In this episode, Benjamin Todd explores how to build a meaningful career in an uncertain world. He and Eric discuss why the old advice to “follow your passion” can lead us astray, how AI is changing the skills that may matter most, and what actually makes work fulfilling. Benjamin also explains how to think more intentionally about the impact of our work, why experimenting is often more useful than trying to think our way into the perfect career, and how to know when it might be time for a change.
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Key Takeaways:
- Why following your passion isn’t always the best career advice
- How AI is changing the way we should think about career planning
- Which skills may become more valuable as technology advances
- The five factors that make work satisfying and fulfilling
- Why meaningful work involves more than a job title or salary
- How to choose work that makes a meaningful difference
- Why asking “What could I become good at?” can open new possibilities
- How small career experiments can help you make better decisions
- Why we often stay in unsatisfying jobs longer than we should
- How to evaluate whether it’s really time for a career change
- Ways to make a difference even when changing careers isn’t possible
Benjamin Todd is the founder and president of 80,000 Hours. He is also the author of 80,000 HOURS: How to Have a Fulfilling Career That Does Good. Dissatisfied with the career advice he received at university, he began researching the guidance he wished he’d had. Over the next ten years, he grew 80,000 Hours from a student society in Oxford into a non-profit that today reaches 4 million people annually, has over 50 staff, and has raised $30M of funding. It has been covered in the Financial Times, Guardian, TIME, Wall Street Journal, and BBC, and was one of the first non-profits to go through Y Combinator, the world’s top startup accelerator. 80,000 Hours provides free online research, one-on-one advice, a job board, and podcast to help people find more fulfilling and impactful careers. Over 10 million people have read their advice online, and over 3,000 have switched to more impactful careers. This includes people who helped to pioneer research into AI safety, have taken key roles aiming to prevent a catastrophic pandemic, and have pledged billions of dollars to high-impact charities. As CEO for the organization’s first ten years, Ben led strategy, fundraising, and senior management, building an organization with average annual staff retention of 95%, while also writing the 80,000 Hours Career Guide, Key Ideas series and over 100 articles. His TEDx talk has been viewed over 6 million times.
Connect with Benjamin Todd: Website | Instagram | LinkedIn
If you enjoyed this conversation with Benjamin Todd, check out these other episodes:
Mind Over Grind: Practical Tips to Manage Work Stress and Enhance Your Well-Being with Guy Winch
How to Create a Life Strategy for Meaningful Change with Seth Godin
How to Craft a Meaningful Life with Emily Esfahani Smith
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Episode Transcript:
Benjamin Todd 00:00:00 Your career is this huge amount of time, and for many people, that’s their biggest opportunity to make a difference in the world.
Chris Forbes 00:00:14 Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:00:59 A couple of years ago, I found myself in an unusual situation where I was talking with my son about his future, and for the first time ever, I just felt like I had nothing to offer.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:10 Not that I’d ever believe that I knew what was right for him, but I always felt like I had a perspective or something to offer. And this time I just thought, I have no idea. That’s the strange spot AI has put us in. Benjamin Todd wrote the book 80,000 hours, about how much time we spend in our careers, and he spends his life helping people choose work that matters. His answer isn’t to predict the future, it’s to build skills that hold their value and to get a few big decisions right. This one is about choosing when nobody knows what’s coming. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Benjamin, welcome to the show.
Benjamin Todd 00:01:50 Hey, thanks for having me.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:52 I’m excited to have you on. We’re going to be discussing your book, which is called 80,000 Hours how to have a fulfilling career that does good. But before we get into that, we’ll start like we always do with a parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:13 One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. I think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah.
Benjamin Todd 00:02:40 One thing it reminds me of is in the first chapter of the book, I talk about people think in order to find a filling career, they think they have to follow their passion. And there’s this kind of this idea that there’s this one perfect career out there for you. Almost like a kind of romantic match. And it’s just a matter of like finding that one perfect match, and then you’re sorted. And I actually think it’s much more a case of building something over time in building your skills, putting yourself in the right context and gradually finding something meaningful.
Benjamin Todd 00:03:17 And that’s what then passion comes from, rather than something that is just out there. And it’s feeding those conditions for passion. That is how I think about building a fulfilling career, though I wanted to. Then I think there’s kind of another theme in the book, which is almost that when you’re in a situation where your two wolves are battling, you kind of want to avoid that situation in the first place is another big theme in my mind, and one of the big points I’m trying to make is if you can get a couple of big picture decisions, right, that can really determine a lot of your impact. And by putting yourself in kind of the right circumstances, you can then achieve a lot and kind of almost bypass these internal tensions or these like more day to day concerns around character. Though I agree they’re really important to and I spend loads of time meditating and so on as well.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:15 Yeah, I mean, we’ll get into sort of many of those things that make a career feel worthwhile and fulfilling, and you really do a great job of laying out this idea of being really intentional, that the career you choose is one of the biggest decisions you’ll ever make.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:34 Sometimes it’s less choosing a career because we don’t know what exactly where everything is going. It’s choosing maybe the next best choice, but you certainly make a very compelling case. We need to be looking at the long game. We need to be looking at work that feels meaningful as it solves real problems. And it’s a fit for us and I want to get into all that. But I think the elephant in the room is AI, right? The elephant in the room is that AI is here. And there’s all kinds of different estimates about how soon, how fast that it’s coming for a lot of existing jobs. I remember a moment a couple of years ago, I was talking with my son. He’s 28, and he right now is what’s called a hotshot crew wildland firefighter in the US. And that’s probably not a long term job for a variety of different reasons. And I found myself, for the first time ever being like, I have no idea. I have no idea what to say. I mean, I feel like at any moment up till now, it’s not that I would have known what was right for him.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:42 It’s not that I would have had an opinion on what he should do, but I would have been like, well, I have a lot of experience and I’ve been through a lot of roles. Right? I can offer some ideas, some thoughts, and I just found myself going like I have no idea. So talk to me about that.
