80,000 Hours: Find a fulfilling career that does good

"80,000 Hours is named after the number of hours we spend working in our life. That’s a lot of hours. Spending 1% of this, 800 hours, on figuring out what to do with the remaining 99%, makes a lot of sense. The aim of this organization is to provide advice and coaching for people who want to use their career to do as much good as possible. It has developed a body of research since its creation, and it has coached hundreds of people, giving them tailored advice on how they can use their career to have the biggest impact. The book is a summary of these years of research. It addresses questions like: what are the most important areas you should focus? Within those cause areas, such as global health and development or existential risks, what are the highest priority careers? To what extent should you focus on what you’re personally passionate about, good at, or excited about? To what extent should you invest in yourself in order to have a larger impact later on, such as by pursuing further degrees, or working in a non-impactful but prestigious organization that would train you really well? These are the core questions of the book. It seems to have been very successful so far, although it’s been a long time since I’ve personally done some coaching. But about a third of the people I talked to reported having made significant changes in their life on the basis of the advice they received, and it’s probably a larger amount now. There are various calls to action on 80,000 Hours’s website; after someone has read a bit, they can apply for coaching, especially if they’re interested in a particular area. They’ll be asked to read a lot of background on the research that we’ve done, then they’ll talk to an advisor, to discuss what are their strengths and weaknesses, what they think they could potentially excel in if they worked in a particular area, and what would be their 2 or 3 best potential options. These are often people in the early stage of their career, in their twenties. They’ll also get connected to various mentors who have specialist knowledge and have worked in these areas for a number of years. They go away from this coaching with a long list of things to look into, jobs to apply for, etc. “Spending 1% of your career figuring out what to do with the remaining 99% makes a lot of sense.” The motivation for this is a kind of “practice what you teach” idea. The world would be a lot better if charities were very honest and open about what they do, including their mistakes. One thing we found when looking at charities is that it can be incredibly hard to know even the basics of what a charity actually does—not in the sense of what they focus on, such as malaria, but what is actually their intervention and what is the evidence base for this intervention. I think that transparent reporting is good for the organization as well: it keeps you on track, especially as a charity when you don’t have the carrot and stick of profits and losses beating you into submission all the time. Instead, you have to rely much more on judgements from advisors and people you work with, to judge how well you’re doing. Being transparent on these aspects means that you get a lot more opportunities to get criticised. It’s also the case that 80,000 Hours received money from the effective altruism community, from very deserving donors who would not donate to an organization that wouldn’t report what it was really doing."