80,000 Hours

by Benjamin Todd

Find a fulfilling career that tackles the world's most pressing problems, using this guide based on five years of research alongside academics at Oxford.

You have about 80,000 hours in your career: 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 40 years. This means your choice of career is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make.

Make the right choices, and you can help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems, as well as have a more rewarding, interesting life.

For such an important decision, however, there’s surprisingly little good advice out there. Most career advice focuses on things like how to write a CV, and much of the rest is just (misleading) platitudes like “follow your passion”. Most people we speak to don’t even use career advice – they just speak to friends and try to figure it out for themselves.

When it comes to helping others with your career the advice usually assumes you need to work as a teacher, doctor, charity worker, and so on, even though these paths might not be a good fit for you, and were not what the highest-impact people in history did.

This guide is based on five years of research conducted alongside academics at the University of Oxford. It aims to help you find a career you enjoy, you’re good at, and that tackles the world’s most pressing problems.

It covers topics like:
1. What makes for a dream job, and why “follow your passion” can be misleading. 2. Why the most effective ways to make a difference aren’t always the obvious ones like working at a charity, or becoming a doctor. 3. How to compare global problems, like climate change and education, in terms of their scale and urgency. 4. How to discover and develop your strengths.
It’s also full of practical tips and tools. You’ll come away with a plan to use your 80,000 hours in a way that’s fulfilling and high impact.

Genres: Business, Self Help, Psychology

342 pages, ebook

Published November 1, 2016

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Useful and thought-provoking, though premised on elitist principles.

This book raised a lot of personal questions that are helpful to examine while trying to figure out career - how do I want to dedicate most of my time? What is the kind of impact I want to make? What is my definition of "doing good"?

Where the book falls apart for me is that, aside from actively being in a select few, narrowly scoped careers, the book says the best way to "do good" is to earn as much money as possible with the goal of giving part of your earnings or influence as many people as possible to effect change by being in a "prestigious" position.

I have a problem with this because the very people who strive to make lots of money and attain positions of influence contribute an outsized portion to the global problems presented in this book. Also, those people have a vested interest in keeping the status quo of the global caste system. And this book is basically telling people to be like them.
Yes, it's not exactly the same - the book tells people to make lots of money or attain positions of power so they can effect change with donations or their prestigious position, but this book is still perpetuating and participating in the system that created these global problems in the first place. At its core 80,000 Hours is a book written by an elitist for elitists. War and pillaging other nations started with elitist thinking - "We're better than them so we deserve to get all their resources." Fast forward a couple centuries and "Now we feel guilty about our incredibly unequal distribution of global wealth so we'll write books funneling people into high-paying careers so they can send part of it over to these poorer countries."
It's more so a bandaid than anything.

I don't know if making money is the best way to do good. I think teaching people to go for money might cause more harm than good. I don't know if increasing human population is inherently good.
What about increasing the number of people to pursue innately human and gratifying endeavors like making art and creating music, increasing the quality of humans instead of the quantity, teaching people to live in peace and be satisfied with what they need not what they want, and teaching people to think for themselves?

To be fair, this is all outside the scope of this book. And the book did have a short disclaimer midway through about your own definition of social impact possibly differing from theirs, and values like justice and equality not being the focus of this book. Hence, 3 stars because the book really is useful, but my own moral qualms were kind of getting in the way with digesting its advice.

[Robin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I only made it 25% into this book.
Unfortunately it wasn't what I was hoping it would be. I bought the book after reading the waitbutwhy post about careers where this book was linked/recommended and I thought it would be more indepth than the blogpost.

However the first 25% of the book basically kept saying that in order to be happy you should donate your time/money to charity, and every chapter was more of the same, how you would achieve happiness by giving to charity. Obviously there is nothing wrong with giving to charity, but that's not what the book was advertised as.
So unfortunately have to 1 star this book.

[3li · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5/5
Not sure what exactly I expected but this was a really general description of a path to fulfilling work; this is more a sec help journal than a book. I think it could be really useful for high school seniors/college freshman trying to figure shit out for the first time, but if you have responsibilities beyond those typical of that age range, you may find some of the applications in this book impractical or redundant in your experience. Take it for what it is and it’s not a bad read but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it either

[Jon Richards · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was advertised as an in-depth guide to finding the best career for you. Whilst it does have some useful advice on finding a job that’s better suited to you, that isn’t really the focus of the book. In essence, this isn’t a guide on finding a job or career suited to your individual traits and quirks, but rather a guide on becoming an effective altruist and finding a career path that supports that belief system.
As such, whether or not you’ll find value in this book depends heavily on whether or not you align with the ideals of effective altruism. If you do, you’ll likely get a lot more out of this book than someone who doesn’t. However, even if you align with effective altruism then I still have difficulty in recommend this book to you. You’d be better off visiting the 80k website and browsing it’s many articles seeing as this book feels, and reads, like a sequence of blog posts strung together, rather than well thought out, well written book.

[Aldo Acevedo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the ideas presented in the book although the writing feels all over the place and is quite often hard to follow. The pacing is off, as if the author wants to introduce and recall too many ideas at once. Maybe it is just me, as I haven't seen many reviews pointing this out aside from stating the book is too long (which I agree with a bit).

I also wish the author had addressed more of the criticism to the effective altruism movement apart from the Sam Bankman-Fried controversy.

[Matt Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Catalyst for the career change I've just made. How do you spend your time? Who benefits from what you do? How is what you're doing helping to impact the world and the attention focussed where it is most-needed? This should at least help frame all those key questions, and you should come away from it very much alive and with a ton of follow up reading. Handily available for free as an ebook.

[Goke Obasa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll recommend this book as a career guide especially for young people and everyone concerned about making an impact beyond making money.
I learnt about personal career planning in a whole new way in this book.
I like the way ideas are presented from different angles. There are also many links and additional reading materials which makes this book a valuable resource.

[Levi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the charts might be invalid due to insufficient experimentations to prove their validity. But overall, it is a great book to realise your value in this world and start setting your priorities right.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This could be a valuable book to people starting their careers. I'm going to recommend it to my children.

[Ileana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book about how to choose your career, questions to ask yourself and where to find answers.

[Philipp Scholz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read dozens of books about career advice and on self-improvement. The best lessons of all of them are synthesized in this book. Enough said.

[Noureddine LOUAHEDJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book that change the way we usually look at jobs, and how we plan for our career, it focus on the true value and meaning of life

[Jacqui Gonzalez · Rating 2 out of 5]

Muy útil todo el apartado vocacional y los consejos sobre la vida profesional pero no dejó de ser una lectura muy primer mundista con varias red flags.

[Herbert Toler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every young professional needs to read this and take notes. Thanks Baak!

[openshroud · Rating 1 out of 5]

Repetitive