To find work you love, don't follow your passion | Benjamin Todd | TEDxYouth@Tallinn | eJOY English
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Transcriber: Queenie Lee Reviewer: Ivana Korom
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When I graduated from university,
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I didn't know what career I wanted to choose.
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I had a lot of interests,
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but which interest should I pursue and try and turn into a job?
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So, back then, I was really interested in martial arts.
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Here's me.
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But I didn't want to turn that into a career.
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Here's my face.
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(Laughter)
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I was really interested in, and I was studying philosophy,
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but one of the philosophers I most enjoyed reading -
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late at night, in my dorm room -
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recently said,
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"Philosophy is a bunch of empty ideas,"
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and there's no job in philosophy, anyway.
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So that was out.
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Being a slightly weird kid,
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I was really interested in investing and finance,
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and I had even taken a portion of the small savings I had,
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and invested them into gold when I was a teenager.
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I knew that following the finance root would be a really well-paid career,
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but I was wondering, like,
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maybe I wouldn't make as much difference as I could in that,
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it wouldn't help society,
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so in the end, it wouldn't really be that fulfilling.
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I was left with the question,
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"How could I choose a fulfilling career?"
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And, maybe many of you have asked yourself the same question.
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I thought about this question,
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I realized I didn't even know how to go about choosing a career,
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and I, you know, read books, I went to careers advisors,
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I just couldn't really find the information I really needed:
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what would I be good at in the end?
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What skills should I learn now?
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Which areas is there a great social need where I can make a difference?
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These unanswered questions led me to,
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kind of, delay the decision by a few years.
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Instead of actually settling on a career,
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I founded an organization dedicated to researching the question
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of which career to choose.
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And this organization is called "80000hours,"
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that's the number of hours you have in your working life,
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that's a long time,
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so, it's worth really doing some serious research,
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and try to work out how best to use them.
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We help you do some of this research,
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and we publish all of our findings;
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it's part of a free online careers guide: 80000hours.org.
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Here's some of the team today,
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surrounded by laptops and whiteboards, as normal.
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So, you might at this point be thinking to yourself,
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"Well, you hardly look like you're above the legal age to drink,
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what could you tell me about choosing a career?"
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Well, it's true that one of the main things we discovered
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is that we have a lot to learn.
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Choosing a career is a complex problem and not enough serious research
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has been done into how best to do it.
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But we have spent the last three years
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doing research with academics of University of Oxford,
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and most importantly,
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we've coached hundreds of people on how to make real career decisions.
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All this research and thinking has led us to the conclusion
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that careers advice today focuses on the wrong thing.
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Throughout most of history
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people basically did what their parents did.
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Some people in the 1980s thought,
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"The greed is good,"
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and they focused on making money.
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But our generation grew up with some different careers advice,
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and that's that you should follow your passion.
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You can see that use of this phrase
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increased dramatically from the mid-nineties.
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But today I think need to move beyond "Follow your passion,"
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as the career advice to focus on,
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and instead of asking what our own interests and passions are,
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we should be focusing much more
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on what we can do for other people, and to make the world a better place.
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Ok, so let's go back to my decision,
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how would "follow your passion" apply to me?
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I think what "Follow your passion" tells you to do is three things:
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the first is to identify your greatest interests;
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second, find careers that match those interests;
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thirdly, pursue those careers, no matter what.
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Finding a fulfilling career
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is just a matter of having the courage to pursue your passion.
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In my case,
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I was interested in martial arts and philosophy, remember?
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So, which career should I pick?
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Any ideas?
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I should obviously become a Shaolin monk -
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Buddhism and martial arts, together.
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What's the theory behind this advice?
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You get passion match,
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then you really enjoy your work, you're really motivated,
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so you're more likely to be successful,
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and if you are successful doing something you're passionate about,
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then you have a fulfilling career.
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And, spelled out like that,
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this really does sound like pretty reasonable advice, right?
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I can maybe get behind that.
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But let's just think about it in a bit more depth.
