Notes and further reading

for 80,000 Hours career guide

Make a copy of this document, and write your own notes.

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Notes and further reading
for 80,000 Hours career guide
1) The one pager
1) What is a fulfilling career?
Exercises
Exercise 1
Exercise 2
If you had to read one book:
What else:
2) In which career can you have the greatest social impact?
A) Which cause is most effective?
B) Which methods?
Exercises
Collecting your thoughts about best direction over 3-10 years
Further reading
If you had to read one book:
More reading:
The moral argument for focusing on helping others with most of your time and money
was made in this classic essay by Peter Singer:
3) Career capital
How to get career capital
Further reading
Exercises
4) How to figure out what youll be good at
Further reading
If you were to read one book:
5) Make your plan
Now make your plan
6) How to get jobs
Further reading
Exercises
6) Next steps
Tell us your story

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1) The one pager

1. Explore. Learn more about and try out your most promising options, while minimising the costs.
Dont expect to figure out whats best right away just by thinking about it, rather, think like a
scientist testing a hypothesis. Keep focusing on exploration until you feel youre getting a better
sense of the best options.

2. Build flexible career capital. Improve your skills, connections and credentials to put yourself in
a better position to make a difference in the long-run. Do this at least for your first few jobs, and
keep going until you stop finding really high return opportunities, or you find a really good way to
make an impact.

3. Solve the most pressing social problems. Do what contributes by focusing on the most
pressing problems, picking the right method, and doing something with excellent personal fit. That
way youll have a career thats both personally fulfilling, and has a big positive impact on the world.

4. Adapt your plan. Review your career at least once a year, since the best option may well keep
changing. Keep a plan B and a plan Z in mind. Dont expect to figure out your perfect match right
away.

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1) What is a fulfilling career?

The key predictors of job satisfaction are:

Engaging work (autonomy, clear tasks, feedback, variety)

Work that helps others
Being good at your job
Getting on with your colleagues
Meets your basic needs
Fit with rest of life

To be fulfilled, focus on getting good at something that helps others.

Helping others might make you more successful and is also a good thing to do.

For more, read our article summarizing the key predictors of job satisfaction, and the evidence
behind them:
https://80000hours.org/articles/job-satisfaction/

We explore how to find work that helps others and that youre good at in later sections.

Exercises

Exercise 1
Rate some jobs on the predictors of job satisfaction from one to five.

Predictor Job 1 Job 2 Job 3

Engaging work

Work that helps others

Being good at your job

Supportive colleagues

Basic needs

Fit with rest of life

Further reading:
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If you had to read one book:

Flourish by Prof. Martin Seligman is a survey of the findings of positive psychology from the last
couple of decades, by the founder of the field. A bit rambly (compared to his excellent earlier work),
but full of fascinating ideas and examples.

What else:

Stumbling Upon Happiness, by Prof. Dan Gilbert, outlines the science of measuring happiness,
and explains why were so bad at judging what will make us happy.

Give and Take, by Prof. Adam Grant, outlines the evidence that having an altruistic mindset can
make you more successful, so long as you avoid burnout. It then goes on to explain how you can
avoid burnout.

Take the VIA Signature Strengths test, and find ways to use your strengths in your work every day.
Theres an emerging evidence base to show this will make you happier and more productive:
http://www.viacharacter.org/www/The-Survey

2) In which career can you have the greatest social impact?

The definition of social impact:

(How many people you help) x (how much you help them by)

More reading:
https://80000hours.org/articles/the-meaning-of-making-a-difference/

The easy baseline:

Do whatever job is most fulfilling and give 10% of your income to the poorest people in the world.

Read more: https://80000hours.org/2015/12/whats-the-easiest-way-anyone-can-have-a-big-social-

impact/

Take the Giving What We Can pledge.

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https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/join

A framework for comparing career options in terms of impact

A. Which problem is most pressing?

B. Which method is most effective?
C. Where do I have the most personal fit and job satisfaction?

To get specific career recommendations, try our career quiz (click late career to see those mainly
focused on social impact rather than career capital).
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/career-recommender/#/

See all our career reviews:

https://80000hours.org/career-guide/profiles/

A) Which cause is most effective?

The framework:
Scale
Neglectedness
Solvability
Personal fit

Get ideas for pressing problems to focus on by taking our quiz:

https://80000hours.org/articles/cause-selection/

And see all our problem profiles:

https://80000hours.org/articles/problems/

B) Which methods?