Benjamin Todd 00:05:57 Yeah, I mean, it’s a big topic, I do agree. The next decade, we could easily see more change to the job market than we’ve seen an entire generation before. And as the pace of change gets faster, your planning horizon should shorten and you should focus more on just putting yourself in a good position in the next couple of years. I use the example of even something like medical school, I think is a much less compelling bet than it was, say, to even just 10 or 20 years ago, because you’re then having to spend the next eight years in training, and we don’t know what it’s going to look like at the end. So, yeah, in general, we’re in a very weird situation with AI where it often feels like it’s all anyone’s talking about.
Benjamin Todd 00:06:44 In some ways it’s like incredibly hyped, but in many ways I feel like we’re actually not really taking it seriously, Especially on a gut level, and I think things could actually change a lot more than most people think.
Eric Zimmer 00:06:59 Yeah, I tend to agree. I think part of what makes it hard to think about and spend a lot of time with is not having any precedent to try and understand what’s happening and to feel slightly also like things are going to happen and we don’t know what’s going to happen, and we don’t have a lot of control over what’s happening that leads to just don’t think about it, right. It’s a perfect recipe for like, at least for me. Like, all right, I can’t control it. I have no idea what it’s going to be. Yeah. Move on. But that’s not necessarily the best choice.
Benjamin Todd 00:07:32 Yeah. And I think there are things that people can do. I mean, this is another huge topic, but you still have some influence in who you vote for and like calling a representative and spreading ideas on your podcast.
Benjamin Todd 00:07:48 I mean, you can only influence things a little bit for sure.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:52 So you’ve made some points about things that we can do. When I’m looking at a career perspective, whether I am 18 years old, 28 years old, 48 years old, and I see this massive change coming, how do I start to think about how to navigate it?
Benjamin Todd 00:08:10 Yeah, that depends on what your goals are for this. But I mean, one framework I talk about is like which skills to learn, which is a question in a lot of people’s minds. And I mean, this is also going back to people feeling powerless, so we could end up in a situation where pretty much every job has been automated. But this requires what’s called full artificial general intelligence. It can do every cognitive task, and you need robotics that’s fully working, and you need it to be fully deployed. And like all the legal issues worked out. And like people trust these systems. And that is quite a major process. And before you get to that point, we only have part of the jobs automated, and what’s actually happening is the skills that are getting automated are going down in value because AI can do them instead.
Benjamin Todd 00:08:58 But all the other skills are actually going up in value, because they become the remaining bottlenecks in getting anything done, and people’s like ability to contribute to the world and have an impact actually probably goes up, at least in the initial stages. In the long term, it goes down because everything’s automated. But at least before we get to that point, your impact is actually going up. And one way to see this is we now meet these teams of like 3 or 5, sometimes very young people who are able to do what would have taken 20 people before. They just wouldn’t have been able to do it because they’re like, as an 18 year old, you can’t get expert legal advice, but they’re able to figure it out like 80% of the way there by using AI. Well, and that’s actually very empowering for them and nonprofits. That would have just been way too expensive to start in the past. You can now start them with a much smaller budget, because you can get all this AI help to do some of the work and automate some of the work.
Benjamin Todd 00:10:02 so that is like a framework I would think about is, yeah, which of these skills are going up in value, and how can you actually use these tools to have a greater impact in the next couple of years? And I think there are a lot of opportunities for this as well.
Eric Zimmer 00:10:15 There’s a lot of advice that centers on get better at using AI, which on one hand makes a lot of sense, and on the other hand, I think is challenging. And the reason I think it’s challenging is I’ll just give an example. Two years ago, you could have invested a huge amount of time and energy into becoming a prompt engineer. The models have more or less swallowed that they are your prompt engineer. I’ve seen people build software companies that were like this little thing that sits on top of AI, and six months later, the model does all of that. So Open Claw, I think, is another example. I know a lot of people spending a lot of time in Open Claw, but it’s not far off that the models just do that kind of out of the gate.
Eric Zimmer 00:11:01 And so it seems like you learn a skill and then it just gets swallowed and you learn a skill and it gets swallowed. So what are the AI skills that are worth trying to learn?
Benjamin Todd 00:11:12 Yeah, it’s worth saying, like all of these skills are a moving target. There’s no final answer. And so you could then go one step further and say, well, the skill of learning skills rapidly is the most useful skills. Yes. And I think there is actually things you can do there to learn to learn more efficiently. I do think the skill of learning to use AI is one of the most valuable skills, though I do agree with the caveats you just said. And then I would say I think there are some others. So I’ve also written about social skills. And one way of saying this is so there’s actually over the last 20 years in the US economy, many people don’t realize that jobs involving Stem have actually had lower wage growth than average, whereas jobs involving social skills have had higher wage growth than average, and then jobs that have had the most wage growth involve both Stem skills and social skills.
Benjamin Todd 00:12:01 And it’s kind of like this ability to translate between technical topics and skills and products and so on, to the messy world of working with other people. I would guess in the next five years that will remain an important skill set. I mean, people are going to still really value real relationships. So we’re seeing this with content now, where as someone who’s just published like a quite practical book, how to nonfiction is collapsing sales completely.
