# 80,000 Hours, Todd
> Source: https://ollybritton.com/notes/books/80000-hours/ · Updated: 2024-09-08 · Tags: book, notes
> You have about 80,000 hours in your career: 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 40 years. This means your choice of career is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make.
> Make the right choices, and you can help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems, as well as have a more rewarding, interesting life.
This book is about choosing what to do with your career. As of when I write this (Sep 2024), you can actually get a free paperback copy, without having even to pay for shipping: .
### Chapter 1, "What makes a dream job?"
#### Stumbling on Happiness
- "The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.", Prof Dan Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness.
- Links to [Thinking, Fast and Slow: Two Selves](https://ollybritton.com/notes/books/thinking-fast-and-slow/two-selves/) and the "experiencing self".
#### Money makes you happier, but only a little
- Most research shows a big plateau in life satisfaction after around 100K per year, the graph looks almost logarithmic.
- Going from a pre-tax income of $40,000 to $80,000 was only associated with a 0.5 point increase on a scale of life satisfaction from one to ten.
- If instead you ask people if they felt happy yesterday (so called "positive affect"), then the graph plateaus around $50,000.
- Also talked about a lot in [Optionality](https://ollybritton.com/notes/books/optionality/).
#### Don't aim for low stress
- Modern literature surveys have shown confusing results about stereotypically stressful jobs, like being a military leader.
- "The sweet spot is where the demands placed on you match your abilities", this is the whole subject of [Flow](https://ollybritton.com/notes/books/flow/).
#### What should you aim for in a dream job?
- Work that's engaging
- Freedom to decide how to perform your work
- Clear tasks, with clearly defined start an end
- Variety in the types of tasks
- Feedback
- Work that helps others
- Studies have shown that performing acts of kindness makes the giver happier
- Work you're good at
- Work with supportive colleagues
- Work that doesn't have major negatives
- A long commute
- Very long hours
- Unfair pay
- Job insecurity
- Work that fits with the rest of your life
### Chapter 3, "Three ways anyone can make a difference, no matter their job"
#### Charitable parachuting?
- A study of two popular parachuting centres found that over a 5 year period approximately 1,500 people went skydiving for charity and raised over £120,000.
- But there are some problems:
- The donations also had to cover the cost of the parachuting, reducing the figure to £45,000.
- There was a total of 163 injuries, and as a result, an average hospital stay of nine days.
- To treat these injuries, the NHS spent £610,000.
- So far every £1 raised for the charities, the NHS spent £13.
#### The 10% pledge
- Take whichever job you find the most rewarding, and then donate 10% of your income to the worlds poorest people.
- Because the semi-logarithmic scale of happiness, and assuming that you make $54,000 post-tax, one dollar will do about 70 times more good if you give it to someone in Kenya rather than spending it on yourself.
- Little personal sacrifice
- Challenges the typical view that a doctor can have more of an impact than other jobs, e.g. software engineering, since if you measure in lives saved then a pledge could actually be more effective.
- Join over 9,000 people who've collectively pledged over $3 billion.
#### Other ways of having an impact
- Political advocacy
- Being a "multiplier" to help others be more effective
### Chapter 4, "Want to do good? Here's how to choose an area to focus on."
#### Characteristics of good problems
- Large-scale problems, e.g. leaving phones plugged in is not the main contributor to the UK's energy usage
- Neglected problems
- Feasible
#### Problems with Scared Straight
- People on Scared Straight committed less crimes after the show
- But the Washington State Institute for Public Policy estimated that each $1 spent on Scared Straight programmes causes more than $200 worth of social harm, since young people would admire the criminals or think jail wasn't as bad as they thought.
### Chapter 5, "The world's biggest problems and why they're not what first comes to mind"
- Global health
- Longtermism
- Addressing neglected existential risks
- Biorisk
- Preventing an AI-related catastrophe
- Global priorities research
- Broad interventions like improved politics
- Capacity building and promoting effective altruism
#### Charity starts at home?
- Issues facing rich countries aren't the most important, "charity shouldn't always begin at home".
- In the US, only 5% of charitable donations are spent on international causes.
### Chapter 6, "Which jobs help people the most?"
- Earning to give
- Communication
- Research
- Government and policy
- Building organisations
### Chapter 7, "Which jobs put you in the best long-term position"
- Concrete steps for gaining career capital
- Work at a growing organisation that has a reputation for high performance in your path
- Go to graduate school in carefully chosen subjects
- The most attractive might be economics and machine learning PhDs.
- Entry-level route into policy careers
- Develop a useful skill
- Software engineering
- Machine learning and applied AI
- Management
- Information security
- Data science and applied statistics
- Marketing
- Sales and negotiation
- Develop expertise in China or another important emerging economy
- Do anything where you might excel
- Do what contributes
### Chapter 8, "How to find the right career for you"
- Suppose you're comparing two options
- Earning to give as a software engineer
- Research in AI safety
- If you only get one shot, it might be worth choosing earning to give
- But you get more than one chance in the real world
- "An aggressive version of this strategy is to rank your options in terms of upside – that is, how good they would be if they go unusually well (say in the top 10% of scenarios) – then start with the top-ranked one. If you're not on track to hit the upside scenario within a given time frame, try the next one, and so on."
### Chapter 9, "How to make your career plan"
- [x] You can apply to speak to the team one on one at: .