Options:

1. Direct work
a. Work at the best organisation you can find that works on solving the problem (or
found a new one).
2. Research
a. Do a PhD, then work your way up in academia, or exit to industry or think tanks. Aim
to better understand and come up with solutions to the most pressing problems.
3. Advocacy
a. Types
i. Social - change attitudes
ii. Political - change policy
iii. Movement building - mobilise support for a cause

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 b. Roles
i. Work in an NGO as a campaigner.
ii. Work in a generally influential position - journalist, public intellectual, policy.
iii. Do it in your spare time.
iv. Political careers.
4. Earning to give
a. Pursue a high-earning career and donate over 10% of your income to the most
effective charities you can find within the cause.
b. Some particularly high earning paths with good career capital include: tech sector
(startups, software engineering, data science), some part of finance (especially
asset management), consulting, marketing.
c. Law, medicine and professional services are also high earning.

Choose between these based on what the cause needs and what youre good at - personal fit. We
discuss how to figure out what youre good at in a later talk.

To get more ideas for specific jobs, try our career quiz (select mid or late career to focus on
those best for impact rather than career capital):
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/career-recommender/#/

Exercises

Collecting your thoughts about best direction over 3-10 years

1. What problems are most pressing?

2. Which methods seem best within that problem?

3. What specific jobs could you do?

4. Which of these would you be good at and enjoy?

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 5. Overall, what are the top 2-5 paths to strive for over the next 3-10 years?

6. How confident are you in your answer to (5)? A total guess or pretty confident?

7. What are you most uncertain about with your answer to (4)? Which uncertainties could
most easily change your ranking? (This will help you figure out what to investigate).

Further reading

If you had to read one book:

Doing Good Better, by the co-founder of 80,000 Hours, Will MacAskill.

More reading:

The moral argument for focusing on helping others with most of your time and money was made in
this classic essay by Peter Singer:
http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Singeressayspring1972.pdf

See how rich youre going to be compared to everyone else:

https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/how-rich-am-i/

Will giving 10% of your income to charity make you happier? A paper by Andreas Mogensen:
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/sites/givingwhatwecan.org/files/attachments/giving-without-
sacrifice.pdf

See all of Open Phils cause profiles (though bear in mind these are written from the perspective of
a donor, rather than worker).
http://www.givewell.org/labs/causes

How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, by Bjorn Lomborg, based on the
research of the Copenhagen Consensus, which asks leading economists to prioritise among
different ways to help the global poor.
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More detail on the argument for focusing on international development rather than developed
country poverty: http://www.givewell.org/giving101/Your-dollar-goes-further-overseas

An argument for the moral value of animals:

http://www.oswego.edu/~delancey/Singer.pdf

The concept of existential risk, and what it means for choosing which problem to work on:
http://www.existential-risk.org/concept.html

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3) Career capital

Career capital is anything that puts you in a better position to make a difference in the
future (not just hard credentials like degrees).

We usually break it down into:

Valuable skills
Connections - how many people you know who are willing to help you out, and how
influential they are.
Credentials - anything that lets you prove your abilities to others, whether formal titles or
impressive achievements.
Character - your ability to identify and do the right thing despite difficult circumstances.
Runway - how long you could comfortably live if you lost your job.

Flexible career capital can be used in many different future careers, and that makes it more
valuable than narrow career capital.

Focus on building career capital in your first couple of jobs, until you start facing diminishing
returns, or find an unusually great opportunity for impact. More detail:
https://80000hours.org/articles/should-you-wait/

How to get career capital

Some of the best types of option early in your career for capital include:

Working in any organisation which, or with any person who, has a reputation for high
performance e.g. top consultancies, top tech companies, as well as certain financial and
legal firms.
Undertaking certain graduate studies, especially economics, computer science and applied
mathematics.
Focusing on developing valuable transferable skills e.g. programming, data science,
marketing.
Taking opportunities which allow you to achieve impressive things e.g. founding an
organisation, doing anything you might be really good at.

Use our career quiz selecting early career to sort your results by career capital.
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/career-recommender/

You can build career capital in any situation by doing the following, roughly in this order:

1. Set up routines to stay on top of your sleep, diet, exercise and close friendships.
2. If you have a mental health issue, focus on that.
3. Start doing the exercises from positive psychology.
4. Build relationships with great people.

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 5. Find small ways to become generally more productive.
6. Learn how to learn.
7. Actively work to learn useful skills, either in your job or on the side.
8. Establish yourself as an expert in an important area.