Eric Zimmer 00:12:30 I just published a book in that category too, and you’re like, You know, you’re right. This is interesting. But I mean, your point is that content is essentially becoming free, and to learn how to do something more and more is simply go ask the AI, how should I do this? And it knows about who you are and knows about your history. And it gives you a customized plan, which is something a book can’t do. We could argue the benefits of books because I think they’re out there, but the general trend is inescapable. The content creator is a harder and harder business.
Benjamin Todd 00:13:01 Yes, though I would say yes, exactly. But there’s a shift towards more opinionated or more like story based or relationship based content, which people still value. It’s the very like more bland type how to content is the most effective. Unfortunately what I slightly specialized in.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:20 But yep, I feel your pain. So I want to back up for a second. So we’ve talked about AI a little bit and that’s kind of what’s on everybody’s mind. The thing with AI is sort of a little bit of the reframing in my mind of the question that was asked most often before, which is like, what’s going to make the most money? Now we’re asking what’s going to survive a AI, but you go back to a far more fundamental place of starting. So let’s talk about, in your mind what makes for a good career.
Benjamin Todd 00:13:51 Yeah, I mean, I talk about five main drivers of job satisfaction, fulfillment. And the first, it almost sounds simple, but I think it is actually often very overlooked.
Benjamin Todd 00:14:04 And it’s just the engagement on an hour to hour basis. And this has been called by researchers in psychology who was like trying to sum up the whole literature. And he was like, these are the most empirically validated predictors of job satisfaction. And he broke it into four factors. So it was how much feedback you have, how clear the tasks are, how much variety you have, and whether you have autonomy. So you can decide how the work is done. And instead, people often when they think of a career, they think, well, I want to be a professor. And they kind of imagine, like someone sitting in an office with a tweed jacket and students coming in and they think about like, what my friends think of me if I was a professor. And is it kind of like what I think of as a cool life? But that’s all kind of like looking at it from a very big picture point of view. But what actually drives whether you’re satisfied or not is how you’re spending that time, hour to hour.
Benjamin Todd 00:14:56 And that’s much more like, well, it’s writing papers, it’s writing grant applications, it’s doing university admin grading papers.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:03 Yeah, yeah.
Benjamin Todd 00:15:04 And if you don’t like those things, you’re probably going to have a bad time. Even if you find the kind of image of being a professor really attractive.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:12 Yeah, I think that is such salient advice. Like are the actual tasks of the thing, things that you would want to be doing. And I think we can fall into that trap in all kinds of places. I see people fall into that trap in the entrepreneurship world. They’re like, I want to run my own thing, which has lots of great values, but there are a whole bunch of tests that go into that that have nothing to do with the thing you actually want to do, you know, taxes and bookkeeping, and the list just kind of goes on. And I’m not saying it’s not worth doing, it’s what I’ve done. But there’s a realization that, like, there’s stuff that comes with that that’s sort of inescapable.
Benjamin Todd 00:15:52 Totally. Yeah. The second factor is then also really important because there’s a lot of jobs that are very engaging on those grounds, but people don’t say they’re meaningful. And when you might look back on your life, you might kind of have this sense of like, what was it all for? So the second big ingredient is like work that helps other people work that makes a difference to other people’s lives. Yeah. And then maybe more quickly, the third is I think just I think competence is important. That’s very satisfying. But also competence at your job is what enables you to get all the other things that matter. You know, this is again why passion isn’t sufficient. Because if you’re passionate but not very good at it, then you’re gonna end up with like no money and lots of other working with people who are really frustrating. And these things can also be really important for your satisfaction. And then, yeah, the fourth is like working with supportive colleagues. Again, I think what’s so interesting is again, people think they often think in terms of the job title.
Benjamin Todd 00:16:49 Is this satisfying or not? Is this what I want to do, my dream job or not? But so many of these conditions are actually about the context of the work. Yeah, it could be something that like seems boring from the outside, like it’s admin. But if you do it with people who are really fun and in pursuit of a meaningful goal, and it’s structured in an engaging way, it can actually get you into a lot of flow and motivation, even if like you would never thought from the outside, it’s the kind of thing you would have wanted to do. Yeah. And then the fifth and final thing is you could call these hygiene factors or basic conditions. So it’s just like not having a super long commute and not feeling like your pay is unfair, and that those things can make you dissatisfied even if you have the other ingredients in place.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:55 You’ve described two situations for me. One is in my late teens, early 20s, I thought I’m going to be a musician, and I just wasn’t even remotely good enough.
Eric Zimmer 00:18:06 You know, through the fog of addiction and alcoholism, it took me a couple of years to figure that out. But also, I had a career before I did this in the software business that in many ways met many criteria. You’re talking about like it was challenging. I lost myself in the work. I liked the people I worked for. The time flew by, I got paid well. It was really good and I couldn’t answer the meaning question. And then I tried to answer the meaning question by like, I’m going to start a solar energy company. But what I realized after a little while, in addition to Ohio being a terrible political climate to even attempt such a thing, is that that’s not actually would have played to my actual best skills. And then when I stumbled into this podcasting and coaching people and writing, you know, when I stumbled into that, I was like, oh, I have finally put all the different pieces together in a way that makes sense for me. And so I just relate a lot with what you’re saying about, you know, trying to get as many of those factors as you can, and you may not get all of them, or they may be weighted differently, but the more of it that your job fulfills, obviously the higher level of satisfaction you’re likely to have.
