You’ll spend about 80,000 hours working in your career: 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 40 years. So how to spend that time is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make.
If you could make your career just 1% more impactful, or 1% more enjoyable, it would be worth spending up to 1% of your career figuring out how to do so. That would be five months of full-time work — or 800 hours. Fortunately, this guide only takes about four.
For instance, we recognised that some of the highest-impact people in history came from different fields. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a pastor who shaped the US civil rights movement. Marie Curie was a scientist who pioneered life-saving medical technologies through her research into radioactivity.
One of the most important things we’ve learned is that if lots of people already work on an issue, the best opportunities to help are more likely to have already been taken. But that means the most common and popular issues to work on, like health and education in rich countries, are precisely not the ones where you can have the biggest impact — in...
We’ve been wrong before and we’ll be wrong again. While we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these issues, we still have a lot to learn. Our positions have changed over the 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...
Glasp is a social web highlighter that people can highlight and organize quotes and thoughts from the web, and access other like-minded people’s learning.