Yeah, well, so I suppose I just want to talk about like, careers
generally, altruistical note. Because I think careers are really important. And
I see a lot of people making mistakes. And I think two of the biggest mistakes I
see people making is one, just, especially like students and young people is one
just like not thinking about it ever. And two, getting really stressed and
overwhelmed about it. So I think it's crazy to never think about it. Because
your career is such a big passion for life. It's like 80,000 hours, it's insane.
And, more importantly, I think you can productively spend time when you're
young, to make the rest of your career better.
And but I think it's also kind of understandable to feel stressed and
overwhelmed about it. Because there are people who like, yes, I get the
argument. It's a really big deal. And, like, I completely abide with this
because it stress me out. But I think this is a classic case of having
unrealistically high sadness of yourself, like, people anchor themselves to
thinking that they're failing, if they haven't perfectly solved this problem,
and they're perfectly or they're doing without, and I kind of slip into this,
like, I don't know what I'm doing with my life, I maybe feel like I should, you
know, I'm 22. I've graduated, and then sometimes chat with my friends who are 10
years older than me.
And they say, "what the hell are you talking about" I don't know what I'm doing
with my life, this is completely fine. But the solution also isn't to just give
up on this. It's not a binary of confused or not confused, it's a spectrum. And
the less confused you are, the more you can productively think about this, I
find it helpful to think that as an opportunity, like, most things we ever do,
just don't matter in the long term. Like, when I look back on what I was doing a
year ago, other than going outside, but more of most of it, just like I don't
really care, there are very few ways to trade time now to make the rest of my
life better. And it's pretty short. It's like it's a very short list.
It's like forming close and meaningful friendships, learning things and watching
myself and figure out how I'm doing with my life. And there's just an awesome
opportunity to make things better. And I think that you can do things
productively. There are like, two key ways I think about this, again, engaging
with this cool thing of confusion. So first, becoming less confused. I like to
think about careers in terms of how can I gain as much information as I can,
like, is the puzzle. The world is big and overwhelming. There are better and
worse things I could be doing. And I want to figure out what these are.
So I need to be grounded and actually gardens, the world run tests, try things
and gain data. I should just run lizard tests. Start with cheap things like
talking to people, scale up asking for advice, scale up to more expensive things
like doing projects. Even more expensive things like doing internships, even
doing jobs, I think you should think of your first job as just how can I gain as
much information data as I can. And note that by career, I don't necessarily
mean like getting a soulless corporate job, or like a thing you started apply
for.
Like, I think the what Ali is doing with being a popular thing, or Taim is doing
with a startup, these are both like careers in the sense of what you will do
with your life and your productive energy. And for some people, this kind of
lifestyle is a great fit, some people it isn't, you can run tests to figure this
out. I think people should be a lot more willing to ask for help. This recent
blog post was just about how I personally suck at asking for help.
And [UNCLEAR] is more like, I've got so much value from asking mentors for
advice. And like, what is your job like? What things do you think I'm currently
missing? How should I test it? What should I be thinking about? Like, I'm
confused to the point that I'm currently on a gap year, just doing a series of
internships, to get more data, and see what different things are like.
And the second thing is, you're really confused. And what you can do is to be
robust to the confusion, and do things that are just good, no matter what your
like long term goals are. And I think one of the best ways of doing this is what
I call becoming awesome. Like, trying to get skills, learn things and become
better, I think especially good to focus on the meta skills, like productivity,
social skills, communication, how to learn things better, like, and my
university experience, I probably put in more effort to self improvement, and
getting better at learning that actually did learning maths. And I think that
paid off pretty well. Investing and things like this just pays off in the rest
of your life.
And I think that if you actually spend time being strategic about this, like
what skills you bottleneck, how can you get practice and get better at those,
and then actually doing it just pays off really good dividends, 80,000 hours,
who were affected by organization, specialist and career advice, and have loads
of other awesome ideas, call this career capital. And the idea is that one of
the big variables explaining how you do over like 40 year career is just how
much skills you gain especially early on, and that you should focus on the years
over anything else like success or prestige, like hockey pays off in a better
position. Cal Newports book So Good They Can't Ignore You is also pretty greatly
on careers and hammer this point him a lot.
