On average, you will spend about 80,000 hours in your career: 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for 40 years.
What are the types of careers you envisage when you think about doing good? Like most, being a doctor, teacher or working for a charity will spring to mind. Whilst these are all noble professions, there are other more indirect routes to impact which you can (and should) allow yourself to open to if you are looking to make a positive change in the world.
Defining ‘Impact’ in a Career
From a quantitative perspective, some paths open to you may be seen as more impactful than others, e.g. contributing to policy changes can allow you to influence hundreds or thousands of people or resources, rather than if you were to work in a standard ‘do-good’ career.
A common psychological bias, known as scope neglect, can be used to explain why you should put more thought into how impactful your career is — humans struggle with emotionally representing large numbers. In one study, a group asked to save 20,000 birds estimated they’d give less than the group asked to save 2,000.
This cognitive bias can help to explain why for many people, helping 100 people is felt as satisfying as helping 1,000 people, even though the latter is 10x more impactful.
Why does this matter?
The relative scale of how impactful a career is, or could be, is often overlooked — it could be the difference between saving 100 more lives, reducing carbon emissions 100 times as much or making 100 times more progress on ground-breaking cancer treatments.
Most people wish for a career which is fulfilling, pays well and makes a worthwhile contribution to society. If you care to live ethically, your choice of career is an important decision to make — the reason being that you have a huge amount of time in your hands, and time is one of the biggest resources you have to help others.
How can you determine how impactful a career is?
Some careers provide the opportunity to do more good than others, and if you want to create a positive impact, www.80000hours.org have outlined three main factors which can determine how much impact your career will have:
- How pressing the problems are that you focus on
- The scale of the contribution the path lets you make to tackle those problems
- Your personal fit for the path
Let’s see how they break this down even further:
- How Pressing the Problems Are
There are an infinite number of problems in the world and there are people working to solve these issues every single day, but creating a positive impact means we should identify the largest gaps in the efforts which already exist to minimise these issues by comparing them in terms of “scale, neglectedness and tractability”.
For instance, this present time is crucial in protecting future generations from the potential existential risks of AI, but little is being done to address these issues. As concerns surrounding the ethical and social implications of AI grows within the public domain, technology companies themselves appear to be presenting a different sentiment.
It would be an “absolute fatal error in this moment to worry about things that can be fixed later”, a Microsoft executive wrote in an email about generative AI, reported by The New York Times.
2. The Scale of the Contribution
Say you wish to tackle inequalities within the education system, there are paths in which you could mobilise resources such as money, attention and skill to tackle this issue indirectly, or directly.
Working in an environment in which you can leverage off resources around you is another meaningful way to create an impact towards a specific cause. E.g. working in government and policy; sharing ideas through media or contributing to organisations through well-targeted donations. In many cases, contributing through donations over your working life can be more impactful than making a career switch.
3. Personal Fit
According to 80,000 Hours, the most productive people in a field often have far more output than the average- such people are likely to have greater connections, resources and a high reputation allowing them to create the most impact.
So if there is a pressing problem which is (or could be) posing huge risks to lots of people, compounding your expertise in this area of work to make a difference through policy changes or intensive research for example, could mean that you are bound to make an impact.
80,000 Hours is a charitable organisation founded by two Oxford graduates aiming to help students and graduates switch into careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing problems. They are funded by philanthropic donations, and everything they offer is free.
They have compiled a list based on a multitude of academic research, for what the they believe the world’s most pressing problems are — the top 5 being:
- Risks from artificial intelligence
- Catastrophic pandemics
- Building effective altruism
- Global priorities research
- Nuclear War
You can read more about each of these here.
If you’re grappling with figuring out where to take your career next, or even where to start, I’d highly recommend visiting their website for more insights into how to make the most of your 80,000 hours.
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