Careers decisions are highly individual, so there are many questions we can’t easily help with. We aim to focus on career questions that are more widely relevant. To answer the questions we tackle, we draw on:

• Expert interviews — you can listen to over 60 examples of these interviews on our podcast, and also see the results of some anonymous interviews, and our annual survey. Our first pass on many questions involves synthesising what several experts say on the question.
• Academic literature — we aim to draw on academic literature where it’s available, such as the literature on existential threats, the distribution of productivity in different fields, and how to make good decisions. We’re also affiliated with some academic partners.
• Advising our readers — we’ve given one-on-one advice to over 1,000 people since 2011, many of whom we’re still in touch with. This gives us a sense of what mistakes are common, as well as some indication of how decisions play out over time.

It’s not usually possible to confidently answer the kinds of questions we tackle. However, we do our best to synthesise the sources of evidence we draw on, using our research principles. We also aim to highlight the key aspects of our reasoning so that readers can make their own assessments.

The topics we tackle are complex, and in the past we’ve noticed people interpreting our advice in ways we didn’t intend. Here are some points to bear in mind before diving into our advice.

• We want our writing to inform people’s views, but only in proportion to the likelihood that we are correct. Given that, it’s important to keep in mind that we’ve been wrong before and we’ll be wrong again. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these issues, but we still have a lot to learn. Our positions often change every couple of years, and due to the nature of the questions we take on we’re rarely more than about 70% confident in our answers. You should try to strike a balance between what we think and your previous position, depending on the strength of the arguments and how much you already knew about the topic.

• It’s extremely difficult to give universally applicable career advice. The most important issue here is that which option is best for you depends a huge amount on your skills and circumstances, and the specific details of the opportunity. So, while we might highlight path A more than path B, the best opportunities in path B will often be better than the typical opportunities in path A. Moreover, your personal circumstances could easily mean the best option for you is in path B. So, treat the specific options we mention as an aid for compiling your personal list of career ideas. Also keep in mind that many issues in career choice are a matter of balancing opposing considerations — for instance, if we say people put too much emphasis on X, there will usually be some readers who put too little emphasis on X, and need to hear the opposite advice.

• Our advice is aimed at a particular audience: namely, people with college degrees who want to make having a positive impact (from an impartial perspective) the main focus of their careers, especially in the problem areas we most recommend; who live in rich, (for the most part) English-speaking countries; and who want to take an analytical approach to their career. At any given moment many people need to focus on taking care of their own lives, and we don’t think anyone should feel guilty if that’s the case. Certain parts of our advice, such as our list of priority paths, are especially aimed at people who are unusually high achieving. In general, the more similar you are to our core audience, the more useful the advice will be, although much of what we write is useful to anyone who wants to make a difference.

• Treat increasing your impact as just one long-term goal. Working on the world’s most pressing problems is among the most worthwhile challenges we can imagine, though it can also be overwhelming. Bear in mind, 80,000 Hours is about how to maximise your impact, and this can make it sound like we don’t care about other goals. However, the team sees increasing our impact as just one important goal among several in our lives, which means we often do things that aren’t optimal from the perspective of doing good. Indeed, even if your only goal was to have an impact, to do that it’s vital to do something you can stick with for years — and this means taking care of your personal priorities as well.

• Aim for steady progress rather than perfection. It can take a long time to work out how to factor the ideas we cover into your own plans and find the right opportunity. Along the way, because there’s always more that could be done, it can be easy to become overly perfectionist, get caught up with comparisons, and never be satisfied. When using our advice, the aim is not to find the (unknowable and unattainable) perfect option, or have more impact than other people. Rather, focus on making steady progress towards the best career that’s practical for you given your constraints.

• Older articles on the site are less likely to reflect our current views, so check their publication date. We also aim to keep this key ideas page up to date as the canonical source of advice, and to flag older articles when our views have changed, though we have hundreds of pages of content, so we don’t catch everything.

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