Benjamin Todd
speaker
4,140 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2023
last heard 28 May
Benjamin Todd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Jess Whittlestone loved philosophy as an undergraduate, and was especially drawn to philosophy of mind.
Naturally, she considered continuing to graduate school, but something held her back.
Even if it would be intellectually interesting, if she didn't make a difference, would it really be fulfilling?
After trying several paths, she settled on psychology and public policy.
Over time, she found roles and topics that were meaningful and became passionate about them.
Eventually, she became the director of AI policy at a leading think tank, and in 2023, Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in AI.
We'll explain how she got there in chapter 11.
Why you shouldn't follow your intuition either.
Even if there was such a thing as your one true passion, how would you actually find it?
The usual way is to try to imagine different jobs and think about how fulfilling they seem.
If this were a normal career guide, we'd start by getting you to write out a list of what you most want from a job, like working outdoors or working with ambitious people, and trying to find jobs that match.
The best-selling careers book of all time, What Colour Is Your Parachute?, recommends exactly that.
The hope is that, deep down, people know what they really want.
But they don't, or at least not particularly well.
You can probably think of times in your own life when you're excited about a holiday or a party, only to find that when it actually happened, it was just okay.
In recent decades, research has shown how common this is.
We're not always great at predicting what will make us happiest,
and we often don't realize quite how bad we are.
It turns out we're even bad at remembering how enjoyable different experiences were, let alone predicting them.
A meta-analysis of over 50 studies found we remember experiences by how enjoyable they were at their peak, or at their ending, rather than how enjoyable we'd say they were at the time.
Showing 41–60 of 4,140 · page 3 of 207
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