#587 80,000 hours with Benjamin Todd (A Career Well Spent Series)

0:00Benjamin Todd:The things that people are passionate about when young, it tends to be the same as what everyone else is passionate about. And you're getting led into the most competitive areas where it's then harder to get all the other things that matter for being satisfied.

0:12Squiggly Careers Hosts:We are going to be talking about your book, 8 ,000 Hours, and probably not just the book, but also the work that has gone into it.

0:19Benjamin Todd:You could be super passionate about art, but if you have a terrible boss, you're going to end up pretty miserable, even if it's in your dream field. passion follows from mastering valuable skills because then you get that sense of competence you also get the bargaining power to get all the other aspects of a filling career that you want kind of motto i suggest instead is do what matters or build valuable skills and apply

0:42Squiggly Careers Hosts:them to meaningful problems what are the problems in the world that you choose to work in and how can you use your time to solve them

0:55Squiggly Careers Hosts:hi i'm helen from the squiggly careers podcast and you are listening to the last episode of our summer series where we decided to focus on what does it mean to have a career well spent sarah and i thought whilst we've got our reflections we'd rather get some insights with some experts so over the month we've been talking to four different people to get some insights on purpose, longevity, building the right relationships, spending your time on the right things and today's conversation which is going to be about how do we make sure that we are doing the work that matters most to us. What does it mean to do good work?

1:36Squiggly Careers Hosts:And for that conversation you are going to hear me in discussion with Benjamin Todd, the author and founder of 80 ,000 hours and Benjamin's work is really about asking ourselves what does it mean to have fulfilling work what are some of the questions we should be asking what are some of the reflections we should have in terms of where we're spending our time and what we're working on and where can we all make a bigger difference I think this is a brilliant end to the series I would love your reflections on today's conversation and on the things that you've heard over the series and overall please send them our way we're just Helen and Sarah at squigglycareers.com but for now let's get started with my conversation with Benjamin.

2:19Squiggly Careers Hosts:So welcome Benjamin to the podcast where we're going to be talking about your book 8 ,000 Hours and probably not just the book but also the work that has gone into it that has led to the book and the insights and how they connect to Squiggly Careers.

2:32Benjamin Todd:Thanks yeah great to be here.

2:34Squiggly Careers Hosts:So before we get into 8 ,000 Hours how we make a difference with our time, how it connects to squiggly careers, all that stuff. Can you just give us a bit of an overview of your squiggly career so far and how it's led to the book?

2:46Benjamin Todd:Yeah, sure. I mean, my career was, I mean, maybe it wasn't that squiggly in that I was a student at Oxford and I was wondering what to do with my own life. And yeah, I mean, actually, I mean, the longest story I was, as I was involved with this community called Giving What We Can, which is a group of people who all pledged to give 10 % of their income to life to charity, whichever charities they think are most effective. And so we were all there really interested in how can we make a difference more effectively. And we just realized these ideas applied to our time as well as our money. And I ended up meeting Will McCaskill, who was then a philosophy PhD student as well.

3:27Benjamin Todd:And he was also asking a lot of the same questions. So we, yeah, we kind of, we didn't really feel like anyone else was asking the questions quite in the same way that motivated us so we started doing our own research into which careers we could make the biggest difference in and yeah we gave a talk in Oxford and I think about 25 people came and then about five of them ended up like totally changing their life plans after that and they said we should start an organization based on the ideas so um I actually ended up working full-time straight after I graduated and then was CEO of the organization for 10 years um so just kind of did that one thing and then yeah after that then I've now I've been kind of I I handed over that role in 2021 um or 2022 and now after that I've had more of like a portfolio kind of thing doing writing and some consulting and research and things like that.

4:27Squiggly Careers Hosts:I do think that being CEO of a growing organization, it is just like the role changes all the time. So even though you're doing the same role, your skills, your network, your knowledge is constantly updating to do that role. So I want to talk a bit about a statement and it connects actually to the start of Sarah and my work on Squiggly Careers. So back in 2013, that's when we started our business. We, I guess we were seeing it's like early days of Instagram and we were seeing a lot of posts on social media that had had those like love your job do what you love follow your passion and our premise was that's a bit trite and actually if people are going to connect to something they care about at work there are a set of skills and actions they need to take like this doesn't just happen and in reading your work I think you have a similar I don't know frustration with the whole follow your passion advice but I think your perspective on it is slightly different because of the context of your work about helping people use their time to do good and why the whole follow your passion thing is going to take people down the wrong path can you explain your because it's not just frustration it's database right you've done a lot of research and a lot of data around why that doesn't lead to the best kind of outcomes for people.

