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

What makes for a dream job? 🌞

There are 6 key ingredients of a dream job, and they do not include income (beyond $75,000, our income has no relationship with how happy, sad, or stressed we feel) and passion (because we can develop passion while doing work we enjoy and has meaning. The key is to get good at something that helps other people:

1. Work that’s engaging

What really matters is what we do day by day. It’s the work that draws us in, holds our attention, and gives us a sense of flow. An engaging job has 4 factors:

• The freedom to decide how to perform our work;

• Clear tasks, with clearly defined start and end;

• Variety in the types of tasks;

• Feedback, so we know how we’re doing.

2. Work that helps others

People who volunteer are less depressed and healthier, people who donate to charity are as satisfied with their lives as those who earn twice as much, and performing random acts of kindness makes givers happier - all these findings form a growing body of evidence that helping others isn’t the only route to a meaningful career but it’s widely accepted as one of the most powerful.

3. Work we’re good at

Being good at our work gives us a sense of achievement and power to negotiate for the other components of a fulfilling job, such as the ability to work on meaningful projects, undertake engaging tasks and earn fair pay.

4. Work with supportive colleagues

It’s important that we become friends with at least a couple of people at work, which means working with at least a few people who are similar to us. Research shows that perhaps the most important factor is whether we can get help from our colleagues when we run into a problem. A major meta-analysis found “social support” was among the top predictors of job satisfaction. Similarly, a bad boss can ruin a dream position, while even boring work can be fun if done with a friend.

5. Lack of major negatives

To be satisfied with work, we also need the absence of things that make work unpleasant. All of the below tend to be linked to job dissatisfaction:

• A long commute (if it’s over an hour by bus)

• Very long hours

• Pay you feel is unfair

• Job insecurity

These should not be overlooked as a long commute can frequently be enough to outweigh many other positive factors.

6. Work that fits with the rest of our life

We don’t have to get all the ingredients of a fulfilling life from our job - it’s possible to find a job that pays the bills and excel in a side project, or to find a sense of meaning through philanthropy and volunteering, or even build great relationships outside of work.

We should not follow our passion

“Follow your passion” advice can be misleading as it suggests that it’s all we need, which is not correct.

Even if we do follow it and are interested in our work, if we lack the other 6 factors, we’ll still feel unsatisfied.

“Following our passion” can make it even harder to satisfy the 6 ingredients, because the areas we’re passionate about are likely to be the most competitive, making it extremely hard to find a good job. Another problem is that many people don’t feel like they have a career-related passion so they can’t even do that.

We can start a career in a new area and if our work helps others, we practice to become good at it, have engaging tasks, and work with people we like, then we will automatically become passionate about it. The 6 ingredients are all about the context of the work, not the content.

Do what contributes to the world

Rather than “follow your passion”, better advice would be to get good at something that helps others - or simply do what contributes.

If we put making a valuable contribution to the world first, we’ll develop a passion for whatever it is we do and become more content, ambitious and motivated.

If we make it our mission to help others, then other people will want to help us succeed too. People with a “giving mindset” end up among the most successful and this is because they get more help and because they are more motivated by a sense of purpose.

How to apply this to our own career

1. Practice using the 6 ingredients to make some comparisons. Pick 2 career options we’re interested in and score them from 1 to 5 on each of the 6 factors.

2. The 6 ingredients listed above are only a starting point. There may be other factors that are important to us so we should also answer the below questions:

• What have I been most fulfilled in the past and what did these times have in common?

• If I were to die in 10 years, what would I spend my time doing?

• Can I make any of the 6 factors more specific, e.g. what kinds of people do I most like to work with?

All of these questions should give us a better idea about what you find most fulfilling. Now we can combine the presented 6 factors with our own thoughts to determine the 4 - 8 factors that are important to us.

To summarise: to find a dream job, we should look for:

• Work we’re good at,

• Work that helps others,

• Supportive conditions: engaging work that lets us enter a state of flow, supportive colleagues, lack of major negatives like unfair pay, and work that fits our personal life.

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What does it mean to “make a difference”? ⭐

Ultimately this is a philosophical question but it can be answered as “social impact - the number of people whose lives we improve, and how much we improve them”.

There are 2 ways we can make more social impact:

1. By helping more people,

2. By helping the same number of people to a greater extent.

Social impact is not confined to saving lives, but it can also mean making improvements to quality of life. That could involve making people happier, helping them reach their potential, or making their lives more meaningful.