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Turns out if you follow your passion, you're probably going to fail.
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Why do I say that?
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Let's look at the data.
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A survey of 500 Canadian students found that their greatest passions
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were ice-hockey and dance.
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Ninety percent of them were passionate
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about sports, arts, music, something like that.
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But if we look at census data we can see
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that only three percent of jobs are in art, sport, and music.
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So it just has to be the case
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that even if only one in ten people followed their passion,
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still, the majority would fail to be successful.
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So this first step just doesn't work.
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I think the second step is also not reliable.
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In that, even if you match your passion with your work,
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and you're successful,
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you can stlll quite easily fail to have a fulfilling career,
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that's because you might not find the work meaningful.
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This was a bit like me deciding not to go into finance,
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I thought, well, I was interested in it,
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maybe I could be successful but I wouldn't make a difference,
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maybe it would still end up not being fulfilling,
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so I think the second step doesn't work either.
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Now, at this point you might be thinking,
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"Sure, passion isn't the only thing that matters,
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if I follow my passion, it doesn't guarantee that I'll succeed,
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but maybe at least makes me more likely to succeed,
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and to have a fulfilling career."
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As a career advice, this is the best we can do.
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But I think that is wrong as well.
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Picture to yourself now, the most assertive person you know,
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who' s really passionate about selling and persuading,
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and they're really extroverted.
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Surely someone like that should go
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and become an advertising accounts manager, like in Mad Men,
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or they should become a car salesman, or something like that,
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something which involves selling, being extroverted, and talking to people.
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Well, it turns out that would be a really bad decision:
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analysis of a determined study showed
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that really passionate sales people really persuasive, assertive types
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who went into those kinds of sales jobs
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actually ended up more likely to burn out and in fact died younger
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than normal people who take those jobs.
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Following their passion actually made them more likely to die.
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(Laughter)
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And more generally, researchers have tried to show for decades
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that there's a strong relationship between interest match
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and how successful and happy people end up in their work,
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but so far, they failed to show a strong connection between the two.
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I think this isn't because your interests just don't matter,
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but it's just that when it comes to real career decisions,
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your interests are just not a decisive factor,
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other things matter much more,
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like what your skills are, and what your mindset is.
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Indeed, we think our interests matter a lot more than they do,
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because we really underestimate how much they change:
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just think about your own interests five or ten years ago,
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and how different they are from today.
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I mean, back then, you're probably this tall,
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and you're probably interested in completely different things.
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Five or ten years time,
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you will be interested in totally different things again.
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All this means that your present interests
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are just not a solid basis on which to chose a career.
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So, if we're not going to focus on interests,
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what should we focus on?
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If you're not just going to follow your passion,
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what should you do instead?
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If I had to sum up careers advice as a single slogan,
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here's what I would choose: "Do what's valuable."
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By this I mean
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focus on getting good at something that genuinely helps others,
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and makes the world a better place.
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That's the secret to a fulfilling career.
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Now, obviously doing what's valuable is going to be better for the world,
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you're going to do more good like that,
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but people have also thought for millennia
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that helping others is the secret to be personally fulfilled and happy.
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I've just got a representative couple of quotes here
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just read out the first one:
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"A man true wealth is the good he does in this world."
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Today we actually have hard data to back this up.
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Professor of Psychology Martin Seligman in his 2011 book: Flourish,
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aimed to sum up the last couple of decades of empirical research
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into what really causes people to be satisfied and happy in their lives.
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And two of the key ingredients he identifies
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just are doing what's valuable.
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The first of these is achievement, or sometimes called mastery,
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and this means getting really good at something,
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working hard and getting good at something.
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The second is meaning, also called purpose,
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and this means striving to do something greater than just make yourself happy,
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so it means making the world a better place.
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Put the two together,
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get good at something it makes the world a better place,
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do what's valuable.
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I think, doing what's valuable has lots of other personal benefits as well.
