How To Find The Perfect Career - The 3 Part Decision Framework

Right, so if you ask most people what they want from their careers, they'll say some combination of I wanna make money, I wanna have fun, and I wanna help people. And those are the three facets of finding your perfect career that we're gonna explore in this episode of Career Club, the new and ongoing series where we discuss strategies and tools to find and succeed in our perfect career that lets us have enjoyment and fulfillment and also have a meaningful impact on the world. And this video is made in partnership with 80,000 Hours, a fantastic nonprofit organization whose aim is to help people have more impact while having a fulfilling and enjoyable career, which very much vibes with my whole thing in the series. But I'll tell you more about 80,000 Hours towards the end of the video. Part one, I want to make money in my career. Right, so obviously money is an important part about making decisions about a career, but the problem is that money is also a very easily measurable scorecard that we can use to define our social status. Now, this is a problem. It's a problem because in the capitalistic and like materially driven and the social status-seeking society that we live in and that who we are deep down, we're all status-seeking monkeys at the end of the day. Because of all this stuff, there is an intrinsic bias that we have towards trying to strive for more and more because we're always trying to get more social status and therefore we're always inevitably gonna be trying to make more money in our careers. Now, there is nothing wrong with this per se, but it becomes a problem when we stop thinking of making more and more and more money as being the primary consideration when it comes to making decisions about our career. Now, you might've come across this graph before. This is the marginal utility of extra money graph that shows that at the start of your career when you're not making any money, making more and more money does translate to more and more happiness because it removes money problems from your life. But beyond a certain point, and usually studies say that point is around about $70,000 if you're in the US or like 60,000 pounds if you're in the UK, beyond a certain point, you start getting diminishing marginal utility. So extra money does not actually contribute to extra happiness. And the way that I personally like to think of this is that money is a satisficing good. So there's two different types of goods, quantities that we can have when it comes to making decisions. There's satisficing and then there is maximizing. Now, satisficing is when we say, hey, this thing is good enough, so I'm not gonna bother trying to get more and more and more. When we're choosing a flavor of jam in the supermarket, we just want something that's good enough. We're not like trying to optimize the hell to figure out like, oh my God, what's the absolute best strawberry jam imaginable? It's a satisficing good. It's like, yeah, it's a good enough jam. I enjoy the jam. I don't really have to think about it much more than that. But then we have maximizing goods where it's like, hey, I wanna actually do whatever I can to make the absolute best decision here. And that's where we end up sort of overthinking the hell out of everything. So practically speaking, obviously making money is a consideration in your career, but just like the main point to keep in mind, it's a satisfied good. Beyond a point, you can kind of ignore the money side of things and you can move on to the other things that make a perfect career, i.e. having fun and helping people. Part two, I want to have fun in my career. So once we've got the make money side of the equation taken care of, or at least considered, the next thing we wanna do is have fun. We wanna enjoy our careers. We wanna feel happy and fulfilled and wanna feel like the things that we're doing are meaningful. And within this concept of having fun, there are three ways that I like to think about it in terms of a framework for making decisions about my career. The first one is about choosing the kind of career that I'm in to maximize my enjoyment. But when I say maximize my enjoyment, again, this is one of those things, like having fun is actually a satisfying good as well. Like really you want a career where you're having enough fun, you're having enough enjoyment and actually continuing to chase double or triple or quadruple the amounts of fun and enjoyment. It's like the experience of fun and enjoyment at work and in life doesn't really work like that. And if you find yourself continuing to try and seek those pleasure hits of dopamine, you end up becoming a drug addict because it's like there's actually not sustainable ways to just keep on increasing the amount of fun you're having in your life. And so similar to money, it's like we wanna recognize that as long as we're finding a career where we are enjoying it, it's like, it's very easy to think, oh, I mean, the grass is always greener on the other side, I could find a different career where I'll enjoy it twice as much. But realistically, that's basically never gonna happen and there is like a limit to the amount of fun that you can have in a career. And obviously we want that amount to be high, but like, you know, let's keep in mind that it's also a satisfying good. And so firstly, the amount of fun we can have in our career, the amount of enjoyment we can get from it is partly based on the characteristics of the career or the job in question. And this is things like, you know, if we find that we have autonomy, if we find that we like our work colleagues, if we find that we are learning stuff and growing as people, if we find that we are playing to our strengths, and if we find that the job has no major negatives, like commuting more than 20 minutes is apparently according to the research, a major negative. And so making decisions like that is important when it comes to individual jobs, but it's kind of hard to predict what these things are gonna be if you think about a career more broadly, because most people's careers are quite long, they're quite like, you know, circuitous, they don't follow necessarily a completely straight path. And so this idea of choosing a career that lets you have fun is more about like actually understanding what are the elements that make a job or a specific job more enjoyable and trying to incorporate those into your work, whatever career you find yourself in. Like inherently, there are some careers that are probably just inherently more enjoyable than others or that you feel are more of a personal fit for you, more on that later. But broadly, the way I think of it is that in almost any career, if you've chosen it for the right reasons, you can find ways to have fun in the specific job that you're in at different times, and even careers that seem