Benjamin Todd 00:19:20 Yeah, and it’s the software engineer example. I actually use that one in the book because people do report it’s engaging, but they actually do report lower than average meaning. So that’s actually a common result in surveys.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:33 Yeah, I wasn’t an engineer. I did everything around software, product development, project management, leading development teams, all of that. But I ended my career at the gap. Gap was a wonderful company in so many ways. They do so many good things in the world. It’s an amazing place to work. They make good clothes, and I was sort of in a in a software role where we were focused on the fulfillment of getting the stuff to people, and I ultimately was like, I just can’t find myself deeply caring about whether the jeans get there in one day or two days.
Benjamin Todd 00:20:06 Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:20:07 You know, like everybody finds the thing for themselves and the world isn’t always ideal. And I feel like I am very fortunate, incredibly fortunate to have found what I have. But yeah, it was a process of adding together those elements till I found the thing that feels, at least for now, most.
Eric Zimmer 00:20:26 Right?
Benjamin Todd 00:20:28 Yeah. And it’s great to find that thing. And this is actually something I’ve struggled with the last, I don’t know, five plus years is getting to that place of alignment where you feel like these different goals are kind of enough incoherence that you don’t have the tensions between the different parts. And I did have that in the past when I was founding 80,000 hours for the first time. And then I’ve kind of realized over time, like, actually, it’s very lucky to have that type of period in your life, and a lot of people don’t find it.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:00 Yeah, I’m actually a believer that no matter what you do, the tensions don’t get resolved. We are motivational, complex creatures. We want lots of different things. The world gives us different things. I think there is tension in there, but minimizing it and realizing which tensions can you live with is kind of the game.
Benjamin Todd 00:21:19 Yeah, exactly. It’s not not having the tensions. It’s kind of like being at peace with them or having it be part of a creative process or something like that.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:28 So I want to change direction just a little bit. Into making a difference. That’s a key part of the entire book is, you know, all the things we talked about are important. But what you do mattering and you really go into a lot of data about like what matters most. And by most, I mean if my goal is impact. So describe how you measure impact.
Benjamin Todd 00:21:55 I don’t want to get too fixed on like the idea of like quantified measurement. So, you know, all these things are super unknowable. But the thing I really want to leave people with is you can still come up with rules of thumb to help you find more impactful or less impactful things, and it’s more about using those rules of thumb than kind of making like some type of spreadsheet model. It’s exactly like ten units of impact at the end, right?
Eric Zimmer 00:22:19 If you pick the one that has the most impact, but it doesn’t fit you in many ways, you’re in a different problem.
Benjamin Todd 00:22:25 Exactly. So personal fit is one of the big rules of thumb that we really talk about a lot in the book, but then another one that I think from determining your impact is maybe the most important of all is which problem you choose to work on.
Benjamin Todd 00:22:38 And we encourage people to try and look for problems that are big, problems that are neglected, and problems where there’s a route to progress. So it’s solvable or tractable, and trying to find something that does. Well. On the balance of those three criteria that I would actually say is the thing that most has the biggest effect on your long term impact, but again, is like totally different to the normal. Normally it’s just, you know, well, should I work on climate change or health or education or AI risks? And people are just like just choose what you’re passionate about. Again. But I think actually being really intentional about that choice and then figuring out which of those issues are going to allocate your effort to, whether that’s donating or spreading ideas or political advocacy or working directly on a cause, which, however, you’re going to contribute. Choosing the issue in the first place has a huge effect on how much impact you’ll have.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:32 Let’s throw out four huge issues we’ve got. you know.
Benjamin Todd 00:23:37 This is where it gets a bit more spicy.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:39 Yeah, I want to just kind of talk through this. I’m not trying to, like, be challenging in any way, but let’s throw out, you know, AI risk. That’s an existential problem. Climate change you know, could be considered an existential problem. Hunger. Way too many people don’t eat preventable death. Malaria and other things. You make the point that pandemic planning right. Like knowing what we’re going to do in a pandemic could be one of the most impactful things that anybody could do. So I’ve got these things that are all pretty important. There are at least big. And are they neglected? I mean, I think almost any good cause in the world is somewhat neglected, right? Because most people aren’t paying attention or doing anything about it. And so if I don’t use what pulls at my heart the most, what else might I use to make that choice?
Benjamin Todd 00:24:29 All those problems you just listed are ones that are kind of relatively high on our list. So, you know.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:34 Of course, that’s why I chose them, right? I mean, I guess I should say like your book highlighted those mainly, and I think they’re the ones that, you know, people step back and really look at the big problems.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:45 We would see those as pretty foundational.
Benjamin Todd 00:24:48 A huge amount of, say, philanthropy in the US is basically people donating back to their universities, which is essentially subsidizing some of the richest students in the world.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:58 I find that bizarre. I guess I never went to college, so the concept doesn’t make sense to me. But yes.
Benjamin Todd 00:25:04 Yeah, I would say getting that into that list is actually already quite a minority of what people are focusing on. But then, yeah, within that, this is a bit where I think it is actually quite important to get a little bit quantitative. So climate change and AI risk are both big risks. But the other factor I mentioned was neglected. And if you try and add up all the number of people in the world who are doing climate jobs. I think it’s probably more around a million people worldwide. Ideally, we would have many more people working on climate change than we do. I agree in a kind of very absolute sense, it is still too neglected. But if you do the same exercise for people working to reduce like AI, loss of control risks, that’s probably under 3000 people.
