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And that brings us to the second reason why your choice of career is so important: some careers give you the opportunity to do vastly more good for the world than others \u2014 to a much greater extent than people realise.<\/p>\n
In fact, we’ll argue that some career paths open to you likely have 10 or 100 or even 1,000 times more impact than others. And this makes it even more important to think hard about your career.<\/p>\n
Why do careers differ so much in impact?<\/p>\n
Table of Contents<\/p>
- 1<\/span> How to compare careers in terms of impact: a framework<\/a><\/li>
- 2<\/span> The compounding returns to finding the right career<\/a><\/li>
- 3<\/span> Why not to focus on cutting your carbon footprint (or other lifestyle changes)<\/a><\/li>
- 4<\/span> If such big differences exist, why are they not more widely appreciated?<\/a><\/li>
- 5<\/span> Read next<\/a>
- 5.1<\/span> Plus, join our newsletter and we’ll mail you a free book<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul><\/div>\n
<\/span>How to compare careers in terms of impact: a framework<\/h2>\n
We think the impact you can have in different careers is driven by three main factors:<\/p>\n
- \n
- How pressing the problems are<\/strong> that you focus on <\/li>\n
- The scale of the contribution<\/strong> the path lets you make to tackling those problems<\/li>\n
- Your personal fit<\/strong> for the path<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
In our experience, your options probably vary a great deal based on each of these three factors.<\/p>\n
This claim requires some argument. And when we first encountered these arguments, we were unsure they’d hold up. But over time we’ve come to believe that, despite the uncertainties involved, large differences really exist. We present the arguments in various articles throughout the site (especially in our advanced series<\/a>), but here is a brief summary of our bottom lines:<\/p>\n
- \n
- It’s usually assumed that you can’t compare the importance of different global issues, like climate change or education, and you should just do what you’re passionate about. But with rough estimates, you can show that some problems are much bigger than others<\/a>, and some are much more neglected than others. For example, climate change receives 100\u20131,000 times the resources of efforts to prevent a pandemic worse than COVID-19. The bigger and more neglected an issue is, the greater the chances that an additional person can have an impact. This means that by focusing on these big but unconventional issues \u2014 like engineered pandemics, AI alignment, or space governance \u2014 you can set yourself up to have a much bigger impact.<\/li>\n
- When we think of doing good with our careers, people often first think of becoming a doctor, teacher, or charity worker. But by being open to more indirect routes to impact, it’s often possible to contribute on a greater scale<\/a> \u2014 even if you’re not in a traditional social impact job. For instance, changing policy can allow you to influence hundreds of times more resources than most standard do-gooding careers.<\/li>\n
- The most productive people in a career tend to achieve far more than average<\/a>. So by applying the best ways to predict your fit<\/a>, exploring different paths, and investing in your skills early in your career, you can likely find something you’re much better at and increase your impact several times over.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
<\/span>The compounding returns to finding the right career<\/h2>\n
Given how they’re defined, the three factors multiply together<\/em> rather than merely add.<\/p>\n
If you can eventually find a problem that’s twice as big or neglected, make twice as big a contribution to it, and find a path where your personal fit for your job means your chances of success are twice as high, then (holding all else equal) you can expect to have eight times as much impact.<\/p>\n
One implication of this is that if a path scores near zero on one of the factors, then its overall impact is low. This means it’s very easy to ‘give up’ most of your impact by not paying attention to all the factors.<\/p>\n
But this also means that if you can make improvements on one dimension, it’ll multiply with improvements you make on the other dimensions.<\/p>\n
We think that, despite the huge uncertainties involved, some paths open to you are likely 10 or even 100 times more promising on each of these dimensions \u2014 making it plausible that you can have 100 to 1,000 times as much impact.<\/p>\n
In practice, it’s often not possible to find an option that’s better in every dimension. For instance, by changing the problem area you’re working on, you might have less confidence in your fit.<\/p>\n
There are also some reasons to be sceptical of claims of outsized differences that we’ve covered elsewhere<\/a> in the series<\/a>, such as regression to the mean and epistemic humility.<\/p>\n
All considered, however, we think it’s often achievable to find a path that is 10 times more impactful \u2014 and sometimes over 100 times<\/em> more impactful \u2014 than what you’re currently focused on.<\/p>\n
It’s easy to gloss over these differences. Intuitively, people often group careers into those that ‘help’ (e.g. doctor, charity worker, teacher), those that are neutral (e.g. accountant), and those that are unethical (e.g. oil baron).<\/p>\n
This is driven by a common psychological bias known as scope neglect<\/a>. Helping 100 people feels about as satisfying as helping 1,000, even though the latter is 10 times more impactful.<\/p>\n
But if, even among careers that help, some are 10 or 100 times more impactful than others, it’s vital to try to overcome our biases and take these differences seriously. It could mean saving 100 times more lives, reducing carbon emissions 100 times as much, or making 100 times more progress reducing the biggest risks facing humanity.<\/p>\n
These differences may not be the only ethically relevant factors<\/a>, and everyone has priorities in life besides moral ones, but they do really matter.<\/p>\n
Here’s another way to see their significance: if it’s possible to find an option that’s 100 times higher impact than the option you currently think is best, then 10 years in that higher-impact path would achieve what could have otherwise taken you 1,000 years<\/em>. You could then spend the next 30 years doing whatever makes you happiest, and still have done far more to help than you otherwise would have.<\/p>\n
Most importantly, if you can help 100 people instead of 10, that matters a lot to the 90 extra people.<\/p>\n
As a lower bound, our article on ways anyone can make a difference, no matter their job<\/a> shows it really is possible for typical college graduates in rich countries to save the lives of tens of other people over their careers by donating to carefully chosen charities. And if you’re also<\/em> willing to choose an impactful career, we think it’s possible to do substantially more good. Few other decisions in life have such big implications. Few other decisions in life have such big implications.<\/p>\n