really fun. A lot of people are like, oh my God, being a YouTuber seems really fun. And it is, but I know a bunch of YouTubers who actually are not enjoying their life particularly because there's all these other negative sides of, for example, a career that seems like the dream. The second point to make here is something that Cal Newport talks about in his book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, where he basically argues that this whole follow your passion or find a thing that's fun or find a thing you enjoy is a bit of a myth. Because to be honest, for most of us, the things that we enjoy, like playing video games and watching Netflix and reading fantasy fiction books, are very, very, very, very difficult to make a career out of. And so we shouldn't even try, says Cal Newport, and I broadly agree. Instead, what we should do is we should find a career that ticks other boxes, and that helps us live the kind of lifestyle that we want. And then within that career, we just become really, really good. And the better you become at a thing, the more you feel like you're playing to your strengths, the more career capital you develop, which means you can cash in that career capital for autonomy. Autonomy is a good part of what makes a career or a job fun. And also, there's just this idea that the better you are at a thing, the more likely you are to actually be enjoying doing the thing. And the third point to mention here on the I want a career that helps me have fun angle is that experimentation is a really important part of this. A mistake that a lot of people make, and I've seen this a lot in medicine, is people who are like, hey, I reckon being a doctor would be quite fun. I reckon I might enjoy a career as a doctor. Why don't I just apply to medical school? And this is a bit of a weird thing, because medical school is really long, and you're sort of signing yourself up to a very, very, very long process. Whereas there's a lot of experimentation you can do beforehand. You could do work experience, for example, for a few days or a few weeks, a few days probably isn't enough, but a few weeks to see what is life as a doctor actually like? And you could speak to other doctors and be like, are they actually enjoying it? When it comes to going out to dinner at a restaurant, you know, we spend maybe, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes deciding what restaurant to go to, and it might last like two hours. So what is that? 10% of the time that we spend at the restaurant, we are spending deciding what restaurant to eat at. And yet when it comes to making decisions about our careers, we spend a lot less than 10% of our total work time to actually make that decision. And if we calculate that total work time, that's like a 40 hour week for 50 weeks of the year for about 40 years of our life, that adds up to 80,000 hours. And we definitely don't spend 8,000 hours of our lives actually making decisions about what career to pursue, even though we probably should. So the moral of the story here is that if you want a career that helps you have fun, A, don't try and follow your passions, but B, try and do some like low risk experimentation where you're not signing yourself up to a super, super long career path to just find out what it's like. And you're actually taking some time in advance to figure out, does this seem like the sort of thing that I could actually enjoy? Part three, I want a career that lets me help people. All right, now we come to the interesting stuff, the helping of people. Now, if you ask most people, they'll say that, yeah, I wanna help people in my career. I wanna feel like I'm making a difference. I wanna feel like I'm having some kind of meaningful impact in the job that I do. And this makes perfect sense. Like all of the research shows that when we feel like we have purpose, when we feel like we're working towards something that's bigger than us, when we feel like we are helping other people, that's just A, good for the world, obviously, but it's also good for our own personal fulfillment and the meaningfulness that we associate with our work and with our life. And there's broadly three ways that I like to think of this idea of helping people when it comes to making decisions about my career. And that's firstly, what is the problem that you are working on? Like what problem area is it? Secondly, how effective are you at working on it? And thirdly, how much personal fit do you have for that particular thing? So let's start with the problem area. And the thing to consider here is that how big of a problem is it that you're solving and how neglected is the problem that you're solving? Things that are big problems. So for example, climate change is a really, really, really big problem and it's great to have a career in climate change, but it's not a particularly neglected problem. Like these days there's loads of funding and loads of people in climate change, thanks in part to the work of a small number of activists about like 20, 30 years ago. But now the climate change movement actually has a large amount of funding in it. But if we take a different example, for example, it might sound a bit science fictiony, but most researchers say that the risk from artificial intelligence becoming kind of growing out of our control is actually pretty major. And a bunch of experts who estimate this put it at like a sort of 30 to 50% probability in the next 50 years or so that artificial general intelligence could become a serious threat to the world, a serious threat to humanity, whatever you wanna call it. So that's a pretty big problem if it ends up happening. And even if there's only say a 10% chance of it happening or a 1% chance of it happening, if you, for example, went on an aeroplane and the pilot was like, don't worry guys, there's only a 10% chance it's gonna crash and kill everyone on board. You wouldn't feel particularly reassured by that because you're like 10% chance of dying or even a 1% chance of dying in a plane crash. It's absolutely huge. There's no way I'm getting on that plane. So we can take this concept of expected value, the probabilities and sort of multiply them out to basically see how big the problem is. But also artificial intelligence and the risks associated with that is a very, very, very neglected problem. Have a look at this graph, for example. It shows that as of 2020, there were 40,000 people working on making AI more powerful but like 300 people working on making AI more safe. This is a very neglected problem. If you are the 301st person working on a problem, you can probably have way more impact on the thing than if you are the 40,000th and first person working on that problem. Another example is the issue of pandemic prevention. People in the effective altruism movement have been going on about pandemic prevention for like years. One of the chaps I