Benjamin Todd 00:25:46 So that’s a thousand times difference in the neglected ness of those two issues. This will be even more controversial. But then I would actually argue that the AI risks have a higher like true existential risk in the sense of could actually permanently disempower humanity for the rest of history. Then climate change, where climate change is very likely to kill millions of people. But you know, if you read the IPCC report, which is supposed to represent the scientific consensus on climate change, it doesn’t say it’s going to literally end civilization. So there’s still huge differences. There’s like extremely bad risks and like extremely, extremely bad risks. And there’s actually still a big difference between those. Yep.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:27 But given that, let’s just play with this idea a little bit. So we got climate and we got AI safety. I would argue that part of the problem with AI safety is that there probably aren’t a lot of jobs in AI safety yet at this point. Right. And it seems to be something that all the AI players not at but don’t really meaningfully care about.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:48 So the work isn’t there. Although part of what we’re talking about, you forge and you create your path. But if I really care about forests, I just love forests. And I really just don’t even like thinking about computers and AI. Would I not be better going where I felt pulled to?
Benjamin Todd 00:27:13 Well, this then gets down to a deep trade off because I do think it is really important to do something that you’re truly, intrinsically motivated to do and you will have more impact and you will also gain. We talk about career capital, so you’ll also be in a better position in the future, which will give you lots of other opportunities which could also be impactful in unpredictable ways. Whereas on the other hand, if you’re just kind of doing something that intellectually seems really impactful, but you burn out or you kind of do it reluctantly, that’s probably not going to go that well. So there is a trade off, and you’re trying to find the best balance of the two. And to some level it’s something again, I struggle with where, for instance, I feel like roles involving more like management and organization building could be higher impact.
Benjamin Todd 00:28:00 But I personally prefer to do things that are more like writing or research or kind of like thinking type work. I feel that trade off myself where I’m kind of like, well, I could do more, but like, would I be physically motivated? And you just have to play this, this conflict out between yourself and come to some kind of resolution. But yeah, I think the point. Maybe the point I would make is in some ways, I’m kind of saying the trade off is actually worse than people realize, because there’s bigger differences between areas than people realize. And we have worked with a lot of people who were just like, okay, well, I studied philosophy at university and I’m like super interested in philosophy, and that’s what I spend all my time thinking about. So I should probably work as a philosopher, but would I should do graduate studies and that kind of standard academic path. But they were worried, like, would I actually have any impact? So I use the example like just Whittle Stone in the book.
Benjamin Todd 00:28:56 And then she just took this time to actually explore different paths, and she kind of found that she could get interested in lots of other things and eventually ended up actually actually being head of AI policy. This is like ten years later was head of AI policy at like the UK’s top AI think tank, AI risk think tank. And we’ve seen just many cases of this of people just developing new interests. And that comes from the work being it’s the things we talked about earlier, the work, being engaging, finding it meaningful. So I would say like give it a chance. yeah. Try some things out. If you’ve done that and you’re still like, well, this is the only thing I’m motivated by then. Yeah, there’s another conversation that then be had though about can you contribute indirectly. So, you know, I talk about the power of donating 10%, you know, the traditional practice of tithing from a lot of spiritual traditions. And if you focus that on the right charities, that can actually have a huge impact.
Benjamin Todd 00:29:50 And that’s a way in which you can work on anything. You can be a ballerina, you can start a restaurant like any, any job, and then you can still contribute to the most pressing problems in the world indirectly. So I think that’s also worth considering as a as an option to many people.
Eric Zimmer 00:30:07 So I’ve referenced effective altruism before, but it occurs to me now many people may not know what that is described to me, what effective altruism is and its connection to your work at 80,000 hours.
Benjamin Todd 00:30:22 Yeah. So effective altruism is the project of trying to use reason and evidence to find the best ways of helping other people, the ways of helping that do the most to help others. And so partly it’s a kind of specific social scene of people who are interested in these ideas and try and put them into practice. And then partly it’s just this, this question of trying to find out what actually is the answer to that. And everyone can have different answers, but what unites them is the search in the first place.
Benjamin Todd 00:30:52 And trying to actually not just accept the kind of common sense answers, but be willing to consider more unconventional answers based on like where we think reasons and looking at the evidence takes us.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:08 Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight, breath shallow? Are your shoulders creeping up? Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen. Every Wednesday, I send weekly bites of wisdom, a short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show. Things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose into bite size practices you can use the same day it’s free. It takes about a minute to read and thousands already swear by it. If you’d like extra fuel for the weekend, you also get a weekend podcast playlist. Join us at one You Feed newsletter that’s one you feed newsletter and start receiving your next bite of wisdom. All right, back to the show. Some of this is the simple practice of looking at like, okay, if I spend a dollar here or a dollar there, you know, how much more impact does that dollar have, right? A dollar on mosquito nets for people with malaria may have a much higher impact than a dollar spent on my local food bank.
Eric Zimmer 00:32:20 Right? And I think these things can be measured lots of different ways. But the point is to be thinking about that question, right?
Benjamin Todd 00:32:27 Exactly. I would argue as soon as you start debating that question, you’re doing effective altruism. Whereas, you know, people associate effective altruism with the list of specific answers that people like to say. Like malaria nets is a common thing that people promote. But you could arrive at totally different answers, but still be doing effective altruism, right?
Eric Zimmer 00:32:45 I mean, my approach to it has been to look at that like, where does it seem to show that a dollar that I give is going to do the most good? And then within that sort of broader spectrum, what matters to me more within their it’s a way of sort of triaging to get both right. Most impact not absolutely maximize the impact. Like I choose the one that has absolutely the highest impact, because again, all this stuff is measured and measurements are often incorrect. And we often don’t know what we’re measuring in some cases, but I think the data is worth paying attention to and having some trust in.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:19 And then from there, like what moves me within that?