5:43Squiggly Careers Hosts:Can you talk us through it? Because I found it fascinating when I was reading.

5:46Benjamin Todd:Well, so we talk about a survey of Canadian students in the book where they were asked what their greatest passions were and they said dance and ice hockey.

5:55Squiggly Careers Hosts:Yeah.

5:56Benjamin Todd:And then 90 % said sport, art or music, which makes complete sense. But only 3 % of jobs are in Canada in those fields. And this illustrates that, you know, the things that people are passionate about when young, it tends to be the same as what everyone else is passionate about and they're often not that relevant to jobs and you're getting led into the most competitive areas where it's then harder to get all the other things that matter for um being satisfied like um just you know working with people who you find supportive not having a terrible boss because you could be working in your like you could be super passionate about art but if you have a terrible boss at the gallery then you're going to end up pretty miserable even if um it's in your like dream field yeah

6:43Squiggly Careers Hosts:yeah and almost setting people up for success like in that example i remember reading that in the book about but people following their passions but every lots of other people have the same passion and you're not necessarily creating the best opportunity there's a i'm going to see if i can find it now it's one oh oh my gosh i actually got to the exact page i wanted to in your book i don't know if you remember this but but the long-term career satisfaction part of the what What did you, Kate, if we, your formula for long-term satisfaction, which I thought this is a much better, a much more constructive way about thinking about what does it take to have a job you enjoy over the long term.

7:18Squiggly Careers Hosts:I won't put you to the test, so you have to do it. I'll read it out because I found it quite a useful way. Our listeners love like practical things that they could almost like, you know, models they can reflect on. And so the first thing you'd said, there's like four things that lead to long-term career satisfaction. so it's career capital um your skills connections and your immediate impact which is the pressing problems i might come back to pressing problems in a moment uh pressing problems so i guess that's where you can make a difference and the amount of difference that you can make and then there was supportive conditions so that's like the bad boss at the gallery thing so you want to have engaging work supportive colleagues and how does it fit with your goals outside of work and then the last one the last ingredient here is personal fit so what are your drivers and we would also probably talk about values there the things which the things that motivate and drive people your track record and I liked that as a I quite like a formula and I like a matrix it's just how my brain works but it made me think about follow your purpose or follow your passion probably is it might get me to something that is energizing but I don't think it helps me to take actions that are effective.

8:25Squiggly Careers Hosts:Whereas when I, if I was to write down your formula and put things underneath it, I would be able to see where have I got, like if I was to sort of red, amber, green them, I'd be like, oh, my career capital is probably green. I've got some good stuff there, but immediate impact, I think I haven't really reflected on what are the pressing problems that I could be solving with that capital. And so I think, I think it's a really helpful way to kind to audit your current state satisfaction and what you might need to change and i mentioned the long term problems like the pressing problems um and there is another bit in the book where you talk about like and you know forgive me and correct me if i'm getting it wrong but the most pressing problems in the world right now from your perspective where actually if you want to make a significant difference putting some of your time effort money energy towards solving these problems would be where it is best spent is that a fair reflection of the three yeah like

9:22Benjamin Todd:we so we talk about how to make more impact with your career yeah and i think i mean what normally people think of as an impactful career is just they think of the job title and they think well nurses doctors teachers social workers those are the jobs that make a difference and then there's like the corporate careers that are kind of maybe neutral and then there's like bad careers like

9:45Squiggly Careers Hosts:corporate career is neutral i spent a long time in a corporate career i mean some people would

9:49Benjamin Todd:say they're like mildly good and some you know but they're not normally what we think of as like social impact careers like the ones that do good yeah um you know and then there's like working in big oil or something which is bad um and that's pretty much that's like pretty much the scope of options but i think it's like much more about what you do in the role than the job title itself and in particular we think the most important driver of your impact is just what problem you focus on in the first place and that's another again like normally if you if you went to like a careers advisor or a mentor and said well I really want to have a big impact they would say basically just follow your passion like you know if should I work on climate change or health or education or changing like improving career advice and people would just say do the one you're most passionate about like you can't really compare these things but I actually think that's that that decision is the thing that drives your impact the most um and so we talk about trying

10:48Squiggly Careers Hosts:to find problems that are big neglected and solvable and trying to find the one the ones

