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How To Find The Perfect Career - The 3 Part Decision Framework

2022-09-02 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 14:45 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Work and career · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Evidence-based framing, Lesson from a book, His medical past, AI

In the first episode of Career Club, made with 80,000 Hours, Ali splits career choice into making money, having fun and helping people: money and fun are satisficing goods, enjoyment comes from getting good and from low-risk experiments rather than following a passion, and helping depends on a problem's scale and neglectedness, your effectiveness and your personal fit.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Three things people want from a career; Career Club with 80,000 Hours

  • ★★ Ali starts Career Club, a new and ongoing series on strategies and tools to find and succeed in a career that brings enjoyment, fulfilment and impact; this episode is made with 80,000 Hours. — 00:00:00
  • ★★★ Ali frames finding the perfect career around three things most people want from work: to make money, to have fun and to help people. — 00:00:00

00:00:29 — Part one: I want to make money, a satisficing good

  • ★★ Ali says wanting money in a career is not wrong in itself, but it becomes a problem when making more and more money is the primary consideration in career decisions. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Ali says studies put the point beyond which extra money brings diminishing extra happiness at around $70,000 a year in the US or £60,000 in the UK. — 00:00:58 · United States, United Kingdom

  • ★★★ Ali treats money in a career as a satisficing good, where good enough is enough: beyond a point you can set the money side aside and move on to having fun and helping people. — 00:01:35

    “money is a satisficing good”

00:02:17 — Part two: I want to have fun, satisficing, job characteristics, passion as a myth, experimentation

  • ★★ Ali says having fun at work is also a satisficing good: you want a career that gives you enough fun and enough enjoyment. — 00:02:46
  • ★★ Ali warns that it is easy to think the grass is greener in another career you would enjoy twice as much, but realistically that is basically never going to happen. — 00:03:11
  • ★★ Ali lists what makes a job enjoyable: autonomy, liking your colleagues, learning and growing, playing to your strengths, and no major negatives. — 00:03:40
  • ★ Ali says that, according to research, a commute of more than 20 minutes is a major negative of a job. (hedged) — 00:03:40
  • ★★ Ali says that in almost any career chosen for the right reasons you can find ways to have fun in your specific job at different times. — 00:04:39
  • ★ Being a YouTuber seems really fun and is, Ali says, but he knows a bunch of YouTubers who are not enjoying their lives because of the other negative sides of this dream career. — 00:04:39
  • ★★ Cal Newport (quoted): In So Good They Can't Ignore You, Cal Newport argues that following your passion is a bit of a myth: what most people enjoy, like video games, Netflix or fantasy novels, is very hard to make a career of. — 00:05:08 · Cal Newport
  • ★★★ Ali broadly agrees with Cal Newport: find a career that ticks other boxes and fits the lifestyle you want, then get really good at it, building career capital you can cash in for autonomy. — 00:05:08 · Cal Newport
  • ★★ Before signing up to the long road of medical school, Ali suggests experimenting: a few weeks of work experience, since a few days is probably not enough, and asking doctors whether they enjoy it. — 00:06:07 · experimental mindset
  • ★★ Ali reckons a career's working time at 40-hour weeks, 50 weeks a year for about 40 years, 80,000 hours, and says people spend nowhere near 8,000 hours deciding on a career, though they probably should. — 00:06:36
  • ★★★ For a career you enjoy, Ali advises not trying to follow your passions but doing low-risk experiments to find out what a career is like before signing up to a very long career path. — 00:06:36 · experimental mindset

00:07:05 — Part three: I want to help people, problem area, effectiveness and personal fit

  • ★★ Ali says research shows that having a purpose and helping other people is good for the world and also for our own fulfilment. — 00:07:05
  • ★★★ Ali weighs how a career helps people by three questions: which problem area you work on, how effective you are at working on it, and how much personal fit you have for it. — 00:07:34
  • ★★ Ali judges a problem area by how big the problem is and how neglected it is. — 00:08:03
  • ★★ Climate change is a really big problem and a career in it is great, Ali says, but it is not particularly neglected: it now has loads of funding and people, partly thanks to a few activists 20 or 30 years ago. — 00:08:03
  • ★★ Ali says most researchers call the risk of artificial intelligence growing out of control pretty major, and experts put the chance that artificial general intelligence becomes a serious threat to humanity in the next 50 years at 30 to 50%. — 00:08:03
  • ★★ Even a 10% or 1% chance of disaster is huge, Ali argues, as nobody would board a plane with a 10% chance of crashing; multiplying out probabilities, expected value, shows how big a problem is. — 00:08:42
  • ★★ Ali calls the risk from artificial intelligence a very neglected problem: as of 2020 about 40,000 people worked on making AI more powerful and about 300 on making it safe. — 00:09:11
  • ★★ On a very neglected problem, Ali says, the 301st person working on it can probably have far more impact than the 40,001st person would. — 00:09:11
  • ★★ Ali says William MacAskill, whom he interviewed on his podcast, warned the Scottish government in about 2015 that pandemics were probably the world's biggest issue, and was laughed off. — 00:09:41
  • ★ Ali calls William MacAskill's What We Owe the Future a fantastic book and recommends checking it out. — 00:09:41
  • ★★ Ali says pandemics have killed around 21 million people, so pandemic prevention is a big problem where work could save many lives, yet it is still surprisingly neglected. — 00:10:10
  • ★★★ To help people in the maximum possible way, Ali advises picking a problem area that is a bit more neglected. — 00:10:39
  • ★★ Ali's second question is effectiveness: working on a huge problem that is impossible to solve is not effective, and some ways of doing good in a career are way better than others. — 00:10:39
  • ★★ On climate change, Ali says that instead of campaigning against plastic straws or for recycling, you could do 100 or 1,000 times as much by flying less or by promoting renewable energy, as Elon Musk did. — 00:11:08
  • ★★★ Ali's third question is personal fit: if you do not fundamentally enjoy working in an area, or are not very good at it, you will not be that effective there. — 00:11:38
  • ★★ Ali says his medical background could give him a decent fit for pandemic prevention or public health and his YouTube work for spreading effective altruism, but he would not be good as an artificial general intelligence researcher. (hedged) — 00:12:07
  • ★★ To find out what your personal fit for an area is, Ali says it partly comes down to experimenting, as with finding a career you enjoy. — 00:12:07

00:12:57 — Compounding skills that make you more effective in any career

  • ★★★ Ali advises developing compounding skills useful in almost any career, such as communicating, public speaking and convincing people, which make you more effective, so you have more fun and help more people. — 00:12:57

00:13:26 — 80,000 Hours careers guide and newsletter; the What We Owe the Future summary

  • ★★ Longtermism, the subject of Ali's summary of What We Owe the Future, holds, he says, that focusing more on long-term problems is one of the ways to have the largest impact with a career. — 00:14:24
  • ★ Ali describes William MacAskill as a moral philosopher and one of the co-founders of 80,000 Hours and the effective altruism movement. — 00:14:24

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: Career Club · satisficing

Also: People: Cal Newport · Elon Musk · William MacAskill

Works: So Good They Can't Ignore You · What We Owe the Future

Organizations: 80,000 Hours

Concepts: artificial intelligence · career capital · climate change · diminishing returns · effective altruism · expected value · experimental mindset · longtermism · pandemic prevention · Work experience

Also centred on satisficing: This Book Changed my Love Life

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