Most people think about doing good in the world in terms of the causes they care about — animal welfare, climate change, poverty. But the choice of cause is only one factor in maximizing your impact. An equally important factor is your choice of career, because this determines how much you can contribute to any cause you care about.
Most of us have been taught that the way to make a difference is to follow your passion. But when researchers studied the most effective altruists — people who are actually doing the most good in the world — they found that passion had little to do with it.
Most people think about doing good in terms of the actions they take — the causes they support, the donations they make, the volunteer hours they put in. But researchers who study effective altruism say there's a factor that dwarfs all of these in importance: career choice. The career you choose will determine how much money you have to give, what skills you develop, and what problems you're positioned to solve.
I say to people sometimes the biggest mistake that most people make in their career is never making a big mistake because they never take a chance. Um and if you just wait for sure things you basically never do anything. You don't ever make any big mistakes but you never do anything big.
I keep on getting laid off and losing jobs. What up with that? But you know, every time I do, it turns into something better. You know what I mean? So I wonder what this one gonna turn into.
Just statistically, and I can prove this to you, 50% of the time in your career you were overpaid, and 50% you were underpaid. And almost 0% of the time was it calibrated exactly?
I find that the key to getting a job is how social you are. Study done at Google. They put out a job opening 200 CVs within like 60 minutes. They shut it down. They bring in the 20 best candidates and 70% of the time the person they end up hiring has an internal advocate.
70% of the time the person they end up hiring has an internal advocate. So, one, a boss, if you're in your 50s, it doesn't matter if you're in your 50s or your 20s. The advice we would give your 22-year-old self, you got to make a bunch of calls.
I hadn't relied on those comedic chops in a long time. So to lean into that was something that felt new and fresh again for me, especially this late in my career, where the idea of doing a half-hour comedy was a challenge. I wanted to see if I could do it more than anything.
When you're in your income earning years, I find the US is still the best place. People in the US start from a position of yes. How do we how do we make money together? How do we do stuff together? And Europe is the best place to spend it.
You're never going to have as dense an opportunity or human capital pool as the one you're going to have in graduate school. smart, talented young people who are all looking to better themselves.
My generation was told that we could have it all. And that meant that you could have a career, a successful career and children and a family and a home. But sometimes I feel like perhaps the men weren't told that. And so the society wasn't told that.
if I reverse engineering my career, it's really been about normalizing disruptive technologies to make them more understood and to drive that mass adoption.
You have to be really careful when you reach that peak, as it's always cold, you're often alone, and there's only one direction to go. And it occurred to me right then and there that I didn't want to peak until the day before I die.