- [ ] Also a career planner: .
### Chapter 10, "All the best advice we could find on how to get a job"
- Treat it like a sales process
- Leads
- Convert
- Negotiate
- Leads
- You need lots of leads, example of >70.
- Don't just cold email your CV, use connections
- Search yourself on Google and do anything you can to make the results look good (e.g. delete embarrassing old blog posts).
- Convert
- "Most applicants just filled out our application form, while one sent us a redesigned version of our old career quiz. Which application is more convincing? The person who sent the quiz was immediately in the top 20% of applicants, despite having very little formal experience".
- Do a "pre-interview project".
- Preparing for interviews: ask lots of questions, prepare three key "selling points" ahead of the meeting, focus on what's most impressive, prepare 1-2 concrete facts to back up your key messages, sum everything you have to offer in a sentence, prepare answers to the most likely questions, practice the meeting from start to finish, after each interview figure out what could've gone better.
### Chapter 11, "One of the most powerful ways to improve your career – join a community"
- An advert for the effective altruism community
- Also recommends the AI alignment community
### Appendix 1, "The meaning of making a difference"
> "Social impact" or "making a difference" is (tentatively) about promoting total expected wellbeing – considered impartially, over the long term.
### Appendix 2, "All the evidence-based advice we found on how to be more successful in any job"
- Don't forget to take care of yourself
- "How to improve your sleep", by Lynette Bye: https://lynettebye.com/blog/2019/10/24/lu1xjfsg8i9rzkatmnqgh2r9ykb0r1
- Hit NHS exercise guidelines
- Avoid processed foods
- Maintain close friendships
- Life hacking from Alex Vermeer: https://alexvermeer.com/life-hacking/
- Huberman Lab podcast: https://www.hubermanlab.com/
- If helpful, make mental health your top priority
- Physical health:
- Biggest risk to productivity is back pain
- Correctly set up your desk
- Regularly change position
- Exercise regularly, including some strength training for the whole body
- Set goals
- Longer term goals
- Goals for the year:
- Alex Vermeer also has a ["8,760 hours document"](https://alexvermeer.com/8760hours).
- There's also this document: .
- A list of ways to be more productive:
- Implementation intentions
- Use [Beeminders](https://ollybritton.com/misc/beeminders/)!
- Use a simplified version of the Getting Things Done system, as described in: .
- Do a daily 5 minute review
- Do a weekly hour long review
- Share your todo list
- Batch your time, do all meetings in one or two days, and then block out solid stretches of time for focused work: [Deep Work](https://ollybritton.com/notes/books/deep-work/).
- Use the Pomodoro technique
- Use a regular daily routine
- Set up systems to take care of day-to-day tasks
- Block social media
- Further reading on productivity:
- [Deep Work](https://ollybritton.com/notes/books/deep-work/)
- "Productivity" by Sam Altman:
- "Pmarca guide to personal productivity" by Marc Andreesesen:
- "Seeking the productive life" by Stephen Wolfram:
- ...and many more.
- Improve basic social skills
- How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
- Succeed Socially by Chris Macleod
- Surround yourself with great people
- Network
- Pick a niche topic you know about and try and make your feed into a key place to follow for people interested in that topic
- Consider changing where you live
- "Should you move to Thailand?":
- Apply scientific research into happiness
- Flourish by Prof. Martin Seligman
- Rate your happiness at the end of each day
- Start gratitude journalling
- Use your "signature strengths"
- Learn some basic cognitive behavioural therapy
- Try out a mindfulness practice
- Mindfulness by Penman and Williams
- Do something kind each day
- Practice active constructive responding:
- Craft your job
- Save money
- Save automatically via direct debit
- Focus on big wins
- But still swap money for time
- Until you have six months' runway, cut your donations to 1%.
- Learn how to learn
- Anki, [Anki, applying spaced repetition to A-levels](https://ollybritton.com/blog/graveyard/anki-applying-spaced-repetition-to-a-levels/)
- Famous augmenting cognition essay
- Be strategic about how to perform better in your job
- Use research into decision-making to think better
- [The Scout Mindset](https://ollybritton.com/notes/books/the-scout-mindset/)
- Consider teaching yourself these skills
- Analysis
- Learning
- Social skills
- Management
- Work on becoming a better person
- Being Good by Simon Blackburn
- Reasons and Persons by Deker Parfit
### Appendix 3, "Four biases to avoid in career decisions"
- Thinking narrowly
- Getting stuck
- Misjudging chances
- Base rate neglect
- Relying too much on your gut
### Appendix 4, "How to make tough career decisions"
- Clarify your decision
- Write out your most important priorities
- Generate options
- Rank your options
- List your key uncertainties
- Go and investigate
- Make your final assessment
- Make your best guess, and then prepare to adapt
- Take action
### Appendix 5, "Is it ever OK to take a harmful job in order to more good?"
- Not really
- But quantifying how harmful jobs are is difficult
### Appendix 6, "College advice"
- Even in cases where good grades are useful to your future career, it could still be even more useful to pursue side projects, internships, running student societies, etc.
- Effective Thesis:
- If you're interested in doing graduate school in a subject, attend lectures in that subject
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Olly Britton — https://ollybritton.com. Machine-readable index: https://ollybritton.com/llms.txt