80,000 Hours

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 the most important decision you’ll ever make.

Choose well, and you can have a more rewarding, interesting life, and also help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. Choose poorly, and you could waste decades.

So what should you do? Most advice is based on no research, instead offering (misleading) platitudes like ‘follow your passion’. It’s surprisingly out of date, focusing on traditional paths rather than those most likely to thrive in an age of AI. And if you want to help others, the advice is even more simplistic: telling you to choose careers like nurse or doctor, when there are paths in which almost anyone can save more lives. In fact, some careers have hundreds of times more impact than others, but most of us have no idea which ones.

Benjamin Todd is the founder of 80,000 Hours, a non-profit that’s spent over ten years researching how to have a meaningful and impactful career. Here he introduces a tried-and-tested toolkit framework that has already led thousands of people to change their path. It covers:

• What really makes for a dream job, and why finding it probably doesn’t involve ‘following your passion’.
• How to identify which global problems are most pressing, and why they might involve AI as much as climate change.
• Which roles are likely to be automated, and how to ensure yours isn’t among them.

'A ridiculously in-depth guide about how to find that perfect career for you.' Ali Abdaal, author of Feel-Good Productivity

'Based on evidence and good sense, not platitudes.' Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of our Nature