TYPE III AUDIO (All episodes)

---
client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
qa_time: 0h30m
---

As the 2016 US presidential campaign was entering a fractious round of primaries, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, opened a disturbing email. The March 19 message warned that his Gmail password had been compromised and that he urgently needed to change it.

The email was a lie. It wasn’t trying to help him protect his account — it was a phishing attack trying to gain illicit access.

Podesta was suspicious, but the campai...

---
client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
---
No matter which career you choose, anyone can make a difference by donating to charity, engaging in advocacy, or volunteering.

Unfortunately, many attempts to do good in this way are ineffective, and some actually cause harm.

Take sponsored skydiving. Every year, thousands of people collect donations for good causes and throw themselves out of planes to draw attention to whatever charity they’ve chosen to support. This sounds like a win-win: the fundraiser gets an exhilarating once-in-a-lifetime experience wh...

---
client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
---
If you want to make a difference with your career, one place to start is to ask which global problems most need attention. Should you work on education, climate change, poverty, or something else?

The standard advice is to do whatever most interests you, and most people seem to end up working on whichever social problem first grabs their attention.

That’s exactly what our cofounder, Ben, did. At age 19, he was most interested in climate change. Here he...

---
client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
---
We’ve spent much of the last 10+ years trying to answer a simple question: what are the world’s biggest and most neglected problems?

We wanted to have a positive impact with our careers, and so we set out to discover where our efforts would be most effective.

Our analysis suggests that choosing the right problem could increase your impact by over 100 times, which would make it the most important driver of your impact.

Here, we give...

---
client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
---
Many people think of Superman as a hero. But he may be the greatest example of underutilised talent in all of fiction. It was a blunder to spend his life fighting crime one case at a time; if he’d thought a little more creatively, he could have done far more good. How about delivering vaccines to everyone in the world at superspeed? That would have eradicated most infectious disease, saving hundreds of millions of lives.

Here we’ll argue that...

---
client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
---
People like to lionise the Mozarts, Malala Yousafzais, and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world — people who achieved great success while young — and there are all sorts of awards for young leaders, like the Forbes 30 Under 30.

But these stories are interesting precisely because they’re the exception.

Most people reach the peak of their impact in their middle age. Income usually peaks in the 40s, suggesting that it takes around 20 years for most people to reach their peak productivity.

---
client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
---
Everyone says it’s important to find a job you’re good at, but no one tells you how.

The standard advice is to think about it for weeks and weeks until you “discover your talent.” To help, career advisers give you quizzes about your interests and preferences. Others recommend you go on a gap yah, reflect deeply, imagine different options, and try to figure out what truly motivates you.

But as we saw in an earlier article, becoming...

---
client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
---
The trouble with self-help advice is that it’s often based on barely any evidence.

For example, how many times have you been told to “think positively” in order to reach your goals? It’s probably the most popular piece of personal guidance, beloved by everyone from high school teachers to bestselling careers experts. One key idea behind the slogan is that if you visualise your ideal future, you’re more likely to get there.

The problem? Recent research f...

---
client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
---
People often come to us trying to figure out what they should do over the next 10 or 20 years. Others say they want to figure out “the right career” for them.

The problem with all of this is that, as we’ve seen, your plan is almost certainly going to change:

You’ll change — more than you think.The world will change — many industries around today won’t even exist in 20 years.You’ll learn more about what’s best for you — it’s ver...

---
client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
---
When it comes to advice on how to get a job, most of it is pretty bad.

CollegeFeed suggests that you “be confident” as their first interview tip, which is a bit like suggesting that you should “be employable.”Many advisors cover the “clean your nails and have a firm handshake” kind of thing.One of the most popular interview videos on YouTube, with over 8 million views, makes the wise point that you definitely mustn’t sit down until you’re explicitly invit...