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For instance,
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even if you work in a charity, the people who have the greatest impact,
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do the most valuable things,
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find it easier to raise fundings, and therefore pay their bills,
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and that's important, too.
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I have at least found in my own experience,
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if you focus on helping others, then lots of people want you to succeed,
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so it's actually easier to be successful as an altruist
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compared to just being in it for yourself.
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So, it now turns out that actually the advice "Follow your passion,"
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just gets things backwards.
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Rather than start from what we happen to be passionate about now
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and then hope that success and a fulfilling career will follow,
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instead, it's much more true to say
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that we should focus on doing what's valuable,
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and then that will lead to passion and a fulfilling career.
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I've definitely found this in my own experience.
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If when I was 16, you had given me this careers test:
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"Would you like to give career guidance to people?"
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I'd have clicked the "Hate it" button.
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I was pretty shy and into science,
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and the idea of giving careers advice to people was not appealing at all.
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But now I spend all of my time thinking about careers advice,
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and am absolutely obsessed and fascinated by it.
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Focusing on doing what's valuable
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has given me clear, concrete, meaningful goals,
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and that's made my life a lot better.
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There's no more endless reflection
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on which of my interests represents my true calling,
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which doesn't exist anyway.
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So, how can you actually do what's valuable in your careers,
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what practical steps should you follow?
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This is what we spend most of our time
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trying to work out at 80000Hours,
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I'm just going to give you a super-quick summary
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of three things we'd say that you can do.
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The first of these is to explore,
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learn what you can about the world,
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and test yourself out in different things.
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If you want to do what's valuable,
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you have to discover that out there in the world,
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you can't figure it out just by thinking about your own interests.
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Secondly, go after some skills, and try and get good at them,
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these are skills that are really in demand,
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and can be used in many different areas.
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I might pick computer programming as an example for the next decade.
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This bit is where your passions do come in,
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thinking about your passions does come in.
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Because what you're passionate about now
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can give you clues about what you can get really good at in the future,
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so that's worth thinking about,
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but they're not the only thing that matters.
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And then when you get those skills,
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go and find the biggest, most pressing social problems you can,
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and apply your skills to solving them.
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Don't just pick a problem that is important,
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try and find one that's been unfairly neglected by other people,
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because that's where you'll have the greatest impact.
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And finally, don't think that in order to do what's valuable,
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you have to become a doctor, and personally go to Africa,
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and help people with your own two hands.
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Big social problems can be,
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and often are solved by research, by developing new technology,
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by spreading big ideas in the arts.
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The key is to work out
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where your skills can fit in to have the greatest impact.
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I think the idea that we should focus on doing what's valuable
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is actually really intuitive one.
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I want you now to imagine that you are on your deathbed,
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and you are looking back at your 80,000 hours career,
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rather than just about to start it,
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and picture to yourselves two ways, you could have gone.
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In the first you say to yourself,
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"I was good at what I did, I enjoyed what I did,
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I made lot of money, now I have two houses, and a yacht,
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but what was it all for? "
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In the second you say to yourself,
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"I absolutely worked my arse off at a charity, and it often wasn't easy,
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but through my efforts
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I was able to prevent the deaths of 100 children due to malaria,
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but what was it all for?"
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The first scenario happens all the time,
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but the second scenario is almost unimaginable,
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of course, that was a worthwhile career.
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Altruism is one thing you'll never regret,
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if we really want to be fulfilled in our own careers,
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we have to stop focusing so much on our own interests,
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and instead, ask what we can do for other people.
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Imagine a world in which that was the thought on everyone's minds.
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So, to find a work you love, don't just follow your passion,
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rather do what's valuable.
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Explore, build skills, solve big pressing problems.
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And from that,
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fulfillment and a passionate career will emerge.
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You've got 80,000 hours in your career,
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don't waste them, do what's valuable.
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(Applause)
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To find work you love, don't follow your passion | Benjamin Todd | TEDxYouth@Tallinn

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Mainstream career advice tells us to “follow our passion”, but this advice is dead wrong.
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