Benjamin Todd 00:33:22 I think definitely when it comes to choosing a career, that’s the approach I recommend, like come up with a short list of plausibly good things and then choose between that based on what you’re most motivated to do, what you have the best personal fit for. So you also asked, what’s the connection between effective altruism and 80,000 hours? And I mean, the quick version would be, we were like around at the start of effective Altruism in, in Oxford in 2011. And I would say we were inspired by these ideas, but like, there’s a lot of people who use the advice but, you know, aren’t participating in effect, altruism.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:01 Right? You took some of the core ideas of like, I can think about what has the most impact. We can quantify that to some degree, and that can be something that helps make my not just my donation choices, but my actual career choice, which is arguably the biggest place to have impact that we possibly can.
Benjamin Todd 00:34:20 Yeah, I mean, that’s the original idea of the name 80,000 hours, which I guess we didn’t actually explain at the start. But yeah, it’s just your career is this huge amount of time. And for many people, that’s their biggest opportunity to make a difference in the world. Which again, maybe sounds kind of obvious, but I think is often not really how we think about things. We think like it’s more about what you consume. It’s like whether you cycle to work or turn off the lights or recycle. This is often what like ethical living is associated with. But I would actually kind of argue those things are relatively small amount of your impact compared to just what you’re actually spending most of your time on? I mean, the Buddhists did kind of figure this out because they had right livelihood as one of the key things they did. So yeah, I really agree with that. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:05 Yeah, I think I struggle with that because I think intellectually You’re right. I mean, whether I take a longer shower or not probably isn’t the place that I can make the most impact in the world.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:19 And yet it seems like, you know, I should do what I can. But I think you’re right. I think there’s a lot of factors that go into how people select the work that they do, and what’s the most meaningful and what can have the most impact. Maybe in there, but it’s often lower down. There’s another point you make that I really like, and you say that one thing that people, when they’re trying to figure out a career ask is, what am I good at? And you suggest asking, what could I become good at? Talk more about that. Yeah.
Benjamin Todd 00:35:54 I mean, there’s this really interesting research, actually, about people’s productivity over their lifespans. And although it’s true that, say, for lyrical poets and pure mathematicians, they actually peak relatively early, kind of like in that early 20s in terms of like if you look at like number of papers published or something like that. But for most people in most jobs it’s more in your 40s or 50s. And that kind of suggests that in some way, we’re building skills for these 20 years.
Benjamin Todd 00:36:27 And so choosing a career is much more a case of which skills am I going to learn over this time, like what you’re already good at? And people often narrow down too early because they just haven’t tried something or, you know, they never even considered a certain like learning a certain skill, but they would actually fit it really well if they did. And think about what is worth doing and then work back from that.
Eric Zimmer 00:37:17 I’m going to talk about two different types of people, which is the people that are early on and have more ability to make different choices, and then people who may be a little further on where it’s a lot harder, right? If you are now you have a family of three children and a mortgage, you can always choose to do anything. You could be like, I quit tomorrow. However, most people won’t make that choice. Whereas a 22 year old has a lot more flexibility and option. So I want to talk first about that latter category. The people who are young enough to explore this more, and you talk about a way of running experiments in essence to, you know, learn a little bit more about whether this direction is right for you.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:05 Talk to me about what some of those experiments might look like.
Benjamin Todd 00:38:08 Yeah. And this is another way in which I would say a lot of careers advice. It’s very like inwards and therapy focused. It’s very like let’s really introspect and kind of get down to what my true desires are and find the career that matches them, and there is some place for that. But I would say just a lot of this is so unpredictable. Like we just don’t really know who’s going to end up good at different jobs. And there’s, you know, there’s so many famous examples of like Oprah being told she’s like unfit for TV. And then of course, like having like the top of that, the top of that profession. And then, you know, there’s actually a bunch of literature about this, like what actually predicts who’s going to be good at different jobs. And, you know, one approach that is among the worst ways to do that is an unstructured interview. So it’s just like you talk to the person you kind of vibe and then like choose based on that, which is how a lot of job selection works.
Eric Zimmer 00:39:05 Meaning. I ask somebody who’s a doctor. I spend an hour saying, what’s it like to be a doctor? And then I get the sorry decision.
Benjamin Todd 00:39:13 This is for people who are hiring other people. Okay, okay, okay. This is where the research is from. But then, yeah, we could think that’s a bit more like a kind of intuition led approach. But from the perspective of the person hiring, there is a lot of research on when is our intuition actually good at predicting things and when it is not. And it’s really good in the case of, say, like there’s a fireman who, like, feels like something is off in the room and suddenly the building collapses. But they got out just in time. And that’s because they’ve seen hundreds of fires and they’ve developed this intuition. But your career is really not like that, because most people are only making a couple of big career decisions in their life. And the job market is changing constantly, so you don’t get a chance to kind of like, build up this intuition for what’s going to work in the future.
Benjamin Todd 00:39:56 You do get intuitions for things like this person is untrustworthy, so if you’re getting bad vibes about a job, then yeah, that could be pointing at something really important, but you can’t just simply like, go with your heart and expect that to, like, lead you to the the thing you’re going to succeed at the most. Whereas again, if you look at like hiring practices that are very predictive, it’s often things like work tests, which again, sounds kind of obvious, but it’s like, well, actually like spending some time doing the work and seeing how it is, maybe not surprisingly, actually quite a good way of figuring out who’s going to be good at a job. I encourage people to get out of the armchair and think, how can I actually get close to doing the work itself? Another exercise I really like is if you’re really uncertain between a couple of options, try to just actually write down what are you uncertain about between them? Like, why can’t you decide what information would actually change your ranking of options and then just go and get that information.
