80,000 Hours (the book) comes out in just one month!!

We asked OWID’s Hannah Ritchie if she wanted to say something nice about the book, and she said: “If this had been published a decade earlier, it'd have saved me many restless nights.”

I think that applies to me too… 

But also: wow, I’d really love for us to get the book in the hands of as many ten-years-ago-Hannah-Ritchies as possible!

Can we do that? And if so, how?

Well, the audacious goal that we’ve been aiming at is to embed the book as part of the “canon” of go-to career advice books.

If we manage to pull that off — which is far from guaranteed — it could have a further-reaching impact than any other research we’ve published.

In this post, I thought I’d:

• Describe why I think that’s valuable
• Tell you how you can help increase the odds it goes far (a few individuals could help a lot!)

Why do this?

This is a bold claim, but it’s actually my best guess that the 80k career guide is among the best content ever published, when it comes to helping people have higher impact careers — according to both individual anecdote (including from some people who have gone on to do things I find hugely impressive) and larger data analyses we’ve done.^[1]

Even after having spent quite a long time^[2] with the core material of the career guide, it continues to find new ways to impress and inspire me.

1. For example, I think the new chapter on AI and automation is basically what I want people to know about this topic. It's…not a simple topic, which makes summarizing and communicating about the messages reasonably hard, but I think the chapter taken as a whole is just pretty great.
2. I feel like the section on earning to give in the light of SBF is quite authentically grappling with how we should think and feel about career strategies involving high earnings. I think it would be easy to write something primarily defensive of 80k’s position on earning to give; I think that’s not what Ben wrote.
3. Every time I re-read the data behind problem and intervention prioritization, I am again confronted with my inability to actually hold in my mind the orders of magnitude involved. Being attentive to differences in scope is one of the core ideas that I hope this book will spread!

But it’s still not nearly as widely-known as it could be. So, I think getting it into the hands of more people seems really helpful.

On this ‘canon’ idea: it seems like this is how the world of nonfiction works. There are a few books that will get cited again and again as the go-to place for a given topic (books like Designing Your Life, What Colour is Your Parachute, Atomic Habits, which have been among the top books in their category for many years).

Breaking into that list would, I think, do a lot to shift how people think about their careers in general, and what topics we even view as permissible to discuss (i.e. that you should consider impact!).

As an example of how thoughtful, successful, and well-regarded authors are dealing with these topics at present, see the Amazon blurb of this recently-released pretty direct competitor to our book:

The message is still personal satisfaction and interest, over direct consideration and comparison of the amount of positive impact one could have. 

While there’s definitely some value to this sort of advice, overall, this seems like a shame to me!

How you can help

If this is going to happen, we need help.

The main model of how we get into the ‘nonfiction canon’ is by having a healthy book launch that reaches (at least some) bestseller lists, and establishes the book as a serious, relevant resource in the space.

There’s lots to do if we want this to happen.

Keen to help? Fill out this form and we’ll be in touch with more detail!

We’d especially love to hear from anyone who:

• Runs a local or national group
• Might write about the book on a newsletter or social media
• Is a journalist
• Or could introduce us to any of the above

Or, if you want to help out in a more lowkey way, here’s our preorder page — we really appreciate orders or shares. Ordering this month counts for much more, so if you think you’ll get a copy anyway, now’s the time!

Thanks all!! <3

1. ^{^}

    According to the EA Survey, 80k is the biggest individual source both of people finding out about EA for the first time, and the biggest single entity having a positive impact on respondents’ ability to have an impact. The career guide appears consistently across metrics to have a very outsized impact among 80k’s programmes, both in terms of engagement hours and impact-weighted engagement hours.

2. ^{^}

    “Hundreds of hours” is probably the most precise estimate I can do, depending on what you mean by engaging with the material. That's certainly more than most, although Ben has easily spent several thousand!