How to have a positive impact with your career (with Benjamin Hilton)
Spencer Greenberg and Benjamin Hilton discuss high-impact careers, emphasizing that choosing the right problem, solution, and personal fit are crucial. They explore concepts like career capital, leverage, and the "Scale, Solvability, Neglectedness" framework, while also touching on epistemic habits and economic growth.
Deep Dive Analysis
15 Topic Outline
Core Essence of an Impactful Career
The Importance of Problem Choice and Impact Spread
Quantifying the Spread of Solutions within Problem Areas
Understanding Personal Fit in Career Decisions
Career Capital and the Shift to 'Getting Good at Something'
Identifying Truly Transferable and Cross-Domain Skills
The Role of Passion and Meaning in Career Satisfaction
Balancing Impact with Personal Well-being in Career Choices
The Scale, Solvability, Neglectedness (SSN) Framework
Misinterpretations and Limitations of the SSN Formula
Leverage in Careers: Definition and Examples
Critique of 'Updating Too Much' Based on Evidence
The Case of Minimum Wage and Unemployment
Critique of Economic Growth for its Own Sake
Navigating Economic Growth with Fewer Harms
6 Key Concepts
Problem Spread
This refers to the vast differences in potential impact across various problem areas one might choose to work on. The choice of problem can lead to orders of magnitude difference in the good one achieves, even compared to other very important issues.
Solution Spread
Within a specific problem area, there are many different ways to tackle it, and the effectiveness of these solutions can vary dramatically. Choosing a highly effective solution can multiply one's impact significantly, even within the same cause.
Personal Fit
This is a multiplier on the impact of one's career, representing how good an individual will be at a particular solution or role. It's influenced by existing skills and aptitudes, and can be improved through learning, skill-building, and exploration.
Career Capital
This concept encompasses the skills, network, and credentials accumulated through a job that help an individual secure or perform better in future roles. 80,000 Hours has shifted its focus from broad 'transferable capital' to 'getting good at something' specific and relevant to one's long-term impact goals.
Scale, Solvability, Neglectedness (SSN) Framework
A conceptual framework, derived from the chain rule in calculus, used to estimate the marginal utility of additional effort in solving a problem. It breaks down impact into three multiplicative factors: the importance of the problem (Scale), how effectively resources can solve it (Solvability), and how few resources are currently applied to it (Neglectedness).
Leverage (Career)
This refers to strategies that multiply the impact of one's chosen solution, analogous to physical or financial leverage. Examples include earning to give, working within large institutions (like government or major companies), developing and spreading ideas, or mobilizing others.
13 Questions Answered
The core essence involves critically evaluating the choice of problem one aims to solve, as the impact potential can vary by orders of magnitude between different cause areas.
No, not everyone should, because other factors like the chosen solution and personal fit for that solution also matter significantly, and these can outweigh the 'problem spread' for many individuals.
The biggest 'bang for the buck' often comes from focusing on personal fit, as even among top cause areas and solutions, an individual's unique skills and aptitudes can create a large spread in their potential impact.
Personal fit is about how good you will be at a particular role or solution, and it can be improved by building relevant skills and by exploring different options to see where you naturally succeed and get positive feedback.
Career capital includes skills, networks, and credentials that help in future jobs. 80,000 Hours has shifted focus from broad 'transferable career capital' to emphasizing 'getting good at something' specific and directly relevant to one's intended impact.
While some subtle cross-domain skills like managing mental health, forming healthy habits, and effective communication are broadly helpful, 80,000 Hours suggests that focusing on highly specific skills relevant to one's chosen impact area is generally more effective than generic transferable skills.
80,000 Hours advises against simply 'following your passion' as a primary guide, noting that people's predictions about what they'll be passionate about often don't correlate well with actual job satisfaction. Instead, factors like meaningfulness, good colleagues, and appropriate stress levels are more reliable for job satisfaction.
The SSN framework helps identify impactful work by suggesting that one should look for problems with large 'Scale' (do a lot of good if solved), high 'Solvability' (responsive to additional resources), and high 'Neglectedness' (few people or resources currently addressing it).
The SSN formula can mislead people if they try to use it for precise mathematical calculations with hard-to-estimate numbers, or if they fail to account for implicit assumptions like diminishing returns or the possibility of increasing returns in certain contexts.
Leverage in a career refers to finding ways to multiply the impact of one's chosen solution, such as earning money to fund others' work, influencing large institutions, developing widely applicable ideas, or mobilizing communities.
Yes, Benjamin Hilton believes pretty much everyone should aim for a high-leverage career because it can lead to significantly greater multipliers on impact, making it a crucial deciding factor for career paths recommended by 80,000 Hours.
People tend to update too much when their beliefs fluctuate wildly after hearing new information, especially in areas where conclusions are tricky or when they encounter compelling philosophical or first-principles arguments that seem airtight but may have hidden flaws.
Arguments against economic growth for its own sake include the massive increase in negative externalities like factory farming and the mistreatment of animals, and the heightened risks posed by advanced technologies (e.g., existential risks) that accompany technological progress driven by growth.
26 Actionable Insights
1. Choose High-Impact Problems
Focus your career on problems with the potential for orders of magnitude more impact, such as reducing existential risk, because the choice of problem significantly determines overall impact.
2. Prioritize Personal Fit
When making career decisions, prioritize roles where your skills and aptitudes are a strong match, as personal fit acts as a crucial multiplier on your potential impact.