interviewed on the podcast, Will McCaskill, written a fantastic book called What We Are The Future. You should check it out. He warned like the Scottish government in like 2015. He was like, you know, they asked him, hey, what's the biggest issue that the world faces? And he was like, oh, probably pandemics. And they were all just laughed him off. They were like, oh, don't try and scare us. This is BS, pandemics is never gonna happen. But obviously a few years later, we have seen that pandemics have killed around 21 million people. And so clearly that's a pretty big scale problem. Like working in pandemic prevention could actually save a large amount of lives, but it's also still a surprisingly neglected thing. Like have a look at these graphs. This shows how much money is being spent on counter-terrorism compared to pandemic prevention. Now, obviously preventing terrorism is an important thing, but if we compare it with the graph of how many people actually die through terrorism compared to through pandemics, it's just kind of interesting. Like it's somewhat counterintuitive, the places that we put our time, money, and effort, including what we do with our careers, compared to what the big problems in life actually are and how neglected they are. And so this idea of neglectedness comes into this idea around how do I help people in the maximum possible way? Pick an area that's a bit more neglected. The next thing we wanna talk about is the idea of effectiveness. How much good can you actually do in a particular career? Now, a problem might be absolutely huge, but if it's impossible to solve the problem, then you trying to solve that problem, if it's completely impossible, it's not actually gonna be particularly effective. But also there's this idea that when it comes to doing good in our careers, there are some things that are just way better than other things that we could be doing. For example, again, if you care about climate change, which we all should because it's super important, then you as an individual campaigning for people to stop using plastic straws or campaigning for individuals to start recycling, that's all well and good, but you actually could be doing like 100 or 1,000 times as much to reduce carbon emissions if you instead, for example, took fewer flights or if you instead did an Elon Musk and promoted the transition to renewable energy or if instead you happen to be a policymaker at a big company in like India or China or the US that guzzles out large amounts of CO2 and you happen to be that one person that made them change the policy to become more like climate change friendly. Finally, let's talk about the idea of personal fit. So it's all well and good, like be like, yeah, I wanna do this thing and I wanna be effective in this, but really personal fit is really important because if you don't fundamentally enjoy working in the area or if you personally are not very good at working in the area, then you're not actually gonna be that effective. Like, for example, if I'm thinking what to do with my career, the fact that I have a medical background means that I could probably have a decent personal fit in the field of pandemic prevention or public health stuff. The fact that I do this YouTube stuff means I could spread the message about like effective altruism and other stuff that we're talking about in this video, but it probably wouldn't be a good personal fit for me to become a researcher in artificial general intelligence because I would just not be very good at it. And it's like, even though that's an important thing or climate change, for example, even though those are important, me trying to become a researcher and like working on those things is very unlikely to be personal fit within me. And so that's also an important part of choosing your career. Yes, it's important to pick an area that's important and pressing and neglected, and it's important to figure out how you can be effective in it, but if you don't have that personal fit or if you're just really bad at the thing, it's not actually gonna be particularly useful. How do you know what your personal fit is gonna be? Well, partly it comes down to the idea of experimentation that we talked about earlier in the having fun component, but also you can be generally way more effective as an individual in any career if you develop useful skills within that career and if you develop compounding skills that are useful regardless of what kind of career you're in. For example, knowing how to communicate, knowing how to public speak, knowing how to convince people of stuff is generally a useful thing that will help you in almost any career and you can become more effective at those things to then become more effective in your career, which will then A, help you have more fun, but also help you help more people. Now, if any of the ideas in this video vibe with you and you're looking for actionable next steps, you should definitely check out the completely free careers guide over at 80,000 hours who are very kindly sponsoring this video. 80,000 hours is genuinely an incredible organisation. Their offices are actually just down the road from where I'm filming this. They're a non-profit and their whole aim is to help people recognise that 80,000 hours is the length of the average career and your decision about what you're gonna do with your career is one of the most impactful decisions that you can possibly make. And so the entire job of 80,000 hours, again, it's a non-profit, they're not trying to make money. All they're trying to do is help people figure out where is a career that they can have personal impact in, that they can have personal fit and that they can be effective at. Yeah, everything on the website is completely free. They do not charge a penny for anything. They are funded by Open Philanthropy and other effective altruism funds. So everything is free. You can stick your email address in the link down below and they'll send you their step-by-step careers guide. They also have a completely free newsletter that you can join. You just enter your email address and then they'll send you updates about what are some potentially high impact jobs that are around and other research around what makes for a high impact and fulfilling and enjoyable career. And if you like this video, you might like to check out this video over here, which is my book summary of what we owe the future by Will McCaskill, who is a philosopher, a moral philosopher and actually one of the co-founders of 80,000 Hours and the Effective Altruism Movement. And this is a video all about the idea of long-termism and how actually one of the ways we can have the most ridiculously large impact with our careers is focusing more on long-term problems. So check out that video over there. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you hopefully in the next video. Bye-bye.