Our social impact includes all of the people our actions help, both immediately and over time over the coming decades. As such, sometimes it might be better to seek an indirect impact, such as improving the quality of government decision-making that could have a huge social impact in the long run even if it doesn’t help people right now.

Environmental impact is also included but indirectly. If the environment degrades, then we and other animals will have worse lives and eventually face extinction.

How can we make a big difference in any career?

Any college graduate in the developed world can have a significant social impact with little personal sacrifice, by taking whatever job they find most personally fulfilling, and giving 10% of their income to the world’s poorest people. For example, we can give to the world’s poorest people through GiveDirectly, a charity that provides one-off cash transfers to the poorest people in East Africa via mobile phone. Most of the recipients spend the money on whatever they need most, rather than what external aid agencies think they need.

Another way to make a social impact is by advocating for important issues (e.g. using our political influence, such as voting).

If we don’t have political influence ourselves then we might know someone who does - then we can make a difference by helping or influencing those who do have it.

What are the world’s most pressing problems?

We can start by thinking about which problems in the world are in most need of attention (education, climate, poverty) and then work out what we can do about them. As a note, although our motivation is important, there is a chance that we might be interested in solving problems that are really hard to solve, that already have a lot of attention, or are just not very important.

To minimise this issue, we can:

• Work on problems that are unfairly neglected - the more neglected the problem, the more chance there is to find great opportunities to have a social impact that hasn’t already been taken.

• Work on problems with the largest scale - a problem has a greater scale 1) the larger the number of people affected, 2) the larger the size of the effect per person and 3) the larger the long-run benefits of solving the problem.

• Work on problems that are solvable - before we choose a social problem, we need to ask ourselves 2 questions: 1) is there an intervention to make progress on this problem with rigorous evidence behind it? 2) if not, can we test new interventions to learn about what works? If the answer to both is no then we should look for another problem to solve unless the problem is exceptionally large and neglected.

• Personal fit - we will of course feel much more motivated to work on one problem rather than another so the problem we select must fit us personally too.

The most pressing global problems currently are:

• Risks from AI

• Building effective altruism

• Catastrophic pandemics

• Factory farming

• Global priorities research

• Improving decision making

• Nuclear weapons

• Great power conflict

👉 read more here

In which career can we help the most people?

Such career choices as teachers and doctors can only help a limited number of people at once. Nobel prize winner Karl Landsteiner discovered blood groups, which enabled hundreds of millions of life-saving operations that he would not have been able to carry out himself.

Below are 4 ways to use our career to contribute to solving the social problems we want to work on:

1. Earning to give

People who are a good fit for a higher-earning option can donate to organisations that solve social problems and make a large contribution indirectly. Earning to give is not only for people who want to work in high-paying industries but for anyone who aims to earn more to give more too. By doing this, they can have more impact than they could by working directly in a non-profit.

Should we earn to give?
Earning to give can be a good option worth considering if:

• We’re a good fit for a high-earning option (but we should avoid areas that cause harm)

• We want to gain skills in a higher-earning option

• We’re very uncertain about which problems are most pressing

The best way to earn to give:
These two paths are among the highest-earning and can build our skills (although both are very competitive):

• Tech startup founder

• Quantitative trading

Some other promising options include:

• Management consulting

• Data Science

• Software engineering

• Start-up early employee

In all of the above, we could earn far more than the average while also putting our careers in a better position for the future.

The below options are also promising and are far less competitive:

• Marketing

• Actuarial science

• Nursing

• Executive search

As a note, we don’t need to limit ourselves to funding charities - we can also fund research, political advocacy or for-good-for-profits instead.

2. Advocacy

It’s the promotion of solutions to pressing problems that can also be pursued in a wide range of careers and can have an even higher impact than earning to give:

• Earning to give ourselves vs

• Earning to give ourselves, and persuading a friend to earn to give as well. This path does more good, and probably twice as much.

Ideas can spread quickly and advocacy is a way for a small group of people to have a large effect on a problem. A small team can launch a social movement, lobby a government, start a campaign that influences public opinion, or just persuade their friends to take up a cause - each of these can have a lasting impact on the problem that goes far beyond what we could achieve directly.

Then, advocacy is neglected because there is usually no commercial incentive to spread socially important ideas.

