Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill

Author:William MacAskill [MacAskill, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-07-27T22:00:00+00:00

NINE

DON’T “FOLLOW YOUR PASSION”

Which careers make the most difference?

As Peter Hurford entered his final year at Denison University, he needed to figure out what he was going to do with his life. He was twenty-two, majoring in political science and psychology, and he knew he wanted a career that would both be personally satisfying and would make a big difference. Graduate school was the obvious choice for someone with his interests, but he didn’t know what his other options were, or how to choose among them.

How should young people like Peter who want to make a difference in their careers go about their decisions? What if you’re later in your career but are considering changing jobs so you can have a bigger impact? In chapter five, we saw that earning to give is one powerful way to make a difference, but it’s certainly not the only way. There are a dizzying number of career paths, each with their positives and negatives. At the same time, the decision is high-stakes. Your choice of career is a choice about how to spend more than eighty thousand hours over the course of your life, which means it makes sense to invest a considerable amount of time in the decision. If you were to spend just 1 percent of your working time thinking about how to spend the other 99 percent, that would mean you’d spend eight hundred hours, or twenty working weeks, on your career decision. I doubt many people spend this much time thinking about their careers, but it might be worth it.

Over the last few years at 80,000 Hours, we’ve coached hundreds of people like Peter, as well as people later in their careers, most of whom find the following framework useful in figuring out what their next career steps should be. There are many considerations relevant to choosing the right career for you, and this framework ensures that you give due weight to what’s most important. You should ask yourself:

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