussing on this policy is in large part determined by the damage done by guns in the first place. In that light, does it deserve it?
Robin Hanson is an American economist who recently blogged about an elegant way to help others at little personal cost. The logic goes like this…
Worldwide, over US$100 billion is invested every year in supporting biomedical research, which results in an estimated 1 million research publications per year
A recently updated systematic review of 79 follow-up studies of research reported in abstracts estimated the rate of publication of full reports after 9 years to be only 53%.
An e?cient system of research should address health problems of importance to populations and the interventions and outcomes considered important by patients and clinicians. However, public funding of research is correlated only modestly with disease burden, if at all.
Some activities have many more times more impact than others. For example, if you’re learning a new skill you’ll improve very quickly at the start as you learn the fundamental skills and then your progress will slow. For example, in language-learning the first hundred words you learn are by far the most useful, often gainig you ~80% coverage. Someone who makes sure they learn the most common words can thus reach conversational fluency several times faster than someone who picks more randomly from the most common couple of thousand words.
Many of us at 80,000 Hours have found that having a good task management system – a list of tasks with a process for maintaining it – is important for being productive. The most popular sysetm is called Getting Things Done and you can read a summary of it here.
Commitment devices have boosted my productivity from spending hours or even days procrastinating to consistently achieving my aims. The idea is that you make it costly to fail to do what you say you’ll do. For example, you tell a friend that you have to do 8 hours work a day or you pay them £50. Or maybe you have to shave one side of your body if you fail (I know someone who had to do this!)
To have impact you need to choose the right career. But that’s not all. If you can build your knowledge and productivity faster than everyone else in your career then you’ll rise from average in your field to the top and have much more impact. So how can you do this?