Benjamin Todd

So what should you do instead?

The three key stages to a career.

Move through the following three stages.

One, explore.

Take low-cost ways to learn about and test out promising longer-term roles, until you feel ready to bet on one for a few years.

most likely to be the top priority ages 18 to 24.

Two, build career capital.

Take a bet on a longer-term path that could go really well by building the career capital that will most accelerate you in your chosen path, but with a backup plan, age 25 to 35.

And three, deploy.

Use the career capital you've built to tackle pressing problems and bargain for a job you find personally satisfying, age 36 and up.

And then keep updating your plan every one to three years as you continue to learn more and the world changes.

Career capital, exploration, and of course the impact of your work are always going to be relevant to every career decision you face throughout your career.

But your focus should change over time.

The stages last different amounts of time for different people.

If you're especially uncertain about what to do longer term but feel like you're learning a lot about where to focus, you might stay focused on exploration for longer.

Or just build transferable career capital and figure out your vision later.

Or someone mid-career who's made a dramatic career change might shift back to exploration.

If you've already hit diminishing returns on career capital, you might move to the deploy stage faster, and vice versa.

And if you think work on your chosen problems is especially urgent, which many people think is the case for AI safety, and the opportunities around today are better than those that will be around in 10 years, that's a reason to skip to the deploy stage, even if you'll be less well prepared for it.

Next, we'll look at some more ways we recommend going about career planning, while taking the uncertainty involved seriously.