A career of meaning - 80,000 Hours
For the last year I have been thinking about the concept of “a good life.” I hesitate to say how many hours I have spent thinking about it. Broadly, to me a good life is an active life, a life filled by making the decisions that fit you — not what society thinks is best for you, or what your parents, your partner, or your friends think is best for you. But you. As the now rather clichéd quote goes: everything is a win when the goal is to experience.
Through this process I have been thinking through the ever-present question of one’s twenties. What should my career look like?
The two biggest decisions of your life are who you marry and what your career is. It is now commonplace for people to spend years deciding who they are going to marry, yet it is far less common for someone to take the time to decide what they actually want to do. Instead, people blindly fall into the traps set by life.
The traditional pathway for any smart, young, ambitious person who has had an elite education typically starts with the ideal to “change” the world.
Yet on graduating, they largely slot into fields such as corporate law, investment banking, and consulting.
If I look at my personal life, the smartest, most capable people I know from secondary school — bar one or two — have largely filtered directly into one of the three listed above.
They have disappeared into what the Oxford doctoral student Simon van Teutem calls “The Bermuda Triangle of Talent.” In his book of the same title, Simon argues that young talent gets “lost” in the Bermuda Triangle of corporate law, finance, and consulting. He found that in his time in consulting he was working alongside highly capable individuals — such as rocket scientists — who were condemned to building Excel models.
Elite universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale are sold as launch points for a variety of meaningful careers, yet the paradox is that, since the 1980s, these firms have specifically targeted these schools through what's known as 'career funnelling.'
The result is that over 50% of Harvard graduates end up in the triangle. Drawn by high salaries but also the social status of such jobs, generations of talented young people willingly throw themselves into the meat grinder of the triangle. Hoping to stay only a few years, many find themselves trapped with golden handcuffs and simply accept their fate.
To say I think this is a travesty of human talent beyond comprehension is an understatement — though that’s of course unfair, as I have built my own life around working in a field I find meaningful, and given up other things to make that choice. But in thinking it’s time to move jobs, I have gone back to a resource I used to make my original choice to work in politics.
When I was 18 and struggling to think of what to do for work, I was lucky to stumble upon 80,000 Hours.
80,000 hours represents exactly 40 years of full-time employment. They start with a simple question: you have 80,000 hours in your career — how can you best use them to help solve the world’s most pressing problems?
Work represents roughly a third of your waking life as an adult. It is more time than you’ll spend eating, socialising, and watching Netflix put together. If you choose your job well, you will have a fulfilling, interesting life. If you choose poorly, you could be at risk of a wasted one.
The problem, of course, is how on earth do you pick?
When you are young, the typical advice is “follow your passion” — putting aside how few people really have a passion that could sustain a career — that path could lead to as unfulfilling a life as the Bermuda Triangle.
Most people, when it really comes down to it, want to make a difference. It is all too human to want a legacy.
Yet when consulting traditional career advice, if your objective is to “make a difference,” the default suggestions are medicine, social work, or teaching. Those are all, told truly, noble pursuits. But in actuality they have significantly less impact than those pursuing them expect — a doctor can only treat the person in front of them.
That’s where 80,000 Hours becomes all the more interesting.
They use the example of the cost of saving lives in low-income countries. The most expensive treatments in low-income countries are cheaper than many everyday treatments in the UK — interventions such as childhood vaccinations can save many hundreds of lives for the same cost as one treatment in the UK.
The figures on this are staggering. When the general population is polled on how much more effective they think the best charities are at saving lives, they guess about 50% better — yet experts in global health say that the best charities in the world at saving lives are around 100 times more cost-effective than the average charity. The consequence is that working at one of those charities could result in achieving in 10 years what would have taken 1,000 years at the average.
Just with that quick calculation, the question of what you work on and where becomes significantly more important.
Now, I’m not saying everyone should give up their jobs to go and work for childhood vaccination charities — beyond that being a limited field, it would also fail to recognise that everyone has fields they are better suited to. My real suggestion is to really think about what you want to do.
If your career is going to be 80,000 hours long — and frankly, if you’re reading this under the age of 50, it’s likely to be longer — then finding a way to spend those hours just 1% better would be worth spending 800 hours figuring out how, because a good career choice is far more likely to improve things by way more than 1%.
The real test of this advice isn’t the framework around how to think about work, it’s how you apply it to your career. That is what I have been weighing up the last year and thinking about my own 80,000 hours. I’ve been trying to figure out what that meaningful move is for me and hopefully I have it soon. And I would implore anyone reading this with similar questions around their career to do the same.