80,000 Hours: Find a fulfilling career that does good.

by Benjamin Todd

Many conventional approaches to making the world a better place don’t actually work.

However, research shows that although self-reflection is useful, it only goes so far. You can probably think of times in your own life when you were excited about a holiday or party — but when it actually happened, it was just OK.

It turns out we’re even bad at remembering how satisfying different experiences were. One well-established mistake is that we often judge experiences mainly by their endings:4 if you missed your flight on the last day of an enjoyable holiday, you’ll probably remember the holiday as bad.

We now have three decades of research into positive psychology — the science of happiness — as well as decades of research into motivation and job satisfaction. We’ll summarise the main lessons of this research and explain what it means for finding a fulfilling job.

It’s a cliche that “you can’t buy happiness,” but at the same time, better pay is people’s top priority when looking for new jobs.10 Moreover, when people are asked what would most improve the quality of their lives, the most common answer is more money.11

We reviewed the best studies available,12 and the truth turns out to lie in the middle: money does make you happy, but only a little.

This is hardly surprising — we all know people who’ve gone into high-earning jobs and ended up miserable. But this result may be too optimistic. If we look at day-to-day happiness, income seems even less important.

Many people tell us they want to find a job that’s not too stressful. And it’s true that in the past, doctors and psychologists believed that stress was always bad. However, we did a survey of the modern literature on stress17 , and today, the picture is a bit more complicated. One puzzle is that studies of high-ranking government and military leaders found they had lower levels of stress hormones and less anxiety, despite sleeping fewer hours, managing more people, and having higher occupational demands.

The key difference is that the second set of jobs seem to help other people. That’s why they’re meaningful, and that’s why helping others is our second factor.

There’s a growing body of evidence that helping others is a key ingredient for life satisfaction. People who volunteer are less depressed and healthier.

All of the following tend to be linked to job dissatisfaction. A long commute, especially if it’s over an hour by bus Very long hours Pay you feel is unfair Job insecurity

In fact, “following your passion” can make it harder to satisfy the six ingredients, because the areas you’re passionate about are likely to be the most competitive, which makes it harder to find a good job.

In reality, rather than having a single passion, our interests change often, and more than we expect. Think back to what you were most interested in five years ago, and you’ll probably find that it’s pretty different from what you’re interested in today. And as we saw above, we’re bad at knowing what really makes us happy.

Or simply: do what contributes. We highlight “get good” because if you find something you’re good at that others value, you’ll have plenty of career opportunities, which gives you the best chance of finding a dream job with all the other ingredients — engaging work, supportive colleagues, lack of major negatives, and fit with the rest of your life.

Many switched into a field that didn’t initially interest them, but that they believed was important for the world. After developing their skills, finding good people to work with, and finding the right role, they’ve become deeply satisfied.

an average doctor in the UK will enable their patients to live about an extra combined 100 years of healthy life, either by extending their lifespans or by improving their overall health.

You can see that the curve goes nearly flat once you have more than 150 doctors per 100,000 people. After this point (which almost all developed countries meet), additional doctors only achieve a small impact on average.

drinking a solution made at the right concentration and consumed at the right rate could be almost as effective as delivery via feeding tube or IV.29 This meant the treatment could be delivered with no equipment, and using extremely cheap and widely available ingredients. Since then, this astonishingly simple treatment has been used all over the world, and the annual rate of child deaths from diarrhoea has plummeted from around 5 million to 1.5 million.30 Researchers estimate that the therapy has saved over 50 million lives to date, mostly children’s.

But Petrov didn’t push the button. He reasoned that the number of missiles was too small to warrant a counterattack, thereby disobeying protocol.

Quite a bit, actually. According to a study of two popular parachuting centres, over a five-year period (1991 to 1995) approximately 1,500 people went skydiving for charity and collectively raised more than £120,000. That sounds pretty impressive — until you consider a few caveats. First, the cost of the diving expeditions came out of the donations. So of the £120,000 raised, only £45,000 went to charity. Second, because most of the skydivers were first-time jumpers, they suffered a combined total of 163 injuries, resulting in an average hospital stay of nine days. In order to treat these injuries, the UK’s National Health Service spent around £610,000. That means that for every £1 raised for the charities, the health service spent roughly £13, so the net effect was to reduce resources for health services. Ironically, many of the charities supported focused on health-related matters.36

Normally when we think of doing good with our careers, we think of paths like becoming a teacher or charity worker, which often pay under half what you could earn in the private sector, and may not align with your skills or interests. Compared to switching to those careers, giving 10% of your income could easily be less of a sacrifice. Moreover, as we saw in chapter 1, once you start earning more than about $55,000 per year,44 extra income won’t affect your happiness that much — while acts that help others, like giving to charity, probably make you happier.

if you earn $60,000 per year after taxes and don’t have kids, then globally speaking, you are the 1%.

Launch a campaign that ends 10% of the phone charger problem, and you achieve very little. Launch a campaign that persuades 10% of people to install home insulation, and it’s a much bigger deal.