Benjamin Todd

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Introduction 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.

Choose wisely, and you will not only have a more rewarding and interesting life, you'll also be able to help solve some of the world's most pressing problems.

But how should you choose?

Back in 2011, we were students at Oxford in the UK.

We wanted to figure out how we could do work we loved while having a positive impact.

We wondered, should we work at a non-profit, go to grad school, try to earn high salaries and give back through philanthropy, give up and go meditate in a cave, or something else entirely?

Most career guides we read were about how to land different jobs, but few gave advice on what jobs to aim for in the first place.

Most people we knew didn't even use formal career advice, relying instead on conversations with friends.

As for doing good with your career, people suggested things like medicine, social work, teaching, or, most thrillingly, working in corporate social responsibility.

But valuable as these careers are, we felt like there might be even higher impact options out there.

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.

Since founding 80,000 Hours, our team has spoken to hundreds of experts, spent hundreds of hours reading the relevant literature, and conducted our own analyses of the many job options available.

We still have a lot to learn, these questions are difficult to settle, and we've made some mistakes, but we don't think anyone else has spent as long researching these topics as we have.

Among the things we've learned, if you want a satisfying career, follow your passion can be misleading advice.