10:53Benjamin Todd:that do best on balance of those three that you might be able to work on yeah and then once you found those problems you can contribute to them in all kinds of different ways and um yeah we could come on to we can come on to that later yeah yeah okay so if you want to make an impact

11:08Squiggly Careers Hosts:then don't follow your passion actually think about what are the most pressing problems that you could work on in different ways to have that impact yeah and then what you're going to be best

11:19Benjamin Todd:at yes among those different options which i guess is that career capital like what the way that we

11:23Squiggly Careers Hosts:all might contribute to solving those problems would be different career capital is like the

11:26Benjamin Todd:skills you build over time which like improves your ability to contribute and then when it comes down to your shortlist of options I would say like choose based on personal fit okay okay

11:37Squiggly Careers Hosts:try to work out whether we can do this with my career whether this is going to be very exposing can we start with because in your book I found it um I don't know refreshingly clear and almost slightly worrying when you like very specifically outlined we think these are the three biggest problems right now um let's start with those would you mind talking them through for us and then we might have a think about how could somebody if I kind of just almost say well my career has been in this area generally these are the sort of skills that I've got because I was looking at them and I was like whoa they're quite big and then how could I connect my talents and experience to solving those might help people listen to think oh if I'm working on something that's very different to that today how could I make an impact and contribute to it so maybe let's start with the problems what do you think are the three most pressing problems in the world right

12:23Benjamin Todd:now yeah and i want to be clear like in the book we help people whatever your views you can use the framework scale neglectiveness and solvability to find the problems that make the most sense to you yeah um but i do also have an opinionated chapter where i give my own takes because i think people find that useful yeah but um but yeah these will be like these will be going more off into the deep end of it yeah like um so i mean very big picture i just think the most important thing going on right now is the rapid improvement of ai and what happens if you just project that forward a bit further like the current trends forward um i mean this is a huge topic but like if you got say ais that could do remote work jobs pretty much as well as humans that could have huge consequences in you know so there's many different ways to see this but essentially the economy now can't grow that fast because the number of people is fixed but if you can kind of create digital people then effectively the population can grow massively and we could end up having billions or tens of billions of ai workers and that means like economic growth could like rapidly accelerate and also if those AIs can do scientific research the number of scientific research researchers could increase like 100 times or more so the rate of scientific progress could also really speed up this may be like really transformational moment we're facing as a society when this might become possible for the first time um and so then my frame is like this is going to create all kinds of different problems that could arrive very soon like in the next five or ten years we could we could start seeing some of these things um and so then my my my thought is like okay well what are the the biggest and most neglected kind of things that will arise from um this this transformational moment if it happens and then there's like we have i mean we actually there's probably actually about on our full list on our website we maybe have like about 10 okay um but i like highlight three the most in the book and um yeah the first is engineered pandemics so it's possible for a pandemic to be much worse than any naturally caused ones and you know covid was actually like a very mild pandemic compared to even what's possible naturally and if ai speeds up scientific progress it might be possible to engineer viruses much sooner than it seems naturally.

15:07And yeah, I mean, we could go into

15:10Benjamin Todd:like why anyone would ever be released. But one thing I've been thinking of is, you know, we had mutually assured destruction with nuclear weapons. So you could get a state like North Korea saying, well, we have this super virus. If you ever invade us, we'll release it. That's one way it could happen um though and then also like there's lab leaks all the time so it might just get released by accident yeah um okay and then the second is concentration of power so there's several ways in which ai is very centralizing and could make it possible to um really concentrate power in either one country or even just a small number of companies much more than was possible in the past and this could be bad because then like that small group will dominate the future okay and then the third one which we actually rank first i'm doing them in reverse order is um loss of control of ai systems themselves so you know current ai they're trying to make it agentic which means it can like pursue long-term goals because an ai that you can just say like oh go run this business for me go and make me money is so much more useful than a chatbot where you have to kind of continually prompt it so that's what all the companies are trying to build um but if you have AIs that are capable of like if they're kind of like have human level intelligence but are capable of pursuing long-term goals then it's like it's possible for them to escape human control and there's there's a few reasons why you might almost expect that to happen

16:46Squiggly Careers Hosts:um which yeah I talk about in the book and and I know I found it fascinating because I think I'm not always that zoomed out. So just part of that reading that chapter in the book, I think it just helped me to sort of zoom out of some of the problems that I try to solve and then think, wow, these are really big, significant problems. And am I in any way spending time supporting them? But even just generally as a thought process, I think starting with what are the problems in the world that you choose to work in and how can you use your time to solve them? I think that is a very different career question to ask an answer than the one that, to your point, starts with what job title do I want or what jobs are available in my organisation or even what jobs are available in my function?

