TYPE III AUDIO (All episodes)

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As the 2016 US presidential campaign was entering a fractious round of primaries, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, opened a disturbing email. The March 19 message warned that his Gmail password had been compromised and that he urgently needed to change it.

The email was a lie. It wasn’t trying to help him protect his account — it was a phishing attack trying to gain illicit access.

Podesta was suspicious, but the campaign’s IT team erroneously wrote the email was “legitimate” and told him to change his password. The IT team provided a safe link for Podesta to use, but it seems he or one of his staffers instead clicked the link in the forged email. That link was used by Russian intelligence hackers known as “Fancy Bear,” and they used their access to leak private campaign emails for public consumption in the final weeks of the 2016 race, embarrassing the Clinton team.

While there are plausibly many critical factors in any close election, it’s possible that the controversy around the leaked emails played a non-trivial role in Clinton’s subsequent loss to Donald Trump. This would mean the failure of the campaign’s security team to prevent the hack — which might have come down to a mere typo — was extraordinarily consequential.

Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/information-security

Narrated for 80,000 Hours by TYPE III AUDIO.

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TL;DR: To have a fulfilling career, get good at something and then use it to tackle pressing global problems.

Rather than expect to discover your passion in a flash of insight, your job satisfaction will grow over time as you learn more about what kind of work fits you, master valuable skills, and use them to find engaging work that helps others.

Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/summary/

Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.

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We’re about to summarise the whole guide in one minute. But before that, imagine a cheery thought: you’re at the end of your 80,000-hour career.

You’re on your deathbed looking back. What are some things you might regret

Perhaps you drifted into whatever seemed like the easiest option, or did what your parents did.

Maybe you even made a lot of money doing something you were interested in, and had a nice house and car. But you still wonder: what was it all for?

Now imagine instead that you worked really hard throughout your life, and ended up saving the lives of 100 children. Can you really imagine regretting that?

To have a truly fulfilling life, we need to turn outwards rather than inwards. Rather than asking “What’s my passion?,” ask “How can I best contribute to the world?”

As we’ve seen, by using our fortunate positions and acting strategically, there’s a huge amount we can all do to help others. And we can do this at little cost to ourselves, and most likely while having a more successful and satisfying career too.

Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/end/

Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.

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Not many students are in a position to start a successful, cost-effective charity straight out of a philosophy degree. But when Thomas attended an “effective altruism” conference in London in 2018, he discovered an opportunity to start a nonprofit that could have a major impact on factory farmed animals.

Through the community, he received advice and funding, and ended up in an incubation programme. Today, Thomas’s charity, the Fish Welfare Initiative, has reduced the suffering of around one million factory farmed fish, and has an annual budget of over half a million dollars.

If Thomas had just added loads of people on LinkedIn, this would have probably never happened. And this illustrates what many people miss about networking: the value of joining a great community.

Finding the right community can help you gain hundreds of potential allies in one go.

In fact, getting involved in the right community can be one of the best ways to make friends, advance your career, and have a greater impact. Many people we advise say that “finding their people” was one of the most important steps in their career, and life in general.

What’s more, a group of people working together can have more impact than they could individually.

In this article, we’ll explain how joining a community can help, and how to get involved.

Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/community/

Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.

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When it comes to advice on how to get a job, most of it is pretty bad.

• CollegeFeed suggests that you “be confident” as their first interview tip, which is a bit like suggesting that you should “be employable.”
• Many advisors cover the “clean your nails and have a firm handshake” kind of thing.
• One of the most popular interview videos on YouTube, with over 8 million views, makes the wise point that you definitely mustn’t sit down until you’re explicitly invited to do so by the interviewer.

Who could ever recover from taking a seat a few seconds too early?

Over the years, we’ve sifted through a lot of bad advice to find the nuggets that are actually good. We’ve also provided one-on-one coaching to thousands of people who are applying for jobs, and hired about 30 people ourselves, so we’ve seen what works from both sides. Here, we’ll sum up what we’ve learned.

The key idea is that getting a job is about convincing someone that you have something valuable to offer. So you should focus on doing whatever employers will find most convincing. That means instead of sending out lots of CVs, focus on getting recommendations and proving you can do the work. Read on to get a step-by-step guide.

Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/how-to-get-a-job/

Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.

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People often come to us trying to figure out what they should do over the next 10 or 20 years. Others say they want to figure out “the right career” for them.

The problem with all of this is that, as we’ve seen, your plan is almost certainly going to change:

• You’ll change — more than you think.
• The world will change — many industries around today won’t even exist in 20 years.
• You’ll learn more about what’s best for you — it’s very hard to predict what you’re going to be good at ahead of time.