So those are like careers in general, how can people do things better? If you
specifically care a lot about doing good with your career. And again, career is
like one of the biggest things you have for shaping the world. So if you care
about altruism, think about [UNCLEAR]. So firstly, there's a organization called
80,000 Hours, they're really, really awesome. And their career advice is way
better than anything I can say in the next 10 minutes. And they have a article
called the key ideas series, which you can easily link to in the show notes. And
people should just like go read that. And they're like years of evidence backed
research.
And one of the annoying things about trying to give career advice in a podcast
is everyone's journey is different. And everyone's like, optimal career path is
different. So everything I say ends up being a bit generic. So yeah, I said this
one already. Motivation and good fit is really, really, really important.
There's a lot of spreads between different careers in what they do, but also
between different people on the same path, like the best researcher does maybe
like 10 to 100 times as much research as the average one. And you're not going
to be exceptional, unless you really care about what you're doing. And you're
actually motivated about it. So that's really important to pay attention to.
And you're like doing good as a marathon on a sprint. You don't want to burn
out. I think it's easy when you start thinking about doing goods to only think
about sacrifice. I think that's really wrongheaded. I also think it's easy to
have a limited view of altruistic careers. Like when you ask most people what
kind of careers do good people we're gonna say things like being a doctor
voluntary with a charity going and working for an NGO in a developing country.
And I think that's all cool, but there are a lot of other things.
Brain dump of some problems that I think really matter, biosecurity that
thinking about future pandemics and how to prevent them or prepare for them,
where you can do things like work on like, what could biology and biotechnology
try to influence policy to make it better? Thinking about other emerging
technologies, especially AI, which I think is like, probably one of the biggest
deals is going to happen in the next century. I think there are a lot of
important technical problems here that can be solved, to get systems that do
exactly what we want, rather than just things that kind of do what we want.
There's lot of important policy work.
Like, if half of all jobs are going to be automated in the next 50 years. How
can we make sure that this is good for the world, rather than just creating an
even more hyper rich class? And how can the world adapt to these big social
trends? I'm doing research into how to prioritize between problems. And like,
all the important points are missing. This can do with like talented economists,
falsely researchers, social scientists, working on global health, like just
earning a lot of money and donating it can make a really big difference here.
Working for policy, working for NGOs, working on global development, like if
you're an economist working with governments in poorer countries, making what's
better the factory farmed animals, like going and campaigning and talking to
companies. Working on technologies like clean meat. What can problems like
climate change? I think one of the big bottlenecks here is policy. Another thing
I want people to work on is a lot of the risks dominated by the really bad
scenarios, where we have like a lot more warming than we expect, like rather
than having to rigorously have like six degrees. But very few people will
research that stuff, and extreme climate change.
A lot of these problems are kind of underlaid by having a messy political
system, where politicians want to look good for the next five years. Rather than
thinking long term. People don't use best practices from forecasting. And like,
actually making the world better. And getting political systems that do that
would be awesome. And I don't know needs to be done to make that happen. But I
think there's good work that's been done there. The other thing is, you're
certainly have to like directly, like do a research on these problems, like
generating money and donating it to organizations doing good work is awesome. Be
doing kind of outreach and getting other people care about them is awesome.
Being a kind of like more meta person work, being a manager or doing operations
work at an organization doing a lot of goods. Generally just spreading important
ideas in the world, like being a journalist, or say, being a YouTuber, he talks
about important things in his videos, and hence. Yeah, and ramble about. One
thing is that the listeners can connect with. If you're kind of feeling
overwhelmed by all of the options, a good way of getting traction is like, sit
down and try to figure out which problems do you think are most important?
80,000 hours has a bunch of good write ups on different things. There are also a
lot of problems they haven't had time to think about, or to, like hard think
about the recipe for the big deal, like climate change.
Finding the ones that you care about the most, which is pretty personal
question. And then thinking about the different ways you could work on each of
these problems, and seeing which of them might fit you well. And then think
about what you could do to get efficient about this. And like, explore and test
prep. That was a long ramble. So to recap, the key points from that. careers are
really, really important, this massively affects, there's like a big chunk of
your total impact on the world. This will affect both your happiness, and
fulfillment, and also just how the world is different. This is one of the best
things to think about.
I think it's useful to see it as an opportunity, not a duty or an obligation.
You can orient towards getting information to become less confused. You can
focus on gaining skills and career capital, even if you are confused about just
a robustly good thing. And if you care about altruism, I would recommend picking
out the most important problems. And then thinking about which careers you think
could help those that are high impact and might fit you well. And you should go
read what he does and say about this. Because it's far better than anything I'm
saying right now.