17:33Squiggly Careers Hosts:Because we see a lot of people end up getting stuck in a silo because of how they think about their development. Whereas I think starting with a problem, whether you're as significant as the ones that you're talking about needing solving or whether it's an industry problem, you know, it might not be as significant as the ones you talked about. but it's still it's still a slightly different way of thinking about your career to start with

17:51Benjamin Todd:the problem yeah and i'll try to kind of try out a framing that i don't know if i've quite managed to get stick but i kind of often think like internal versus external and i feel like a lot of careers advice is very internal focused it's like it's all about your strengths and preferences and interests and often a lot of careers advice almost sounds a bit like psychotherapy um like whereas another approach is much more external focused and it's more like okay like what actually matters trying things out seeing what's working um like testing things

18:32Squiggly Careers Hosts:and it's this more kind of like empirical approach and I think that is a big theme of the book is trying to get people to like, yeah, just get outside of their own heads a bit and their own

18:46Benjamin Todd:like, like self kind of focus and think like, what can I offer? And I would, I would argue that actually, you know, is, is actually a better way to make yourself happy as well. Um, and again, it kind of comes back to the, the follow your passion advice. Like in a way that's quite, um, it's quite limiting because it's like well what am I passionate about now and then like can I try and like find something out there in the world that like matches this this vision that I have but the the kind of motto I suggest instead is like so I sum it up as like do what matters or build valuable skills and apply them to meaningful problems and I think taking that that approach like it's getting you to think like what is actually helpful to what is actually helpful to other people and that both like is satisfying in itself because like helping helping others can be really meaningful but it also means you then get skills that actually are valuable which then means you also can get the personal the things that you want personally too so So yeah, like we would say like passion follows from mastering valuable skills because then you get that sense of competence and you also get the bargaining power to get all the other aspects of a fulfilling career that you want.

20:10Squiggly Careers Hosts:Yeah, I think sometimes when we talk about, so one of the things we talk to people about in the context of squiggly careers, and it starts in this sort of premise that in a squiggly career, your talents trump titles. So actually talents are sort of your currency in a squiggly career because they're going to take you to many different places. but within that what we talk about people is you want to create pull rather than push so push would be me saying you know I'm good at this I want to do that and it's kind of like I'm pushing myself onto Benjamin I want to do that whereas pull is much more this is a problem that I can see you the organization the industry is facing and this is how my ability can help to solve that and it's such a different way of people thinking about and I guess it does require a bit of both right so you do need the awareness of self so you do need a bit of the internal but you have to you have to attach that to the external to actually like create the opportunity

21:03Benjamin Todd:yeah I like that yeah and I was just trying to put my finger on like exactly what's the thing that how what exactly is the mindset shift that unlocks it but yeah I like I like the pull versus push framing um yeah if you go too far with the kind of external approach then you can end up doing something that like makes sense intellectually but you're not actually aligned with and then you burn out a couple of years later yeah so that's the risk of that approach um but in general i would say people are much too biased on the kind of wait so which way around were they for you the push approach um yeah yeah so people are more like well i want to

21:45Squiggly Careers Hosts:do this and i and i hear it i hear it quite a lot and they're like well i want to spend more time this is what i enjoy this is what i want to spend more time doing and my challenge is always well how does that help your manager how does that help your organization how does it help the industry like if you can't talk about how your talent solves a problem it's very hard for someone to sort of buy into you doing something different we find that particularly relevant when people want to do a pivot and I don't think that always has the filter like I was thinking of in your work I think it made me reflect on or what might be missing from some of the conversations that I have with people is what's your for good filter because I think when we talk to people we talk about what motivates and drives your values your strengths what gives you energy where do you have impact and there are some other skills but I don't think and I might I might see like oh what's what's a Benjamin question that I could bring into our work because at the moment I don't think I add a and like a for good filter and how could the work that you do make a difference beyond the team company and industry that you're in I don't think I provoke people to think about that and it's really made me think from your work oh that's that's missing from my work so I would like to sort of end with a last piece of advice on impact so I know we've gone into lots of different specifics but I'm thinking someone's here now and they're kind of inspired by a lot of what you said and then thinking or maybe I don't have a for good filter I have I've missed my for good filter and I want to do I want to do more good um I just kind of don't quite know where to start what would your advice be to that person who's going I definitely want to make more of a difference than I'm doing today what would your advice be to that individual about what they should do after listening to this