\n<\/span>Why not to focus on cutting your carbon footprint (or other lifestyle changes)<\/h2>\n
At this point, you might be wondering: what about the common advice to focus on changing our behaviour and personal consumption, such as by cycling to work instead of driving, buying ethical products, and reducing our carbon footprint?<\/p>\n
One problem is that many of these actions achieve very little. Using a canvas bag instead of a plastic one every day for three years would reduce your CO2 emissions by about 0.01 tonnes. In contrast, a single transatlantic flight<\/a> emits about 160 times as much. And the non-climate environmental impacts of manufacturing the canvas bag, such as on water pollution, may well be worse.<\/p>\n
The bigger problem is that even if you took this to the extreme and decided to live in the woods and never emit any CO2 ever again, you’d only be removing the emissions of one person: less than 15 tonnes per year in the US and about 7 in Europe.<\/p>\n
By contrast, donating 10% of a $70,000 salary to purchase carbon credits \u2014 which cost under $100 per tonne in the EU and create a legal obligation for companies to emit less \u2014 would reduce emissions by 70 tonnes per year, about 7 times as much as entirely eliminating your personal emissions.<\/p>\n
And it’s probably possible to do a lot better. Founders Pledge<\/a>, a nonprofit that provides philanthropic advice, has researched which charities most effectively reduce CO2 emissions<\/a>. They’re sceptical about many of the options, but believe that exceptional organizations, such as the Clean Air Task Force<\/a>, which advocates for greater investment in neglected clean energy technology, have reduced emissions for under $10 per tonne in the past. At that rate, donating 10% of your income would reduce emissions by over 700 tonnes of CO2 per year \u2014 70 times more than your personal emissions.<\/p>\n
This example is for a 10% donation, but if you use your career to work directly on those solutions, that’s worth a lot<\/em> more to the cause than $7,000 per year. So, by changing your career, it’s most likely possible to reduce CO2<\/sub> emissions by hundreds or even thousands of times as much as you would by changing your lifestyle \u2014 making that decision hundreds of times more important to get right.<\/p>\n
The third problem is that the issues you can affect with your consumption may not be the most crucial to focus on in the first place. We’ve shown elsewhere<\/a> that a donation of $7,000 per year can also save about two lives from malaria. And we’ve also argued there are even bigger and more neglected global problems<\/a> than climate change. But many of these issues \u2014 like preventing an engineered pandemic \u2014 won’t be affected by what you happen to buy in a supermarket (or not).<\/p>\n
If you want to make a difference, the most important decision to get right is your choice of career, followed by where to donate and what ideas to spread, followed by volunteering, and finally followed by what you choose to consume.<\/p>\n
But most discussions of making a difference do the reverse<\/em>: they start with the idea that “every little bit helps,” when in reality, every little bit only helps a little<\/em>. If you have the option, focus on the big decisions first.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/span>If such big differences exist, why are they not more widely appreciated?<\/h2>\n
It might sound unbelievable that some careers open to you might do 100 or 1,000 times as much good for the world as others, especially while being similarly satisfying. We certainly aren’t 100% positive this is right, but we’ve become more confident since we first heard the arguments.<\/p>\n
If these differences really exist, though, why are they not more widely known?<\/p>\n
We think it’s because our common-sense understanding of what it means to live ethically stems from hundreds \u2014 if not thousands \u2014 of years ago, and it hasn’t caught up with the power that many of us now have.<\/p>\n
The massive economic and technological bounty of the Industrial Revolution means that today, many ordinary citizens of rich countries have what would have been kinglike wealth and power in previous centuries.<\/p>\n
![\"World](\"https:\/\/80000hours.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/80K_worldGDP-year_V3-1.jpg\")
<\/p>\nOur generation can:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Wreck the climate for thousands of years, or build a sustainable economy that supports a greater standard of living for all.<\/li>\n
- Continue to expand factory farming, or eradicate it.<\/li>\n
- Allow technologies like nuclear weapons to end civilisation, or usher in a future better than we can easily imagine.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
The above mostly did not hold as recently as the 1940s. Looking forward, there’s a good case to be made that these crucial technological junctures will make the next century among the most important in history<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Our aim is to help people like you understand your new power. If you have the good fortune to have options for how you’ll spend your career, you can help change the course of history on these vital issues.<\/p>\n
This is not an easy path, but it is a worthwhile one.<\/p>\n
Finding the best path for you<\/a> requires exploring, investing in yourself, taking risks, and making hard tradeoffs.<\/p>\n
We’ve often felt racked with uncertainty about what to do, and overwhelmed at the scale of the issues. But we’ve also found meaning and satisfaction in our efforts, especially as more and more people have united around them.<\/p>\n
We still have a lot to learn, but we hope that by sharing what we’ve learned so far we can help you avoid the mistakes we’ve made and speed you along your path to an impactful career.<\/p>\n
You have 80,000 hours in your career. Make them count.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Read next<\/h2>\n
This article is part of our foundations series. See the full series<\/a>, or keep reading:<\/p>\n
- When we think of doing good with our careers, people often first think of becoming a doctor, teacher, or charity worker. But by being open to more indirect routes to impact, it’s often possible to contribute on a greater scale<\/a> \u2014 even if you’re not in a traditional social impact job. For instance, changing policy can allow you to influence hundreds of times more resources than most standard do-gooding careers.<\/li>\n
- The scale of the contribution<\/strong> the path lets you make to tackling those problems<\/li>\n
- How pressing the problems are<\/strong> that you focus on <\/li>\n
- 2<\/span> The compounding returns to finding the right career<\/a><\/li>
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