In a sense, there is no stable “right career for you.” Rather, the best option will keep changing as the world changes and you learn more. Many people we’ve advised would never have predicted the job they’ve ended up doing.

Long-term planning could even be counterproductive. There’s a risk of becoming fixated on a specific plan, and failing to change your plans as your situation changes.

All that said, giving up on planning and setting goals probably isn’t wise either. As Eisenhower said, “Plans are useless but planning is essential.”

Having some idea of where you’d like to end up can help you spot much better opportunities to advance. In fact, if you want to have a big positive impact, we’d argue that planning is even more important. Many of the highest-impact roles require specialist career capital you’re unlikely to get by accident, such as connections to people in biosecurity or expertise in particular technical skills. Likewise, getting to the top of many fields often requires decades of focused effort.

This is the planning puzzle — most ‘plans’ will radically change long before they’re completed, but we still benefit from having them.

Given all this, how should you make a good career plan? Here are our main tips.

Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/career-planning/

Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.

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The trouble with self-help advice is that it’s often based on barely any evidence.

For example, how many times have you been told to “think positively” in order to reach your goals? It’s probably the most popular piece of personal guidance, beloved by everyone from high school teachers to bestselling careers experts. One key idea behind the slogan is that if you visualise your ideal future, you’re more likely to get there.

The problem? Recent research found evidence that fantasising about your perfect life actually makes you less likely to make it happen. While it can be pleasant, it appears to reduce motivation because it makes you feel that you’ve already hit those targets.1 We’ll cover some ways positive thinking can be helpful later in the article.

Much other advice is just one person’s opinion, or useless clichés. But at 80,000 Hours, we’ve found that there are a number of evidence-backed steps that anyone can take to become more productive and successful in their career, and life in general. And as we saw in an earlier article, people can keep improving their skills for decades.

So we’ve gathered up all the best advice we’ve found over our last 10+ years of research. These are things that anyone can do in any job to increase their career capital and personal fit — and, therefore, their positive impact.

Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/how-to-be-successful/

Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.

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Everyone says it’s important to find a job you’re good at, but no one tells you how.

The standard advice is to think about it for weeks and weeks until you “discover your talent.” To help, career advisers give you quizzes about your interests and preferences. Others recommend you go on a gap yah, reflect deeply, imagine different options, and try to figure out what truly motivates you.

But as we saw in an earlier article, becoming really good at most things takes decades of practice. So to a large degree, your abilities are built rather than “discovered.” Darwin, Lincoln, and Oprah all failed early in their careers, then went on to completely dominate their fields. Albert Einstein’s 1895 schoolmaster’s report reads, “He will never amount to anything.”

Asking “What am I good at?” needlessly narrows your options. It’s better to ask: “What could I become good at?”

That aside, the bigger problem is that these methods aren’t reliable. Plenty of research shows that while it’s possible to predict what you’ll be good at ahead of time, it’s difficult. Just “going with your gut” is particularly unreliable, and it turns out career tests don’t work very well either.

Instead, you should be prepared to think like a scientist — learn about and try out your options, looking outwards rather than inwards. Here we’ll explain why and how.

Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/personal-fit/

Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.

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People like to lionise the Mozarts, Malala Yousafzais, and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world — people who achieved great success while young — and there are all sorts of awards for young leaders, like the Forbes 30 Under 30.

But these stories are interesting precisely because they’re the exception.

Most people reach the peak of their impact in their middle age. Income usually peaks in the 40s, suggesting that it takes around 20 years for most people to reach their peak productivity.

Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/career-capital/

Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.

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Many people think of Superman as a hero. But he may be the greatest example of underutilised talent in all of fiction. It was a blunder to spend his life fighting crime one case at a time; if he’d thought a little more creatively, he could have done far more good. How about delivering vaccines to everyone in the world at superspeed? That would have eradicated most infectious disease, saving hundreds of millions of lives.

Here we’ll argue that a lot of people who want to “make a difference” with their career fall into the same trap as Superman. College graduates imagine becoming doctors or teachers, but these may not be the best fit for their particular skills. And like Superman fighting crime, these paths are often limited in the amount they could potentially contribute to solving a problem.

In contrast, Nobel Prize winner Karl Landsteiner discovered blood groups, enabling hundreds of millions of lifesaving operations. He would have never been able to carry out that many surgeries himself.

Below we’ll introduce five ways you could use your career to help tackle the social problems you want to help work on (which we identified in the previous article). The five ways are: earning to give, communication, research, government and policy, and organisation-building. We’ll make concrete recommendations on how to pursue each approach.

Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/high-impact-jobs/

Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.

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