Advocacy is typically better than earning to give because everyone wants more money and there is a lot of competition, whereas there is much less competition to spread good ideas! For this reason, it would be possible for many people to influence more money than they could donate.

The most successful advocates influence millions of people, while others might struggle to influence more than a couple of friends. So, if we’re a good fit for advocacy, then it’s the best thing we can do as we are likely to achieve far more by doing it ourselves than we could by funding someone else to engage in advocacy on our behalf.

The best way to become an advocate is:
We can advocate for solutions to pressing problems in any job. To do that, we should go over the problems we think are most pressing and then look for small behaviours or ideas we could promote that would make a difference if they spread, like voting in an election or giving to a certain charity. It might be best to lead by example, helping to set expectations, rather than being pushy!

Taking a stable job and doing advocacy part-time can be effective because we wouldn’t need to worry about funding it, which would help us stay independent and take bigger risks. Moreover, we’ll be in a better position to advocate for attention to pressing problems if we’re successful in our fields because we will appear more credible.

Some advocacy options for those who want to focus directly on this:

1. Political and policy positions
   Relatively few people try to become or advise politicians, which means that each person involved potentially has a large influence. If we are good at this, then this option would be the most influential path there is. Other policy positions that offer influence and political networks include working in government (esp. such prestigious positions as Civil Service Fast Stream in the UK), positions especially relevant to the problems we think are most pressing, and “influencer” positions, such as think tank research and lobbyists.

2. Positions with a public platform

• Journalism

• Public intellectual (if we can get an academic position, then we could focus our time on advocacy instead of research)

• Positions in the media (pursuing fame in arts and entertainment is another option, as well as working in TV producing news, documentaries, and comedy that draw attention to important issues).

• Managers and grant-makers at influential organisations (jobs that give us a say over large budgets)

• Professional positions that let us meet lots of influential people (such as tech startup founders, management consulting, and founding an international development non-profit). These positions can make it easier to do advocacy on the side as well.
  

3. Research

Along with advocates, many of the highest-impact people in history have been researchers.

First, when new ideas are discovered they can be spread incredibly cheaply and so it’s a way that a single career can change a field. New ideas also accumulate over time, so research contributed to a significant fraction of long-run progress. However, there’s little commercial incentive to do research relative to its importance. As such, if we do care more about social impact than profit, then it’s a good opportunity.

Like advocacy, research is an especially promising option when we’re actually a good fit for it because the best researchers achieve much more than the median.

Research requires administrators, managers, grant-makers, and communicators to make progress - many of these roles require very able people who understand the research. However, because these are not glamorous or highly paid positions, it’s hard to attract the right people. That’s why if we’re interested in these positions, the best path would be to pursue a PhD, pick a field, and then apply to research groups.

4. Direct work

Many great teams are working on innovative, neglected solutions to pressing problems. If we’re a good fit for one of these, and they’re finding it hard to hire, then it could be one of the best options.

One doesn't necessarily need to be a leader of an organisation. As with research management, operations roles are both vital and difficult, but because these positions are unglamorous, it’s often hard to attract the right people. Direct work can be for-profit as well as non-profit.

Suppose we’re providing a service directly to beneficiaries. In that case, a for-profit can be more effective because we can get better feedback on whether the service is useful, which allows us to scale it quickly if it is. Non-profits are best when they’re doing something that’s very hard to commercialise, such as research, advocacy, and the provision of public goods like a clean environment, or services like education that take a long time to pay off.

How to find a good direct work position?
First, we need to decide what problems we think are most pressing, then identify the best organisations within these areas, especially those that are especially limited by talent rather than funding. Then find the positions where we’d be the best fit.

We can find recommended positions here.

Which approach fits the problem?

Most of the time, the impact we’re able to make is more about how we use our position than the position itself. This means that we should look for the positions that offer the best balance of ways to contribute directly, through advocacy and donations.

Maybe even more important is that the most effective approach for us will be one which is a good fit for our skills and motivations.

A major study found that the best people in almost any field have significantly more output than the typical person. The more complex the domain, the more significant the effect, which is especially noticeable in jobs like management, medicine, and sales.

Success in any field gives influence that can be turned into a positive impact by using our position to advocate for important problems. An outstanding charity worker will likely do much more good than an average engineer earning to give, and vice versa.

The bottom line: in which carer can we do the most good?

