Tom Wainwright
speaker
83 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 5d ago
Tom Wainwright’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 Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So while both of these books contain some good advice, I felt they both suffered from a bit of survivorship bias, which made them not totally convincing to me.
A more helpful book is Benjamin Todd's 80,000 Hours.
It's named after the amount of time you can expect to spend at work over the course of your life.
Contrary to popular belief, he argues, you should not follow your dreams.
For one thing, plenty of people don't actually know what they want to do when they're 21 years old.
And even if they do have a great passion, it may not lead to a job.
One study he cites found that nearly 90% of Canadian students said that they loved music, the arts or sport.
But these fields accounted for only about 3% of jobs in Canada at the time.
Instead, he argues that the advice to follow your passion gets it backwards.
In his view, people should focus on getting really good at something, ideally something that helps other people, and they will find that passion for their work will follow from that.
The question of how best to help other people is a tricky one.
Benjamin Todd draws on the effective altruism movement to argue that, for instance, if you give 10% of an average American salary to a malaria charity, you can expect that over the course of your career you will save about 20 times more lives than if you'd become a doctor.
His book tries to identify which fields of work are likely to have the most impact on the global good, from pandemic prevention to AI regulation.
It's all very admirable, but I can see that it could become a bit demoralising.
An emergency doctor could save more lives by working in public health, perhaps, which in turn could be less important than nuclear disarmament, and so on and so on.
And if you choose to spend your career on something as frivolous as reviewing books, well, God help you.
Either way, job seekers can be reassured that plenty of people take a while to find their life's work.
Tony Blair, for example, was a music promoter before he became Britain's Prime Minister.
And before she became one of America's most celebrated writers, Maya Angelou was a streetcar conductor.
The main takeaway from all this?
Showing 61–80 of 83 · page 4 of 5
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