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"This is your most important decision" by Benjamin Todd
---
client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
narrator_time: 1h30m
qa_time: 20m
---
Why your career is your biggest opportunity to make a difference to the world
When people think of living ethically, they most often think of things like recycling, fair trade, and volunteering.
But that’s missing something huge: your choice of career.
We believe that what you do with your career is probably the most important ethical decision of your life.
The first reason is the huge amount of time at stake. You have about 80,000 hours in your career: 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for 40 years. That’s more time than you’ll spend eating, socialising, and watching Netflix put together.
And it means (unless you happen to be the heir to a large estate) that time is the biggest resource you have to help others.
So if you can increase the overall impact of your career by just a tiny amount, it will likely do more good than changes you could make to other parts of your life.
Or, to look at it another way: it’s worth thinking a lot about how to make even just small improvements to your career. For instance, if you could increase the impact of your career by 1%, it would be worth spending up to 800 hours working out how to do that.
And that brings us to the second reason why your choice of career is so important: some careers give you the opportunity to do vastly more good for the world than others — to a much greater extent than people realise.
In fact, we’ll argue that some career paths open to you likely have 10, 100, or even 1,000 times more impact than others. And this makes it even more important to think hard about your career.
Why do careers differ so much in impact?
Original article:
https://80000hours.org/make-a-difference-with-your-career/
Narrated for 80,000 Hours by TYPE III AUDIO.
Share feedback on this narration.
View all episodes
By TYPE III AUDIO---
client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
narrator_time: 1h30m
qa_time: 20m
---
Why your career is your biggest opportunity to make a difference to the world
When people think of living ethically, they most often think of things like recycling, fair trade, and volunteering.
But that’s missing something huge: your choice of career.
We believe that what you do with your career is probably the most important ethical decision of your life.
The first reason is the huge amount of time at stake. You have about 80,000 hours in your career: 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for 40 years. That’s more time than you’ll spend eating, socialising, and watching Netflix put together.
And it means (unless you happen to be the heir to a large estate) that time is the biggest resource you have to help others.
So if you can increase the overall impact of your career by just a tiny amount, it will likely do more good than changes you could make to other parts of your life.
Or, to look at it another way: it’s worth thinking a lot about how to make even just small improvements to your career. For instance, if you could increase the impact of your career by 1%, it would be worth spending up to 800 hours working out how to do that.
And that brings us to the second reason why your choice of career is so important: some careers give you the opportunity to do vastly more good for the world than others — to a much greater extent than people realise.
In fact, we’ll argue that some career paths open to you likely have 10, 100, or even 1,000 times more impact than others. And this makes it even more important to think hard about your career.
Why do careers differ so much in impact?
Original article:
https://80000hours.org/make-a-difference-with-your-career/
Narrated for 80,000 Hours by TYPE III AUDIO.
Share feedback on this narration.