1. Make an initial shortlist of fulfilling, high-impact careers that we could work towards in the long run

2. Choose a problem that resonates with us the most

3. Work out how best to contribute to solving it - consider indirect approaches such as research, advocacy and earning to give, as well as direct work, to find the best fit.

4. Then focus on the approaches that are most needed in our chosen problem area. E.g. some problems are best solved through changing policy, whereas others need research or require funding…

5. Finally, choose something where we have the potential to excel and avoid doing something we know we wouldn’t enjoy.

6. Ultimately, look for the best option on a combination of a) how pressing the problem is, b) how large our contribution will be, c) our degree of personal fit.

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Which jobs put us in the best position for the future & how to avoid two common early-career mistakes 🙏

It’s important to invest in ourselves to maximise our impact in the long term and find a job we’re good at. We should build career capital that is flexible and relevant to many different jobs in the future.

Mistake 1: Ignoring opportunities to invest in ourselves

Most people reach their peak in their middle age - their income peaks in the 40s, suggesting that it takes around 20 years for most people to reach their peak productivity. Similarly, experts only reach their peak abilities between ages 30 and 60.5

Researchers found that expert-level performance in established fields requires 10-30 years of focused practice, which means that there’s a good chance we have a greater lifetime impact by first investing in ourselves. For this reason, the advice would be to always be on a lookout for opportunities to build career capital.

Early career, the ideal is to find a job that offers both impact and career capital, but if forced to choose between the two, it’s best to lean towards career capital.

In this case, we can get involved through conferences, donating 1-10%, volunteering etc. to stay motivated and keep learning.

How to compare two options in terms of career capital:

🌟 Skills: Some especially useful transferable skills include:

• personal productivity,

• analysis and problem-solving,

• the ability to learn quickly,

• communication,

• data analysis,

• persuasion and negotiation, and

• management.

But if we want to do good, we also need to learn about the world’s most pressing problems. We will learn fastest in jobs where we can receive good mentorship.

🌟 Connections: Our connections are how we’ll find opportunities, spread ideas and start new projects. The people we spend time with will also share our character.

🌟 Credentials: Will this job act as a good signal to future collaborators or employers? It doesn’t mean that we need formal credentials but we need to think about our achievements and reputation too. For example, if we’re writers, then it will be the quality of our blog that matters, if we’re coders - GitHub, etc.

🌟 Runway: How much time will we save in this job? Our runway is how long we could comfortably live with no income. We should aim for at least 6 months of runway to maintain our financial security. 12-18 months of runway would be even more useful because it gives more flexibility to make a major career change.

Mistake 2: Not building flexible career capital that will be useful in the future

The safest job options are those that involve creativity, high-level problem-solving, and social intelligence, such as management, marketing, social work, and engineering.

Flexibility is also important if we care about social impact because it allows us to focus on whichever problems turn out to be the most pressing in the future. It’s better to give ourselves the option to switch problem areas in the future, even if it slightly reduces our impact in the short run.

Finally, we should commit to a path in which we’ll gain career capital that’s useful in many other paths. So, the best option is to just pick an area, perform highly, learn transferable skills, and meet influential people. This will allow us to be in a better position than if we tried to do a bit of everything and didn’t achieve anything.

Which jobs are the best early careers?

1️⃣ Working at a growing organisation that has a reputation for high-performance

Consultants go into a very wide range of areas, incl. the public sector and social sector, and often reach senior positions more quickly than they would if they hadn’t started in consulting. The same can be true of other professional services jobs.

Consulting works because companies make people work hard, train people and put them around other productive people, building their skills and connections. These jobs are also widely recognised as competitive positions, which give credentials.

However, any position where one has a good mentor or team can help one learn quickly and thus any organisation that is growing quickly can let one gain responsibility quickly.

The following offer the most flexibility and are the best options if uncertain:

• The technology sector - this attracts many of the most ambitious people, often leads other fields when it comes to best practices, is growing, and working in the sector can let one develop useful technical skills.

• Management consulting - this, and especially strategy consulting, can be a great option because firms often invest heavily in training and enable people to meet a lot of other high-performers while exploring lots of industries. Management consultants exit into almost all sectors.

• Professional services - incl. accounting and other advisory services and most often involves working at the big 4: Deloitte, Ernst and Young, PwC and KPMG. Similar to management consulting but less competitive and less prestigious, and has a weaker range of exit options.

