
80,000 Hours career plan worksheet - BreakoutList
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MBpwNLl3AgsKi4Yh4PZ2X30PYy4gV9xK2xgqXKevaVQ/edit
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MR4D
Being in my 40's and reading this, the only thing I can do is quote Tyson:

"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." -Mike Tyson

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toomanybeersies
Following that metaphor: it's always a good plan to wear a mouth guard so that
your teeth don't get knocked out.

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ryanmarsh
I dont know what serves as the mouth guard in your analogy but it sure as fuck
won't stop you from getting laid out.

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dathanb82
Nah, but you might still have your teeth afterwards.

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Xeoncross
Not to down play the usefulness of this, but be careful not to follow others
ideas that your ultimate goal in life is X career plan. I have more of a "life
plan" than a "career plan" since money and hacks/resourcefulness is pretty
easy to the HN crowd relative to many other groups. Especially in the west, it
takes talent to starve here.

A work/life balance is what some people enjoy, while others want a work/work
or life/life balance.

For example, I am not interested in being worth X millions when I'm 60 at the
cost of skipping >50% of life. Even money doesn't help with certain objectives
(especially when you must trade time).

You have to balance what you want to have accomplished in life vs what you
want while living life.

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iplaw
This is a good post.

I was just having a discussion with someone on HN who considered $200k pre-tax
to be affluent, and suggested that if you couldn't save $80k post-tax
annually, you're doing it wrong. Having lived at $30k, $200k, and now more, I
know that $200k isn't as lofty as it sounds. The dollars never seem long
enough.

It's all about living a life worth living. Part of that is buying time by
paying for services - from remodeling, to plumbing and electrical, to
landscaping and tree maintenance, to cleaning.

Once you have a family and sufficient means, the projects that you used to DIY
to save money become tasks that you hire out to save time. Do I want to spend
the next six to eight weekends building a massive Ipe deck, saving thousands
of dollars, or do I want to pay someone to build it in two weeks so that I
have weekends devoted to family, friends, and hobbies? Do I want to spend
several hours a week cleaning the entire house, or do I want to pay someone to
clean it while I am at work?

This can also be applied to subjective enjoyment. Do I want to drive an A-to-B
economy car, or do I want to drive a high performance vehicle which I
subjectively enjoy driving?

I usually choose buying time and buying enjoyment.

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sn9
I get the point about picking and choosing where to spend your time and where
you delegate things to others, but if living within your means expands with
your means to that point, it's no wonder you find what's honestly a windfall
to not be lofty.

And to take a different track than the anti-materialist route, I would ask you
to think about how not taking advantage of that salary to save an amount of
money that could be the salary of a few people put together is basically
abandoning a ton of leverage to just leave a job or take other risks that
would be infeasible to someone who's standard of living closely tracks their
salary.

In choosing to buy the degree of things you buy and dismissing the sort of
leverage a more "frugal" lifestyle could buy you (quotes because I'm using
frugal in terms of still spending 6 figures a year), you're selling freedom of
a different sort.

(That said, I don't know enough about you or what you spend your money on or
what percentage of your income you're spending outside of what you detailed in
your post to suggest you do anything other than think about that angle. I
don't mean to suggest anything negative about your character.)

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iplaw
It's not a matter of salary or saving for me anymore. I've brokered a few
patent acquisitions, each of which would have allowed me to stop working
altogether. And it was an abrupt transition from earning $200k to netting a
somewhat unexpected and fortuitous 8-figures.

BUT, I still stand by my statement that $200k isn't as much as most people
think it is. Sure, you can minimize and scrimp on your house, your vehicles,
your children's institutional education, etc. and squirrel some money away for
a brighter future a couple of decades from now. But that route was never very
appealing to me. It felt like I was selling present-me short for the benefit
of future-me. Sure I saved money, utilized 401(k)s and Roth IRAs (until I was
priced out), heavily took advantage of SEP IRAs, had a liquid safety net, etc.

But I also didn't save $80k post-tax cash.

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jakubp
Imagine you think on that worksheet and... "What is a fulfilling career to
you" -> "I don't know..." "What is your most valuable career capital right
now?" -> "No idea, if I knew how to turn something I have/can do into capital
I wouldn't be planning things on that level would I?" "What global problems do
you think are most pressing" -> How the hell should I know? this is only based
on what I read in the media, I have no exposure to those problems. "Which of
your options are best?" -> "What? I don't even know which of the options might
be worthwhile, let alone having criteria and confidence to judge them in the
absolute..."

Etc. Etc. You get my point: based on my observations of decision making of
people around me, our real difficulty is not in asking those questions, rather
it's that we simply do not know what the answers might be. We have no insight.
We don't know our greatest strengths (or weaknesses), we don't know what's our
biggest career capital, we have no idea what the ideal career for us would
look like etc.

We have little way of knowing other than trying things out and seeing how they
work out. It's easy to say "ask yourself question X", but the problem for
people is that they simply do not have answers to those kinds of questions.

So what can be done about this? Maybe if you get an experienced mentor who
will guide you through answering those questions, that would be progress. I
would love to see tools for that kind of thinking.

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sametmax
Knowing what you want is half of the job indeed.

And then somewhere down the life you change that phrase to "knowing what you
need" and you start all over again.

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nedwin
When I was 25 years old I made the plan to move to SF, find a technical
cofounder and start a fast growth company.

5 years later I achieved that goal.

My plan was nowhere near the detail of this but there were steps along the
way. Things changed a lot, and not everything was done in the order I
originally planned.

With that said, having a clear vision of where I wanted to be and loosely how
I was going to get there meant that I could turn down opportunities that may
have led me astray, or which didn't further my career/life goals.

