80,000 Hours, Todd

Created: March 01, 2024
Updated: September 08, 2024

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: https://80000hours.org/book/.

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]]N 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, Meadows]]N.

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, Csikzentmilhalyi]]N.

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”

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
  • A list of ways to be more productive:
    • Implementation intentions
    • Use [[Beeminders]]M!
    • Use a simplified version of the Getting Things Done system, as described in: <hamberg.no/gtd>.
    • 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, Newport]]N.
    • 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, Newport]]N
    • “Productivity” by Sam Altman: <blog.samaltman.com/productivity>
    • “Pmarca guide to personal productivity” by Marc Andreesesen: <pmarchive.com/guide_to_personal_productivity.html>
    • “Seeking the productive life” by Stephen Wolfram: https://80k.info/swp
    • …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
  • 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: https://gostrengths.com/what-is-active-and-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
  • Be strategic about how to perform better in your job
  • Use research into decision-making to think better
  • 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: https://effectivethesis.org
  • If you’re interested in doing graduate school in a subject, attend lectures in that subject


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