3. Aim for High-Leverage Careers
Pursue career paths that offer significant multipliers on your impact, such as working in large institutions, developing ideas, or mobilizing others, because these roles magnify the good you can achieve.
4. Optimize Solution Effectiveness
Within any problem area, research and choose the most cost-effective interventions, as empirical data suggests the best solutions can be 50 times more effective than the median.
5. Prioritize Neglected Problems
Actively seek out problems or solutions that are highly neglected (few people or dollars working on them), as this often indicates a higher potential for marginal impact.
6. Use the SSN Framework
Evaluate potential problems or solutions using the Scale, Solvability, and Neglectedness framework to identify opportunities where your efforts can yield the greatest good.
7. Get Good at Something
Shift focus from accumulating broad “career capital” or transferable credentials to deeply mastering a specific skill, as becoming highly proficient in a relevant area is key to future success.
8. Build Skills and Explore
Improve your personal fit by actively building relevant skills and empirically exploring different roles to discover what you are genuinely good at and where you can have the most success.
9. Leverage Your Greatest Strengths
To achieve high levels of output and impact, focus on becoming exceptionally good at your greatest strengths, as this can lead to disproportionately large gains, especially in fields with uncapped potential.
10. Address Weakest Relevant Skills
Identify and improve the skills that are most relevant to your domain but are your weakest, because a low factor in a “product of factors” model can severely limit overall output.
11. Seek Deeply Meaningful Work
Choose a career that you find deeply meaningful, as psychological evidence suggests this is a key component of job satisfaction and can sustain motivation.
12. Balance Impact with Well-being
Strive to balance having a significant impact with maintaining a good personal life, as this approach prevents burnout and ensures long-term effectiveness, making it a sustainable path for more people.
13. Consider Earning to Give
If you can enter a high-earning career, consider donating a substantial portion of your income to highly effective interventions, as this can often achieve more impact than direct service.
14. Influence Large Institutions
Work within or influence large organizations (governments, NGOs, major companies) to direct their vast resources towards high-impact solutions, as this provides immense leverage.
15. Develop and Communicate Ideas
Focus on careers that involve developing and effectively communicating ideas, because a single impactful idea can be adopted and spread globally, creating massive leverage.
16. Train Others to Multiply Impact
Instead of solely performing a service yourself, train others to do it, as this multiplies your impact by enabling many more people to carry out beneficial actions.
17. Manage Mental Health Proactively
Prioritize mental health and learn techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to maintain a positive outlook, as this is a foundational skill for long-term success and happiness.
18. Develop Healthy Daily Habits
Learn to construct and maintain healthy daily habits, such as using “anchor habits” (attaching new habits to existing routines), to improve various domains of life and achieve consistent progress.
19. Cultivate Assertive Communication
Develop the ability to clearly and assertively communicate ideas, boundaries, and beliefs respectfully, as this is a fundamental life skill that aids in almost every domain.
20. Use Excitement as Startup Tiebreaker
When deciding between startup ideas, let genuine excitement be a tiebreaker, as it can provide the necessary stickiness and resilience to overcome the high likelihood of giving up.
21. Don’t Solely Follow Passion
Instead of relying on passion, empirically test what you are good at and what makes a job satisfying, as initial guesses about passion often don’t correlate with long-term satisfaction.
22. Avoid Over-Updating Beliefs
Be wary of changing your mind too much based on new evidence, especially in areas with conflicting information, to prevent beliefs from fluctuating wildly.
23. Be Skeptical of Generalizing Success
Resist the urge to over-generalize personal experiences (e.g., a diet that worked for you) as universally applicable, recognizing that what works for one person may not work for all.
24. Bound Updates from Arguments
When evaluating philosophical or first-principles arguments, bound the strength of your update by considering how much empirical evidence would be required to overturn it, preventing overconfidence in purely logical reasoning.
25. Use a ‘Halfway Update’ Heuristic
When presented with a convincing argument, initially update your beliefs only halfway, allowing time for reflection and seeking counter-arguments before fully integrating the new information.
26. Promote Cooperation for Growth
Recognize that unchecked economic growth can lead to significant negative externalities (e.g., factory farming, existential risks), and actively promote cooperation mechanisms (e.g., government regulation, altruistic career choices) to mitigate these harms.
6 Key Quotes
your choice of problem is really important. That is, if you want to go out in the world and help people, like what problem are you trying to solve? And the choice you make there really matters to how much impact you end up having.
Benjamin Hilton
The best things to do here are, I guess there's really, there's really two things. The first thing you can do is you can make your fit for something better by learning about it by building skills in an area. And the second thing you can do is you can go out and explore.
Benjamin Hilton
The rule of thumb is something like, where can I go where I will learn the most, that will be useful to solving a problem in the future?
Benjamin Hilton
I often think, and maybe this is slightly more controversial, that people update too much when they hear like philosophical or first principles arguments for things.
Spencer Greenberg
don't open your mind too much, your brain falls out.
Benjamin Hilton
I feel like it's often just more like, great, I just don't have anything to say to you. I kind of, I guess I'm convinced, like, I can't come up with a reason right now. Huh. And the conversation, something, something. So it feels like there's this pressure to be like, oh, yeah, that's great. I agree with you totally. And what does that imply about everything?
Benjamin Hilton
1 Protocols
Building Healthy Daily Habits (Anchor Habit Technique)
Benjamin Hilton- Identify an existing habit you perform every day (the 'anchor').
- Choose a new habit you want to build.
- Consistently perform the new habit immediately after your anchor habit until it becomes ingrained.