• Working in a small but rapidly growing company with a good boss - this will allow one to try lots of different areas, learn quickly and advance rapidly.

• Government position leadership schemes - such as Fast Stream in the UK, or Presidential Management Fellowship in the US. These options could be good if we want to work anywhere in the policy world or social sector.

• Think tank research roles are also reasonably prestigious and open up options in policy and the social sector.

• Working for a politician (e.g. as a researcher or staffer) can be a good first step into political and policy positions, it's prestigious and gives lots of connections.

• Positions in major media companies as they are prestigious and enable to build communications skills and connections.

• Teaching accelerator schemes, such as Teach First, because they are highly demanding and focus on rapid training.

• Anywhere you can work with a high-achieving mentor.

2️⃣ Pursue certain graduate studies

Compare options in terms of personal fit, flexibility of the program, and relevance to long-term plans. Recommended grad programmes include:

1. Economics

2. Computer Science

3. Applied Math

3️⃣ Develop a valuable, transferable skill

Some concrete options that fall into this category include:

1. Programming Bootcamp

2. Data Science Bootcamp

3. Marketing and sales, especially growth-hacking

4️⃣ Do what contributes

Soft aspects of career capital, such as skills, achievement, connections, and reputation are equally important. It’s a good idea to start our own organisation - if we succeed, it will be impressive, and if we don’t - we’ll learn a lot and might even meet interesting people.

It’s especially good to have achievements that involve doing good and making a positive social impact.

How can we get flexible career capital in any job?

Any job can be a good opportunity to build connections and learn useful skills. Regular career advice focuses on the standard lists of transferable skills (communication and data analysis), but the first area to focus on is skills that are useful in all jobs, such as productivity, learning how to learn, and rational thinking.

So how do we apply this to our career?

1. Start by going over 4 paths to career capital and ways to gain career capital in any job, and note down 3 ways we could gain it:

• Can we work at a high-performance, growing organisation?

• Do we have a good option for graduate study?

• Can we do something that will teach us a valuable skill?

• Is there an option where we’ll achieve something impressive, especially if relevant to social impact?

2. Read the list of ways to gain career capital in any job and choose one to focus on.

3. Ask ourselves the most valuable career capital we already have as it can give us clues about what we’ll be best at, and help us to convince employers to hire us. Review each of the categories:

• Skills - transferable, knowledge, and personality traits

• Connections

• Credentials

• Runway

The bottom line: which jobs put us in the best positions for the future?

1. Working in any organisation which has a reputation for high performance or any work with a great mentor or team.

2. Undertaking certain graduate studies, especially applied quantitative subjects like economics, computer science and applied mathematics.

3. Anything that gives us valuable transferable skills like programming, data science, and marketing.

4. Taking opportunities which allow us to achieve impressive, socially valuable things, e.g. founding an organisation, or doing anything we might excel at.

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How to find the right career 🥨

The best way to find the right career is to ask ourselves: “What could I become good at?” and go investigate - learn about and try out different options, looking outwards rather than inwards.

The most successful people in a field account for a large fraction of the impact, so we’ll have much more impact if we find a job we can excel at. We’re also more likely to feel happier and build up more impressive achievements enabling us to gain better career capital.

So personal fit is one of the key factors to look for in a job.

To investigate the right career choice, we need to research different career options - it’s true whether we’re planning what to do long-term, comparing two offers, or considering quitting our job. Ideally, we will be able to try our top two or four career options over the next few years - it doesn’t mean to necessarily get a job in all of these areas but we can try studying, doing something on the side or creating out own projects that would allow us to test different career options at least to some degree.

We should also consider one or two wildcards to broaden our experience and spot new ideas - these are unusual options out of the normal path, like living in a new country, pursuing an unusual side project or trying a sector we would have not normally worked in.

How to narrow down our options:

1. Make a big list of options:

• Write down our initial list, including both what problems we want to focus on and what role we want (e.g. economics researchers focusing on global health, marketing for a meat substitutes company, earning to give as a software engineer, etc.)

• Then try to come up with even more options! We can do this by asking ourselves:
  a) If we couldn’t take any of the options on our first list, what would we do instead?
  b) If money were no object, what would we do?
  c) What do our friends advise?
  d) How could we use our most valuable career capital?
  e) Can we combine our options to make the best of both worlds?
  f) Can we find any more opportunities through our connections?

