I’ve now spoken to ~1,400 people as an advisor with 80,000 Hours, and if there’s a quick thing I think is worth more people doing, it’s doing a short reflection exercise about one’s current situation.
Below are some (cluster of) questions I often ask in an advising call to facilitate this. I’m often surprised by how much purchase one can get simply from this—noticing one’s own motivations, weighing one’s personal needs against a yearning for impact, identifying blind spots in current plans that could be triaged and easily addressed, etc.
A long list of semi-useful questions I often ask in an advising call
Your context:
What’s your current job like? (or like, for the roles you’ve had in the last few years…)
The role
The tasks and activities
Does it involve management?
What skills do you use? Which ones are you learning?
Is there something in your current job that you want to change, that you don’t like?
Default plan and tactics
What is your default plan?
How soon are you planning to move? How urgently do you need to get a job?
Have you been applying? Getting interviews, offers? Which roles? Why those roles?
Have you been networking? How? What is your current network?
Have you been doing any learning, upskilling? How have you been finding it?
How much time can you find to do things to make a job change? Have you considered e.g. a sabbatical or going down to a 3/4-day week?
What are you feeling blocked/bottlenecked by?
What are your preferences and/or constraints?
Money
Location
What kinds of tasks/skills would you want to use? (writing, speaking, project management, coding, math, your existing skills, etc.)
What skills do you want to develop?
Are you interested in leadership, management, or individual contribution?
Do you want to shoot for impact? How important is it compared to your other preferences?
How much certainty do you want to have wrt your impact?
If you could picture your perfect job – the perfect combination of the above – which ones would you relax first in order to consider a role?
Reflecting more on your values:
What is your moral circle?
Do future people matter?
How do you compare problems?
Do you buy this x-risk stuff?
How do you feel about expected impact vs certain impact?
If possible, I’d recommend trying to answer these questions out loud with another person listening (just like in an advising call!); they might be able to notice confusions, tensions, and places worth exploring further. Some follow up prompts that might be applicable to many of the questions above:
How do you feel about that?
Why is that? Why do you believe that?
What would make you change your mind about that?
What assumptions is that built on? What would change if you changed those assumptions?
Have you tried to work on that? What have you tried? What went well, what went poorly, and what did you learn?
Is there anyone you can ask about that? Is there someone you could cold-email about that?
I’ve now spoken to ~1,400 people as an advisor with 80,000 Hours, and if there’s a quick thing I think is worth more people doing, it’s doing a short reflection exercise about one’s current situation.
Below are some (cluster of) questions I often ask in an advising call to facilitate this. I’m often surprised by how much purchase one can get simply from this—noticing one’s own motivations, weighing one’s personal needs against a yearning for impact, identifying blind spots in current plans that could be triaged and easily addressed, etc.
A long list of semi-useful questions I often ask in an advising call
Your context:
What’s your current job like? (or like, for the roles you’ve had in the last few years…)
The role
The tasks and activities
Does it involve management?
What skills do you use? Which ones are you learning?
Is there something in your current job that you want to change, that you don’t like?
Default plan and tactics
What is your default plan?
How soon are you planning to move? How urgently do you need to get a job?
Have you been applying? Getting interviews, offers? Which roles? Why those roles?
Have you been networking? How? What is your current network?
Have you been doing any learning, upskilling? How have you been finding it?
How much time can you find to do things to make a job change? Have you considered e.g. a sabbatical or going down to a 3/4-day week?
What are you feeling blocked/bottlenecked by?
What are your preferences and/or constraints?
Money
Location
What kinds of tasks/skills would you want to use? (writing, speaking, project management, coding, math, your existing skills, etc.)
What skills do you want to develop?
Are you interested in leadership, management, or individual contribution?
Do you want to shoot for impact? How important is it compared to your other preferences?
How much certainty do you want to have wrt your impact?
If you could picture your perfect job – the perfect combination of the above – which ones would you relax first in order to consider a role?
Reflecting more on your values:
What is your moral circle?
Do future people matter?
How do you compare problems?
Do you buy this x-risk stuff?
How do you feel about expected impact vs certain impact?
For any domain of research you’re interested in:
What’s your answer to the Hamming question? Why?
If possible, I’d recommend trying to answer these questions out loud with another person listening (just like in an advising call!); they might be able to notice confusions, tensions, and places worth exploring further. Some follow up prompts that might be applicable to many of the questions above:
How do you feel about that?
Why is that? Why do you believe that?
What would make you change your mind about that?
What assumptions is that built on? What would change if you changed those assumptions?
Have you tried to work on that? What have you tried? What went well, what went poorly, and what did you learn?
Is there anyone you can ask about that? Is there someone you could cold-email about that?
Good luck!