Looking for a reason to get up in the morning? Or just wanting to position yourself the best you can for positions in AI Safety?
An exercise in reflecting on how small reflections like what you like to do or be with can evolve into your career direction or even deeper purpose!
Taken from https://www.forthcapital.com/us/articles/how-ikigai-can-help-you-plan-your-perfect-retirement
Looking for a reason to get up in the morning? Or just wanting to position yourself the best you can for positions in AI Safety? I feel like this is the core to effective altruism, knowing that your work is purposeful and having meaningful impact to others in beneficial ways.
Ikigai is a philosophy from Japan, what I think it does well is break down this personal pursuit of meaning searching into 4 circles that are small digestible goals to learn about.
I think it answers the "why/how/what/where/when" questions on doing impactful work in the world. But you must spend the time to reflect on the questions it brings up:
For me AI Safety is my example because it is what I am been targeting for this exercise. Maybe it is not your target for your unique positioning, but I hope the examples stil help you find your true calling.
I don’t believe this account that everyone has a soul mate "job," the idea of perfect I think can be harmful at time and Ikigai at first gave me that vibe. But I do think these questions can help emerge positioning to brand yourself as you try to find your next role regardless if it is in AI Safety, in reducing factoring farming or something else. But I do think how reflecting on these aspects can lead to clarity on who you want to be and what you want to do that is aligned with realities of the world rather than just dreams.
These parts are meant to be done as a personal exercise, and I hope that when you are done you can find value from doing this!
What are the things you can DO? What are the solutions you provide to the world?
This is the easiest to fill out in my engineering brain. The solution space, my unique solutions to problems I have been cultivating and building from my education and practice at jobs and hobbies. This is the leet-code grind sessions, hackathon late night surges, or the weekly projects that you use to up-skill.
This circle is about filling out all the things you have spent your valuable time on this earth learning to do. The process of “doing,” is often a priority that many of us have or have been thought to focus on. If you find it hard, upload some course lists and resume to a chatbot to label some skills. But instead of listing them try to quantify on a scale of 0-10 or 0-100 so you pause and reflect from beginner to expert where you land.
This will be a small but important building block on how you position yourself in applications and in your search for what role might be a best fit for you.
At each of these circles, when you are done, stop for a moment and reflect, is there a weak link here? Because noticing your drifts from who you want to be vs who you think you are, requires practice to cultivate the wisdom of those who have arrived in that spot you would like to be in. Wisdom requires participation and it is through this you can build real skills.
Many ways to improve here overlap with what people can pay you for, but not all things. Some skills are useful for the world but no one can afford to give you money for it, below a threshold, for example YouTubers or hobbies that turn into a side hustle later on. You know best what you can do to improve, but remember learning takes time to do it right, so have compassion for yourself!
This skill space really looks at the question of solutions that you care about the most. How do you like to formulate and solve problems? Answering that will merit your list of skills! Not all skills are technical and some are people based or other domains. So explore and be curious about things you have done! Journal, use a wipe board, talk with friends, you name it!
What are the problems you care the most about? What are the thigns you want to spend time being with?
This one can be easy for some, and hard for others. Here I really treat this as an experience to hone in and find my current priorities.
If you can right now right out 3 top priorities in terms of a problem.
For software engineers my example is to refrain from saying, my love is coding. Because code is a solution that should be built to target a problem if you want to have impact.
The problem could be how people in the past have coded, a problem statement that early start up founders of frontier labs might have said, the problem with coding is it is long and frustrating, some section could be repeated for use else were, because of this problem they likely noticed it is easily formulated into a set of training sets that an AI model can use, and thus AI Coding Agents was the attempt to solve that problem.
But often when you solve more course problems, subtler ones appear, like cyber issues when you give coding agents the freedom to do Exploitbench and they hack hugging face! Sulter does not mean less impactful, it just means it was harder to list out in the start. So don’t try to write out every possible problem the world has, just get some course things on paper to explore and keep these documents as a living document that you can update over time.
Practicing writing out the problem can evolve into threat models you might address in AI Safety or even ways to recognize issues in your life that no one is solving!
Again try to quantify by listing out a rank or intensity of how often you think about this problem to really get a grasp of how intense this feeling is for you of love towards this issue.
What are things people will pay you to do? Solutions people ask for directly?
Market research! Job posts: what do they ask for? What skills are you missing in your list that are here? How much can you get paid for what you do, and would it be best to just earn that salary and donate to a cause rather than just work for that cause?
Market reports change, and continuously looking into this you can help understand the market for jobs, businesses, grant funding for research ideas likely overlaps with what the world needs right now.
Look at job posts, market reports, you name it, and make a list!
Start to look at your intersection with your skills and loves.
If you have missing skills that might be the best spot to spend time learning those skills!
What are problems people need help finding solutions to? Where are there gaps where people need more experts becoming focused on that domain?
Where are people granting money for research right now? What is a growing issue that reports say are unsolved and will likely be neglected over the next few years?
The neglected angle looks at places you can find your motivation based on your love intersection. Where people are granting money can help you understand on how the market is influencing research at the moment. Because what you really care about might be in a winter for funding but right now that funding + you could really make high impact if you have the skills to do so and the world needs it...
Passion = Skill intersecting with Love
Profession = skills intersecting with what people will pay for
Motivation = what the world needs intersecting with what you love
Vocation = what the world needs intersecting with what they will pay for
Ikigai = being with topics you love, while doing the skills you have for people who will pay for those tasks and helps with what the world needs.
When all of these intersect: Ikigai is a fun name to label what you just found. There is not a guarantee that given a finite amount of time you will find an Ikigai! But I bet even with a 30 minute journal session you could find a passion for doing a project that you can stick with and get the ball rolling on the search.
It is all about baby steps, not huge leaps. LinkedIn and social media shows how everyone's taking massive leaps, but they all started somewhere, motivated by something doing a profession of some kind because they built the skills to merit the role and so on.
I hope that spending some time finding a deeper point in the search space of what you could be doing that over time evolves to intersect with what the world pays for and needs… then I think that you become the person you have always dreamed to be!
Having hope is a start on the path to becoming. A path of returning to yourself continues the journey. When you know who you are, an application flows from your heart and not an AI bot. When you see where the intersections fit, you can brand yourself better than if you did not know what skills you are best at or where you need to improve. Just looking at your love and skills alone might never land you the dream job, because you were just looking for a hobby project all along, not something for commercialisation or research purposes.
But when these begin, and it might not happen right away, a deeper knowing that is unshakable will emerge from who you are.
Becoming requires not just knowing the problem space nor the solution space, but knowing why you fit into the larger equation and can use your unique characteristics to do the most benefit for problems that still need good solutions!