2. Rank our options

• Start by making an initial guess.

• Then score the options from 1 to 5, based on impact, personal fit, other elements of job satisfaction, and any other factors that are important to us.

• Then try to cut down to a shortlist by eliminating the option that are worse on all factors than another, and those that are very poor on one factor.

3. Key uncertainties

Consider what information could most easily change our ranking. If we could get the answer to one question, which question would be most useful? E.g. “Would I enjoy programming?”, “Can I get a place on Teach for America?” etc.

4. Initial research.

Can we quickly work out any of these key uncertainties? E.g. if we’re unsure whether we’d enjoy being a data scientist, can we go and talk to someone about what it’s like?

How to explore our options:

1. Explore before graduate study rather than after (e.g. if we’re not 100% sure about staying in academia, we must try out other alternatives first before our PhD, as once this is done, it will be very hard to leave academia)

2. Put “reversible” options first - it’s easier to go from a position in business to a non-profit job than vice versa, so if we’re unsure between the two, we should take the business position first.

3. Choose options that let us experiment - an alternative approach is to take a job that lets us try out several areas by letting us work in a variety of industries (freelance and consulting), practice many different skills (small companies), or give us the free time and energy to explore other things outside of work.

4. Try on the side - think about ways to try the new option on the side, such as a short project in our spare time, or our existing job that’s relevant.

5. Keep building flexible career capital.

The cheapest and quickest way to explore might look like this:

• Read relevant career reviews and do some google searchers to learn the basics (1-2 hours)

• Speak to someone in the area we are interested in to get some up to date and personalised information.

• Speak to 3 more people who work in the area we are interested in and read 1-2 related books (20h).

• Consider speaking with a career advisor who specialises in an area we are interested in.

• Look for a project that might take 1-4 weeks of work, like volunteering on a political campaign, or start writing a blog on the policy area we want to focus on.

• Then we can consider taking a 2-24 month commitment, like a short placement, internship or graduate study.

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Creating our career plan 🌅

The A/B/Z plan

Start by setting out a number of possible options, ranked according to preference:

1️⃣ Plan A - Our top option (an ideal scenario)

We can have 3 main options for our Plan A, then choose one of the following:

• Option 1 - if we’re reasonably confident about our long-term option, we can work out how we intend to get there.
  We can determine the best route to our top option by talking to people in the field and looking at what successful people have done in the past. Can we find any examples of when people got to these positions unusually fast, or despite major setbacks? In addition, we need to continue building flexible career capital and look for steps that take us towards the goal at the same time.

• Option 2 - If we’re uncertain about our best medium-term option, instead make a plan to try out our top 2-4 options over the next couple of years.

• Option 3: if we’re very uncertain about our best long-term option, then we need to
  a) do more research,
  b) build flexible career capital in the meantime.

2️⃣ Plan B - Nearby alternatives

These are the options we could switch into if Plan A doesn’t work out, and options that might easily turn out to be better than our Plan A. We should come out with 2-3 alternatives.

3️⃣ Plan Z - Our temporary fallback

This is what we will do if everything goes wrong to buy ourselves time to get back on our feet. Having a Plan Z makes it easier to take risks.

An example:

• Plan A - While a student, I'll spend a summer holiday living in a developing country and another working at a non-profit. Then work as a consultant for two years, and then pursue a Master’s in Economics, then decide to either continue in economics academia or switch to non-profits.

• Plan B - If I can’t get into consulting, then I'll go to grad school a year earlier and spend a year out interning at a non-profit or teaching English in a developing country.

• Plan Z - Move back in with my parents and take a job in the hospitality sector.

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How to find a job 🔍

Stage 1: Leads

Leads are any opportunities that might turn into a job (an available position we can apply for, friends who might know suitable opportunities, or side projects that might be able to generate some money).

We need a lot of leads (usually 20-100) to get one good job, and getting rejected 20 times is normal!

To get leads, we can send CVs, but it’s best if we use connections where possible, and get referrals.

How to get referrals

1. Update our LinkedIn profile (because people will check it out when considering meeting us). Bo concrete and focus on the most impressive accomplishments. Then, search ourselves on Google and do anything we can to make the results look good.

2. If we already know someone in the industry well who can hire people, then ask for a meeting to discuss opportunities (this is almost like an interview).