Benjamin Todd 00:40:51 And you often find that it involves just very practical things, like just going and talking to more people in the profession is often the most useful thing you can do, like on a per hour basis, rather than thinking about it more yourself. And so then, yeah, we talk about like making a ladder of tests where you start with the cheapest, quickest ways to learn more about a job first, which might just be, I mean, these days it might just be asking an AI about it, but then it might be then talking to real people in the job, and then you could think, well, could I try this for a few days or a week or something like that? And you can gradually escalate from there. And that type of kind of more empirical approach, that’s what I find is like ultimately most helpful for most people in figuring out which which option is best for them.
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Eric Zimmer 00:42:00 Feed your good wolf at one you feed net newsletter again one you feed net newsletter. I was fortunate to go to a high school that devoted the second half of your senior year into two, like they called them walkabouts, and you went out and did something. And so what I did was I went and I volunteered at a children’s hospital in the play therapy area, and I very quickly discovered it’s too much for me. Right? I don’t have the personality makeup that can really handle that. The other was I thought it was going to be a writer. And so I went and I found somebody to donate, donated. She let me use a cabin she had kind of out in the middle of nowhere, and my job was to show up each day and write. And I also realized then that I had no I either. I won’t say I had no aptitude for it. I had no ability to sit down and manage myself in that way to produce writing. Now, all these years later, it’s a different story.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:58 But then nothing got done. I learned in that case a couple of things that were valuable for me by ruling certain things out.
Benjamin Todd 00:43:09 I mean, that’s pretty cool. Your high school did that. Like, I think that is a good approach.
Eric Zimmer 00:43:13 Yeah. It allowed you to get well, I don’t know what’s a what’s half of a semester, whatever that is in weeks. Real experience doing things. All right. So we’ve talked about people who have time to make small bets to try small experiments. Do all of that. Now, let’s fast forward to where more of my audience is going to be, which is people, let’s just say, in their 40s who have a career that is doing okay, but they may not feel fully satisfied. And so there’s an allure to just jump ship. Let’s talk about that, because I think a lot of people are feeling that like take me in my software career, right. Paid well, I enjoyed it. I love the people I worked with. I had autonomy, I had all those things, I was just missing the meaning question.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:01 And I got lucky in a way that I just sort of stumbled in at the right time, into the right thing. That answered the meaning question in all of those others. But becoming a podcaster is not a role that is going to work. I mean, lots of people seem to be trying it, but not a role that’s going to work for everyone. So if someone’s in a career and they’re thinking, well, maybe I should move, maybe I should change, how do you think through that?
Benjamin Todd 00:44:30 Yeah, there’s several steps to go through here. And I mean, one thing, this also just applies to young people as well. But I do want to just reemphasize, I do think it’s really worth spending some time thinking about which problems are most pressing in the world, okay. And having some type of shortlist for that. And then, you know, if you’re a young person with a lot of flexibility, you can then think, okay, well, what might actually I be able to do to help with these problems? And then you can do these little experiments to figure out which path is the best fit for you.
Benjamin Todd 00:44:59 If you’re older, then one thing I might say is, I mean, there’s this really interesting study in the book where there was around 20,000 people who had to make some kind of major life decision. They had to choose whether to leave their marriage or quit their job. And they were very uncertain. And they’d thought about it a lot and still were on the fence. And then the study. So it was by the guy who wrote Freakonomics. He just got them to flip a coin, and if it was one way they had to quit, and if it was, you know, they had to stay. And, okay, not everyone actually followed it, but they, you know, they took the people who did actually quit and followed up. I think it was three months and maybe 12 months later, and the people who changed were much happier. It was a really big effect. It was, I think it was for the big life decisions. I think it was two points of life satisfaction.
Benjamin Todd 00:45:50 On a scale of ten, which is about the same shift of like leaving an episode of depression or getting married.
Eric Zimmer 00:45:56 And I’m curious about the bias there. The short term bias in that. I mean, that’s a fascinating study. I’m a big coin flipper listener. I decide a lot of things by flipping a coin. I think there’s a bias in that, that if you follow up six months or 12 months later, there’s a recency effect of like, I’m doing something new. It’s exciting, right? Whereas three years from now it’s like, well, what was new is now you’ve habituated. I think that’s right. But I think it’s still interesting. It’s still worthwhile data.
Benjamin Todd 00:46:24 And it’s such a big effect. I would say it’s like, you know, that’s still a big deal, even if it only lasts for a few years. And the mean, the message, in a way, it’s just backing up a very intuitive idea, which is that we tend to stick with the thing we’re already doing too long.
Benjamin Todd 00:46:38 And there’s many biases that could explain that, like, of course, bias and status quo bias and like loss aversion. And I would say if you’re in a job now and you’re like feeling like, I feel like I should quit. I’m unsure. I’ve thought about it for a while and on the fence then I think that is a good sign that it probably is time to make a change. If your earlier than that stage, then I would say, you know, there’s a lot of people kind of like, well, maybe I should make a change. Like one day I feel like I’m missing something, but they’re not yet on the fence about it. They’re just kind of like as a nagging doubt, if you’re in that position, then I would say just make it concrete, like spend some time to develop specific alternatives to your current job. And then once you have those on the table, do a side by side. So try to get it down to the level of like, well, okay, I could carry on or I could do A or B or C and then side by side.