Further reading

Our article that summarises everything we know about career capital.

https://80000hours.org/articles/career-capital/

So Good They Cant Ignore You, by Cal Newport (a fan of 80k!), which argues you should focus on
building career capital rather than following your passion if you want to have a good career.

Exercises

1. Whats the most valuable career capital you already have?

2. What are your current most promising options for getting career capital over the next couple
of years?

3. What are some new options for getting career capital from the above?

4. Rate your options from 1 to 5 on the following:

a. Flexibility - will they be useful preparation for many types of jobs?

b. How well do they carry you towards your medium term goals?
c. Personal fit - how good do you expect to be at them?

Option Flexibility Take you towards Personal fit

medium term
goals?

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5. Based on all this, what are your top 3 options for getting career capital over the next couple
of years?

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4) How to figure out what youll be good at

Go and investigate. We often try to figure out what well be good at by thinking about it, in
particular by reflecting on what were most interested in. In fact, its really hard to predict what youll
be good at ahead of time.

Explore cheaply by:

1. Using natural opportunities such as university holidays and a gap year

2. Taking several years to explore before graduate school
3. Taking jobs that expose you to several areas (e.g. consulting, freelancing)
4. Speaking to people in careers youre interested in, or doing trial work and side projects.

Then narrow down your options using our process:

Work through our tool:

https://80000hours.org/career-guide/decision-process/
Or read this article:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/how-to-choose/article/

Further reading

Our article:
https://80000hours.org/articles/personal-fit/

If you were to read one book:

The Startup of You, by Reid Hoffman the founder of LinkedIn, which presents a new approach to
career planning based on exploration and flexibility. It also contains great tips on networking.

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5) Make your plan

Since your plan is going to change and its better to think through obstacles in advance, use the
A/B/Z plan.

Plan A is the top option youd like to pursue. If youre relatively confident about what you
want to do in the medium-term, focus on that. If youre more uncertain, look to try out
several options. If youre very uncertain, just build flexible career capital.
Plan Bs are the nearby alternatives you can switch into if Plan A doesnt quite go as
intended.
Plan Z is your temporary fallback in case everything goes wrong. Having a Plan Z helps
you take bigger risks.

Read more:
https://80000hours.org/articles/career-plan/

Based on all the above, heres what long-term career strategy looks like:

1. Explore
a. Focus on the options that seem most promising, plus some wildcards.
b. Keep focusing on exploration until you feel youre getting a better sense of the best
options
2. Build career capital
a. Do this at least for your first few jobs, and until you stop finding really high return
opportunities
3. Solve the most pressing social problems
a. Right cause, right method, personal fit
4. Adapt your plan

Now make your plan

Heres a worksheet to go through that ties everything together.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MBpwNLl3AgsKi4Yh4PZ2X30PYy4gV9xK2xgqXKevaVQ/edi
t#

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6) How to get jobs

Get lots of leads, especially by asking for introductions.

Prove you can do the work by actually doing it. Do a project before the interview, explain
exactly how you can solve their problems or seek a related position first.
Once you get an offer, actually negotiate.
Network
Do whatever it takes to keep yourself motivated e.g. make public commitments to make
applications, and find a partner to search for jobs alongside.

Further reading

You can get an overview of the basics of job hunting by reading What Color is Your Parachute, by
Dick Bolles. Its the best selling career advice book of all time.

The pre-interview project: https://medium.com/life-learning/how-to-get-any-job-you-want-even-if-

you-re-unqualified-6f49a65f5491#.moeef0fz0

How to negotiate your salary:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

Learn how to network:

https://80000hours.org/2015/03/how-to-network/

Getting Past No, by William Ury of Harvard Law Schools Program on Negotiation, is a classic
guide to how to negotiate.

Motivate yourself using the books recommended in the career capital section, like The Motivation
Hacker.

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Exercises

1. For the jobs you want to get, what specifically are you going to do to succeed? Be as
specific as possible, and decide exactly when youll do all this.

2. What obstacles do you anticipate doing the above?

3. If these arise, what are you going to do?

4. When will you review this plan?

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6) Next steps

Join our LinkedIn group and ask a question about your career, or find a job:
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/5057625

Find other ways to get involved with our community:

https://80000hours.org/community/

Read even more:

https://80000hours.org/articles/

Tell us your story

If our advice and community have helped your career, tell us your story. Were able to provide all
this advice for free because people tell us about how we helped them, and this lets us fundraise to
pay for our team. So wed really appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to answer a few
questions.

http://80000hours.org/impact-survey/

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