3. If you know them less well, ask for a meeting to find out more about jobs in the industry in an informal interview. If it goes well, ask them to introduce us to people who may be able to hire us, which is effectively getting a referral from this person.

4. Prepare a one-sentence, specific description of the types of opportunities we’d like to find when asking for introductions.

5. Failing the above steps, turn to the connections of our connections. If we have a good friend who knows someone who’s able to hire us, then we could directly ask that friend for a referral.

6. If our connection is not able to refer us, then ask them to introduce us to people in the industry who are able to hire.

7. To find out who our connections know, we use LinkedIn and reach out to as many as we can.

8. If we still haven’t got anywhere, then it may be worth spending some time building our connections in the industry first.

Stage 2: Conversions

Employers want employees who will fit in socially, stick around, not cause trouble, and solve the problems they face. If we can prove that we’ll get the results the employer most values, everything else is much less important.

The most powerful way to prove we can do the work is actually do some of it:

• Find out what we’d be doing in the role we’re applying

• Work out which problems we will need to solve for the organisation then speak to people in the industry.

• Spend a weekend putting together a solution to these problems, and send them to a couple of people at the company with an invitation to talk more.

• If we don’t hear back after a week, follow up at least once.

• Alternatively, write up our suggestions and present them during the interview.

Trial period:

If the employers in on the fence, we can offer to do a 2-4 week trial period for free or at a reduced pay.

Go for a nearby position

If we can’t get the job we want right away, consider applying for another position in the organisation - it gives us an opportunity to prove our motivation and cultural fit.

How to prepare for interviews:

1. When we meet an employer, ask lots of questions to understand their challenges and discuss how we might be able to contribute to solving these challenges.

2. Prepare 3 key selling points ahead of meetings. These are the messages we’ll try to get in during the discussion. E.g. a) I have done this work successfully before, 2) I’m really excited about this company, 3) I have suggestions for what I could work on.

3. Focus on what’s most impressive. Pick one or two most impressive achievements and focus on these two on our CV rather than fil it with a bunch of stuff.

4. Prepare concrete facts and stories to back up our 3 key messages - they always sell better as they are more memorable than abstract claims.

5. Work out how to sum up what we have to offer in a sentence. Having a short, vivid summary makes it easy for other people to promote us on our behalf. E.g. “ She’s the girl who advises Obama on climate policy and wants a research position.”

6. Prepare answers to the most likely questions. Write them out and practice saying them out loud. The following three questions are most common: 1) "Tell be about yourself - tell a story of why you want this position and mention one or two achievements", 2) "Why do you want this position?", 3) "What are your questions for us?" Then we can expect some relevant behavioural and technical questions.

7. Practice the meeting, from start to finish.

8. Learn after each interview, jot down what went well, what could have gone better, and what we’ll do differently next time.

Stage 3: Negotiation

We can and should negotiate to work on a certain team, have more flexible hours, work remotely, or learn certain skills. All of these could make a big difference to our day-to-day happiness and career capital. It won’t always be possible (e.g. if it’s a Civil Service position) and we shouldn’t negotiate until the employer has made an offer as it will look bad.

Negotiation should be most strongly considered when we have more than one good offer because then we have a strong fallback position.

How to negotiate:

The best way to negotiate is by explaining the value we'll give the employer and why it’s justified to give us the benefits we want. The idea is to look for objective metrics and win-win solutions. E.g. “I’m going to redesign your sign-up process, increasing the conversion rate by 1%, which is worth millions of dollars to you, so I’d like to be given donation matching up to $50,000. This is something I value, and the company can claim tax benefits on the donations”

Once we start the job, we should do our best to perform exceptionally and then negotiate again. Most employers will be very unwilling to lose someone who’s already doing good work.

That being said, we must focus on developing strong skills and kick ass in our work - the best marketing is word-of-mouth - employers seeking us out rather than other way around.

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11 Ways To Put Ourselves In A Better Position In Any Job

1. Looking after ourselves and taking care of the basics

Basics include getting enough sleep, exercising, eating right, and maintaining close friendships as all of these make a big difference in our energy levels and productivity.

2. Looking after our mental and physical health

If we’re suffering from a mental health issue - anxiety, bipolar disorder, depression, etc. - then we must learn to cope with it. The same applies for our physical health - both of these are one of the best investments we can ever make for our own sake and our ability to help others.

