"Earning to give" is highly unlikely to work unless you're a very strong willed individual (in my opinion). We're social animals, so if you decide to focus on a "high earning" area you land-up working with others who are focused on their earnings. This leads to a focus on life-style (as life-style always expands to meet earnings), relative position in the group, and other values. Over time we tend to adjust our values to the social group we're in, so values other than "making a social difference" are likely.<p>Clayton Christensen's book "How will you measure your life" mentions this social dynamic (<a href="http://www.claytonchristensen.com/books/how-will-you-measure-your-life/" rel="nofollow">http://www.claytonchristensen.com/books/how-will-you-measure...</a>) - lots of his peers started out meaning to make a difference but got sucked in. It's a fantastic book for thinking about your life in a well-rounded manner, and not too long!<p>Aside: Did anyone else think the title was odd? I initially thought it meant "how to have a good career", when it means "how to make a difference to the world".
I'm disappointed by the negativity here. The full article is nuanced and encourages thinking about many aspects of one of the most important decisions we'll each make. Then the replies here grab into one aspect and say "what about the others". They're right, we have to consider the others too, but may of us go through life without seriously considering <i>any</i> of these aspects. If you took this article merely as a prod to reflect on your decisions using your own values, it could be great even without ever moving you an inch towards charity.<p>Persinally I find self reflection like this challenging to even consider, my mind tends to flinch away from the thought. Thinking about what would be best make me focus on what might currently be wrong. At least reading this article makes me consider my options explicitly instead of my usual implicit choice.<p>(I signed up for the newsletter.)
This is a Show HN because the article we link to is just one part of a much larger career guide (we checked with the mod). <a href="http://80000hours.org/career-guide/" rel="nofollow">http://80000hours.org/career-guide/</a><p>There’s 8 articles, each with a video, and a planning tool at the end. You can get it delivered over 9 weeks by email. It’s the main thing we’ve worked on building since Feb, and grew out of an in-person workshop that was changing lots of careers.<p>The guide aims to help people switch into careers that have a greater social impact. It covers what we’ve learned in five years of research at Oxford, including:<p>1. Why you can sometimes do more good by taking a higher earning career, like software engineering, and donating to effective charities.<p>3. How any reader of HN could save hundreds of lives in their career.<p>3. How to work out which global problem is most pressing.<p>4. What psychology says about how to find a satisfying job and make good career decisions.<p>See the full guide: <a href="http://80000hours.org/career-guide/" rel="nofollow">http://80000hours.org/career-guide/</a>
One suggestion I have is to come up with tools to think about the variance in future earnings.<p>Let me be more specific: if a person makes $300k/year they may be willing to give away 50% if they know it is going to last 40 years. However, if the job could go away tomorrow and they may end up with a $100k job for 40 years, they will want to have saved some of the money for themselves.<p>Is there a good framework to think about that situation?<p>I read a statistic that 50% of Americans will find themselves earning in the top 10% at least one year of their lives.<p>We just don't know how long it lasts. When should one give it away?<p>p.s. great superman comic in the beginning. makes the point very succinctly.
I think it was a good way to introduce the notion of living for positive impact. And it is certainly helpful for people who feel like they "aren't doing anything good with their lives" to see ways in which they maybe already are, or could be.<p>That said, it felt a bit "all of nothing" in the sense of picking a single strategy for impact rather than trying to be impactful all around. There is probably a place the the "7 habits of highly impactful people" piece somewhere.<p>The final bit that I'd suggest would be having an impact without drawing attention to yourself. A number of really great people I know do wonderful things without having to deal with the issues of public accolades. A friend of mine who became wealthy though Sun stock and good financial management of it, made the mistake of donating directly to an organization he wished to support. And while the donation was not considered "large" by him, it was the largest donation this organization had received so they put a big thank you in their newsletter. And that resulted in literally thousands of other organizations pestering this poor guy for donations. Ever since that time he has made is impact less direct and harder to trace back to him.<p>It walks a very fine line though, between a person believing what they are doing is helping and outside validation that it actually is. Fixing that communication channel would be big win for getting more participation.
The article starts of suggesting a strategy of working and then donating your money, referencing Bill Gates and a Google software developer as examples.<p>This strategy is basically, vacuum up a bunch of money and then pour it into doing good. But necessarily a lot of this money gets pulled out of places where it would do good, even if that good is simply putting food on the table of a poor family.<p>If you're an engineer or someone who creates things, it's probably actually creating value, not just moving it around and siphoning off some of it. But often that value you create is harmful: the Google engineers, for example, probably spend a lot of time working on ads, user data collection, partnerships with banks, etc.<p>And with CEOs like Bill Gates, the harm is much clearer. The money that has been spent by for example the US government, on Microsoft products could have been spent on building equivalent Linux products for a fraction of the cost, and the remainder spent directly on help programs. Bill Gates isn't some savior because he inserted himself as a middle man in the process of spending money on good. Sure, he's putting money into good now, but only after taking money <i>out</i> of good for decades, spending a lot of it on himself, and still keeping a sizable chunk for himself.<p>This applies to almost any rich philanthropist. They look good when they donate billions of dollars, but the world would have been better off if they hadn't amassed those billions of dollars in the first place. I'm not impressed when people decide to do a little good after building a fortune on a mountain of skulls.
I'm flagging this because of the terrible popup. If I submit a (fake) email, it <i>still</i> won't let me read the article, but rather redirect me to a page demanding <i>even more</i> info!
Its ironic that the Superman comic, where in the end Superman says "this seems monotonous" also is the perfect critique of the article. The qualitative, non-quantifiable parts of what we do for a living are equally important. Who would want to be Superman if he turned a crank, at a constant speed, every day of his life?
If people are looking for the full video course list here it is:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-BRtcBm4Yj6ZpOG49cbHut0gtuCEVXfk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-BRtcBm4Yj6ZpOG49cbH...</a>
This is why I'm getting into promoting colonization of Mars and beyond. All human life could be wiped out forever by a single catastrophic event which is surely more important than most other problems.
Summary:<p>Three steps to a high impact job:<p>1. Work out which problems are most pressing – those that are big in scale, neglected and tractable – as we covered in part 2b.<p>2. Choose the most effective approaches. Think broadly by considering research, advocacy and earning to give as well as direct work, and choose the best approach for the problem. That’s what we covered in this article.<p>3. Within those approaches, find a position with excellent personal fit and job satisfaction – something where you have the chance to excel, the work is engaging, you like your colleagues, it meets your basic needs and it fits with the rest of your life. Otherwise you’ll burn out and have much less impact. We’ll explain how to work out where you have the best personal fit in part 4.<p>If you do this, you’ll be doing what contributes, and have all the ingredients of a personally fulfilling career too. In this way, there’s less trade-off between doing what’s best for the world and doing what’s best for you than there first seems.