Benjamin Todd 00:47:31 And then if you found a new option that seems maybe significantly better, then you could change. And if you don’t, then it probably means you should keep doing what you’re doing. And you can be more at peace with that because you’ve actually thought about it, and then you’ve addressed the nagging doubts. So that’s a big thing I would encourage people to do. And then there’s a question, okay, so like what actually are the options that you should take and. Yeah. The later you are in the career, the more the question becomes like, how can I use my existing skills? Or we talk about career capital. So it’s like broader than just your skills. It’s also your connections and your reputation and yeah, your character. And these things like give you abilities to make a difference in the world. And then how could I best use that to have an impact on one of these pressing problems? And normally the best way to figure that out is to go and speak to people who work in the issue and say, okay, for someone you know, I’m a lawyer or I build companies or I’m a software engineer or whatever it is, like, what opportunities could there be? What places could I work with this skill set? And then, yeah, like actually doing a round of applications to them.
Benjamin Todd 00:48:34 And we definitely find people who make pretty dramatic career changes. It definitely takes some time. It’s not easy. But you know, given a year, part time, it’s possible to make some pretty radical changes. And yeah, I would say just like don’t don’t rule it out too early and then. Okay. This is like an overly long answer, but then okay, then there’s the risk piece, right? You’re probably going to be giving something up. Like you’re probably gonna be taking lower salary, and it’s definitely going to take a bunch of time to do this. Like it’s going to be a major project on the side of your job, or if, you know, if you leave your job for a while to try and search for a new thing, that’s even riskier. But then, yeah, what I would say is, you know, actually make a list of what things could go wrong. Like make the risks concrete. You often realize that they’re not as bad as you thought. Like once you’ve been like, well, okay, this is this is a realistic worst case scenario.
Benjamin Todd 00:49:30 This is what could happen. And then also think, what would I do if that happened? How would I mitigate the risk. And often you realize it’s you would actually be okay in that in that circumstance if you realize you wouldn’t be okay and like, you know, you’ve got dependents and you need, you know, or like someone’s sick in your family and you need to take care of them or something like that, then, like, don’t, don’t do it like you if you if the risks are unacceptable to you, then you need to focus on getting into a position where you’re more resilient to those risks in the first place, and then come back to this in the future. Come back to the career change.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:01 I think that seasonality of life thing is really important, like what I did leaving my job and come in and doing what I do now, I couldn’t have really probably done it a decade before. Given responsibilities and different things. Now, I didn’t up and quit. I mean, I did this podcast for five years, and I’m not trying to make this entire conversation about me.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:23 I’m just trying to make it illustrative. But, you know, I did the podcast along with my software career for five years, and I made a choice to make less income, and that has undoubtedly been the case. If you were to measure it strictly on financial impact, you’d go, oh, that wasn’t your best decision. But everything else mattered a lot more. So I do think, you know, as you’re saying, it is more possible than we often think. But again, it was after my son was off to college that felt more possible right before that felt less possible for a variety of different reasons. And so, yeah, some of this is like we recognize we’re in a season of life. You know, you’ve got a four year old. Life is pretty demanding when it’s 14. That changes. I suddenly had a lot more time to put into side projects when my kids were teenagers, and they were out and about all the time. They didn’t have the demands of a four year old that needed my, you know, 18 hour a day attention.
Benjamin Todd 00:51:25 Totally. One other topic that I didn’t get on to is maybe it’s not right to change career right now, but like we already touched on earlier, you can still contribute indirectly in many ways. And we talked about donating is one option that can have a big impact. And in the book I use the example of Fred Mulder, who he was like, well, I could become a social worker, but I just like, I can’t handle this. I’m not a good fit for this. And through kind of like a very coincidental discovery of a bunch of Picasso prints in a shop in Paris that he managed to, like, take back to the UK and resell, he became an art dealer and then has donated enough to maybe fund like 10 or 20 people to work in the social sector, which he thinks had a much bigger impact. That’s donating. But then if you’re already skilled in a profession, you could do consulting in the sense of, you know, if you’re a software engineer, you could advise impactful organizations on their software projects, or you could mentor people.
Benjamin Todd 00:52:18 And there’s often still things like that. I mean, I mean, we also talked about getting involved with politics or I you know, I do actually just think when we talk about spreading awareness, often that just means while I’m like posting on social media to my tribe about things my tribe already agrees with, which isn’t particularly helpful. But if you’re actually bringing up an issue that people aren’t talking about and is genuinely neglected, that can make a big difference. So you can still look at these other ways of contributing. Yeah, building community around causes as well. So there’s a whole chapter about this in the book. And then while you’re doing that, you could also be investing in making it easier to make bigger changes in the future because, yeah, it might just not be the right time for you. But often there’s things you can do to improve your ability to take risks and make changes in the future. And investing in that might be your top priority right now.
Eric Zimmer 00:53:09 Yeah, I love that as a place for us to wrap up, because it’s pointing to, you can always do something that matters, you know, whether it’s in your career, whether it’s in the world, it may not be the way you want it to be, but there’s always a way to do something that matters.
Eric Zimmer 00:53:27 And I think that’s the really empowering point that I got from a lot of your writing.
Benjamin Todd 00:53:33 Yeah, like ultimately you just have your options and your job is to choose the best one, and that’s the best anyone can do.
Eric Zimmer 00:53:41 Well, Benjamin, thank you so much for coming on. You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation where we’re going to get into meditation, which is a topic we both really enjoy and we didn’t have time for here. Listeners, if you’d like access to this post-show conversation, lots of other post-show conversations and ad free episode. And if you want to support the show that needs your help and that you value, go to one. You bet. Thanks again. Benjamin. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity.
Eric Zimmer 00:54:26 But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.
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