3. Taking advantage of our psychology

We can train ourselves to feel happier and to prevent burnout, protect our mental health, perform better, and enjoy our lives more. Here are some techniques:

• Rate our happiness at the end of each day - this will allow us to become more self-aware and track our progress over time.

• Have a gratitude journal and write down 3 things we’re grateful for at the end of each day, and why they happened.

• Learn basic cognitive behaviour therapy, such as ABCD which can be done at the end of each day.

• Practice mindfulness or meditation.

• Do something each day, like donating to charity, giving a compliment, or helping someone at work.

• Practice active constructive responding.

• Adopt the growth mindset and believe that we can improve our abilities.

4. Save money

We should save enough money to comfortably live for at least 6 (ideally 12) months if we had no income for a while. The standard advice is also to save about 15% of our income for retirement. Once we are saving for both, we can move on to the next step.

5. Surround ourselves with great people

Our friends set a behaviour we see as normal (social norms), and thus directly influence how we feel (through emotional contagion). They can also directly teach us new skills and introduce us to new people. Our connections are also a major source of personalised, up-to-date information that is never published. If we want to start a new project or hire someone, our connections are the best place to start, because we already know them.

Our connections are even more important if we care about social impact because they are also a platform for advocacy, because we can persuade people in our network of important ideas and help set the new social norms, spreading positive behaviour.

It’s very useful to know many people in different areas so that we can find diverse perspectives and opportunities as well as develop deeper connections with some allies who know us really well and can help us out when we have a hard time.

We should develop habits that will allow us to build such connections naturally, e.g. join groups that regularly meet or set aside our budget to take a different person to differ each month.

6. Do what we can to become more productive

• Set up systems to track all our small tasks

• Do a 5min review at the end of each day (can include journaling, gratitude, happiness tracker, etc)

• Each week, perform a review of our key goals and plan out the rest of the week

• Batch our time (e.g. do all meeting in one or two days, then block out the rest of the time for focused work)

• Build a regular daily routine, which we can use to complete plenty of other tasks automatically such as exercise

• Use motivation techniques, like Beeminder

• Set up system to take care of day-to-day tasks to free up our attention, like eating the same thing for breakfast every day

• Block social media during work hours

7. Learn how to learn

Spaced repetition techniques can help us memorise certain things faster, such as foreign words (try Ankisrs.net for making flashcards and memrise.com for pre-prepared cards).

Can also join a course on Coursera.org called Learning How To Learn to learn more techniques.

8. Become more rational

Being able to think well and make good decisions is especially important if we want to engage with the complex challenges of making the world a better place. Becoming more rational involves building up better habits of thinking.

9. Teach ourselves useful skills

Rather than learning on the side, look for people who can give us feedback that we can then incorporate into our work or side projects. Some useful skills that are highly recommended include:

• Persuasion and negotiation

• Data analysis

• Communication (esp. writing)

• Management

• Programming

• Analysis and problem-solving

Having one impressive achievement is also more useful for opening doors than several ordinary achievements, so we should focus on that.

It’s also useful to have an unusual combination of skills and become the best person within that niche. E.g. being fairly good at jokes, drawing cartoons, and knowing about the business world.

Research shows that jobs that require both mathematical and social skills were among the fastest growing since 1980.

10. Consider changing city

If we can’t find what we’re looking for where we live, we should be open to changing cities as certain cities might have more relevant opportunities.

11. Become an expert and innovator

Expertise in established areas takes 10 to 30 years of focused practice to build, depending on the area. It's also believed that most people can improve at most skills with practice, so even if we can’t reach expert levels, we can still improve a great deal. The best option, however, is to practice in areas where we already have talent (which we can find by exploring lots of different areas - it will be the one where we improve the fastest).

To find more about how to make creative contributions to a field, check out “Originals” by prof. Adam Grant.

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How to compare different careers?

• If we’re early in our career, it’s best to place greater importance on career capital rather than on role-impact, so that we would be able to find plenty of opportunities to invest in ourselves. If we are later in our career, we should place less importance on career capital and more on making an impact.

• The more uncertain we are about the long run, the more we should prioritise flexible career capital (something that’s useful in many different roles) over narrow career capital.

• The more altruistically-minded we are, the less weight we will need to place on the supportive conditions relative to other factors.

• The personal fit is potentially the most important factor because it can improve everything else.

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