YMMV.

~~~
ensiferum
I've always wondered about this, how do people just "decide" to start a
company for the sake of itself. I've always though that companies are kinda
grown organically, i.e. you have a problem you want/need to solve and it turns
out to be also commercially viable.

I have projects like that, i.e. have been scratching my own itch. Sadly none
of them have taken off financially or otherwise despite the great effort.

If I had to start a business/project just for "fast growth" I'd be totally
clueless how to ago about it?

Is it just about picking the "hottest shit" whatever that is at the moment and
trying to ride that wave?

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morgante
I know some serial entrepreneurs who do decide to just "start" a company. They
usually start with fairly broad research, looking into a lot of different
industries, and then when they hear the whiff of an interesting problem dive
really deeply into it.

However, doing so requires strong entrepreneurial insights. I don't recommend
it for first-time founders, as starting a company for the sake of starting a
company is often a recipe for building something nobody wants.

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jaymzcampbell
Before I got to the bottom of the document I wondered if this was a bigger
thing I'd not heard of before, and indeed: creators of it:
[https://80000hours.org/career-guide/career-
planning/](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/career-planning/).

I quite like the idea of an "ABZ" plan. It's often far too easy to think
things will just carry on as is. Thinking about these things, for me the "Z"
in particular, is something I don't think people do enough until it's too
late. Thanks for providing a template doc like this as a low friction way to
actually start doing it.

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andrei512
I you don't need a more complicated plan than: work a lot, teach others, have
fun, never stop learning. You can't plan opportunities..

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edshiro
But you need to be prepared to seize opportunities that are congruent with
your aspirations; in fact sometimes you need to make these opportunities
happen.

Planning therefore is important, but because so many things in between happen,
your plan should consist of a far reaching vision so as to allow you to learn
along the way, including taking paths that may end up in temporary setbacks.
If you don't fail, you don't learn.

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ivm
And while you're learning, your attitude and world understanding constantly
changes so much that you trash the plans of naive older self almost yearly,
no?

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edshiro
Absolutely true. I have changed and changed and changed, and keep changing my
world view over time. Some of my core principles though (honesty, fairness,
empathy, strong family ties, etc.) remain; and hopefully will stay this way
forever :).

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ericdykstra
If you're looking for a more holistic plan, one that doesn't just focus on
career, check out Self Authoring
([http://www.selfauthoring.com/](http://www.selfauthoring.com/)) and
specifically the Future Authoring course. It was put together by clinical and
research psychologists, and has been administered to University students with
pretty profound results.

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DelaneyM
I can't help but feel career plans, even inherently flexible ones such as the
80000 hour plan, discourage serendipity and encourage sunk-cost thinking.

I'm not saying this is a bad idea, just that for _the specific HackerNews
demographic_ it may be a bit of an anti-pattern.

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cottsak
Yeh, I'd also like to know whether the HN demographic really has a hard time
at finding work?

~~~
ryandrake
It's not super hard to imagine. It's not like awesome jobs grow on trees, or
that they're giving them away at the airport. If you're one of the few people
in the world who can simply point to their ideal company, declare "I shall
work there!" and then [poof] you're there, then congratulations on your good
fortune. For the rest of us, finding the next rung on the ladder is an endless
struggle, and there are not a lot of practical "how to" resources out there.

I'm 40, have been working in technology for close to 20 years, and have had
the great fortune to have stayed employed for most of those years, but for the
entirety of this I've considered myself "underemployed". I've woken up each
day thinking "boy I could be doing so much more if only I wasn't limited by [
ROLE | COMPANY | GEOGRAPHY | BOSS | ETC ]. Don't get me wrong--I feel grateful
that tech is one of those careers where you at least have a chance to improve
where you are, but these opportunities are still few, far between, and you
have to pound the pavement to find them. You do need to plan and you need to
ask the right questions of yourself. I like this article because it provides
some structure for your plan and helps you to think about the good questions
to ask yourself.

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blaisio
This was copied out of the book "The Start-up of You" by Reid Hoffman. They
point this out on their website, but they should really point it out on this
Google Doc as well since it's pretty much entirely unoriginal.

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ryandrake
I like this because it provides structure and some more concrete (yet still
general) advice. Too much career how-to is wishy-washy cliche: crap like "do
what you love" and "follow your passion" and "never stop learning". That's
fine if you're looking for spirituality. Not so much if you're looking for a
solid step-by-step structure to follow.

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deepaksurti
Assuming the 10000 hour rule of gaining expertise and toning it down, because
in a job you cannot just do deliberate practice for 10K hours :-), I guess a
single fulfilling profession for 10 years, where you learn, become good enough
to extract mileage out of it and then moving on to a new career, should be
plausible.

Anyone out here who has done that, much like Tarzan, holding onto the one
career while switching to another? I have not yet given this a deep thought,
but it looks cool to have multiple professions in a one lifespan but am not
sure how to do it. Or is it that as life/age happens and we just have to stick
to 1 career/profession. Any thoughts appreciated.

~~~
nvusuvu
I'm an electrical engineer 12 years out of college. I did design work for 5
years, became an electronics quality manager in operations, then design
validation test manager in R&D, and now questioning what to do with my career
... I'm leaning towards data analytics guru ...

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westurner
> What are your best medium-term options (3-15 years)?

> 1\. What global problems do you think are most pressing?

The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets w/ statistical
indicators, AKA GlobalGoals, are for the whole world through 2030.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals)

[http://www.globalgoals.org](http://www.globalgoals.org)

~~~
westurner
"Schema.org: Mission, Project, Goal, Objective, Task"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12525141](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12525141)
could make it easy to connect our local, regional, national, and global goals;
and find people with similar objectives and solutions.

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didibus
"If you fail to plan, you plan to fail." \- a good friend of mine

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johnward
"What is a fulfilling career to you? "

I'm out.

