80,000 Hours is coming to bookstores in May

Summary

• We’re publishing our book, 80,000 Hours, with Penguin on 26 May.
• It’s an update of the 80,000 Hours career guide, with a full round of edits, new design, and new content discussing the effect of AI on career choice. We think it’s now the best single entry point to our advice.
• We hope publishing it will multiply the impact of our advice.
• One quick way you could help is to preorder a copy (especially from a traditional retailer). It helps increase the chance we get on bestseller lists, and increases our expected reach. Preorder here.

The new book

It’s called 80,000 Hours: How to Have a Fulfilling Career That Does Good. It covers all of our best advice for having a big, positive impact with your career.

It’s being published by Penguin Random House on the 26th May in the US, and the 28th May in the UK.

Why did we decide to publish this book?

According to the EA Survey, 80,000 Hours has been the biggest single entry point into effective altruism, and our online career guide has consistently had an outsized impact compared to our other programmes.^[1] We think it’s probably the best content we’ve ever published, given its reach and our estimate of its impact.

But despite thousands of recorded career changes, surveys suggest over 95% of college graduates have still never heard of 80,000 Hours.^[2] So we think there’s still a much bigger audience out there for our ideas.

A book with a major publisher gives us a unique chance to find them, and lets us turn our best written advice into a mainstream resource that could become a go-to place for people considering social impact careers. (See the FAQ below for more on what we hope to achieve.)

We’re really excited for this book’s potential to empower a generation of people to tackle pressing world problems!

What’s new in this edition?

Benjamin Todd (our founder, president, and author of the original guide) has spent the best part of the last year completely revising and updating it.

 It now includes:

• Updated advice on AI, including new chapters on the most valuable skills for an AI future, a new chapter on the most pressing AI risks, and updated advice on career capital and job hunting in light of AI.
• Expanded practical advice, with a new chapter on how to make career decisions, fleshed-out advice on exploration and career planning, and more useful material for people further into their careers.
• New designs, new cartoons, updated research, and — most importantly — a new font! :) We think it’s the best entry point into our advice we’ve ever produced.

There’s a new cover too, which took dozens of iterations. We’re keeping our fingers and toes crossed that we’ll buck the trend of everyone hating EA book covers, but you should be the judge of that…!

The overall structure of the book remains the same – it’s still a cause-agnostic introduction to what makes for a satisfying job, with classic EA advice on how to have an impact, how to build skills, and how to make a career plan. AI is discussed where it’s relevant to these questions (see the table of contents in the FAQ below).

How you can help

If you’d like to help our advice reach more people, please consider preordering a copy — for yourself, or for a friend. 

Preorders help us reach new audiences by boosting attention from retailers, journalists, and Amazon’s algorithm.^[3] Most bestseller lists count preorders as first-week sales, so every copy bought now strengthens our chance of making them – where purchases from traditional retailers are counted much more highly.

You can also help by sharing the book on social media! Reposting our announcement or linking to our preorder page would be really appreciated. If you’ve ever benefitted from our advice in the past, it’d also be a great time to share on social media how we helped you.

If you run a local or a national group, and would like to help promote the book or purchase more than 20 copies, please contact: [email protected].

FAQs

When will the book be released?

• On the 26th of May by the American publisher and the 28th of May by the UK publisher.

Where will it be available?

• It’ll be available in English worldwide. You can buy it from traditional retailers in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, EU, and India, and order online wherever Amazon makes it available.
• We’re also working on getting translated versions created by publishers in other countries (and so far have secured a deal to translate it into traditional Chinese in Taiwan and Hong Kong).

Can we still read your advice for free?

• Yes — we’ll continue to host all our usual content on our website at 80000hours.org.
• We want everyone to have access to our advice, so sometime after the release of the guide, we’re planning to give out some free copies through our email newsletter.
• So, while you can read the advice either way, you should preorder a copy if you want to support our work and help us reach a wider audience!

What formats will the book be available in?

• It’ll be available as a paperback, Kindle ebook, and audiobook (narrated by Benjamin Todd).
  • Except in the UK where it’ll be a hardback for the first year.

How do you hope to reach more people with the book?

We hope to reach a significantly bigger audience than we’ve reached in the past, via applying the standard “book launch toolkit” to our most successful material:

1. Creating a higher-quality, more up-to-date version that feels like a legit book
2. Making the content more shareable by addressing topical questions about AI
3. Doing a podcast and media tour (books are a great excuse to set up interviews)
4. Getting distribution in book stores
5. Asking for preorders from lovely people like you, to help us hit the bestseller lists
6. Updating the online version so it’ll appear more prominently in search and AI summaries
7. Foreign language translations & media launches (hopefully including China) to let us reach new non-English-speaking audiences

One way it could go really well is by becoming a classic career advice book that gets perennially recommended to people who don’t know what to do with their lives.

Our self-published book from 2017 found ~60k readers, and Penguin are hoping to reach ~200k within two years.

Historically, the career guide has led to hundreds (if not thousands!) of career plan changes, including many people now in key roles in AI safety, biosecurity, factory farming and global health, encouraged hundreds of people to take the Giving What We Can Pledge, and been one of the biggest entry points into effective altruism. If the launch is successful, we hope it can multiply this impact several times over.

Why didn’t you name the book something like “20,000 Hours”, if we only have a few years before AGI?

• We get this a lot, so it’s not an unreasonable suggestion! But we thought it was best to stick with 80,000 Hours:
  • The name has been very successful, and changing it would weaken our built-up name recognition & goodwill.
  • The book covers the possibility of short AI timelines and what they mean for your career, but we don’t think they’re certain, and the book is about careers first, rather than short AI timelines (80k has a bunch of separate material on career advice for mitigating AI risk).
  • Even if the next 5-10 years is the crucial period for AI, the central concept (your career is your biggest lever to have an impact) remains true.

Why didn’t you write a new book about careers in the age of AI?

• We think this might well have been more popular, but it would have also taken about 4x longer to make (and still might not have turned out as well).
• We already know our career guide is pretty great, so it seemed like a better bet overall.

Who is the book for?

• Anyone who’s interested in making helping others a core part of their career (though there’s also a chapter on how anyone can do good, without changing jobs).
• We recognise lots of people aren’t in the privileged position of being able to make social impact a key priority, and need to focus on other things. We support and respect that many people will have different priorities, and that’s okay!
• Within that, we think the book contains lots of advice that’s useful for people at all different stages: it has material for both early- and mid-career folks, and the advice ranges from high-level heuristics for cause selection to concrete advice on landing a job.

What’s actually in the book?

It aims to give a research-backed answer to all the classic questions about how to choose a career with impact. Here’s the contents:

Section I: What to Aim For

1. What Makes for a Dream Job?

Section II: How to Make a Difference

1. How Much Difference Can One Person Really Make?
2. Can You Change the World Without Changing Jobs?
3. How to Pick a Problem to Focus On
4. What’s the World’s Most Pressing Problem?
5. Which Jobs Help People the Most

Section III: How to Get Good at Something Useful

1. Three Common Ways People Sabotage Their Career
2. Which Skills Will Be Most Useful in the Future?
3. Which Jobs Will Put You in the Best Long-Term Position?
4. How to Find the Right Career for You
5. When Should You Settle?

Section IV: Making Your Plan and Putting It into Action

1. How to Make Career Decisions
2. How to Make Your Career Plan
3. How to Actually Get a Job
4. How to Network

Thank you

If you decide to support the launch in any way — we want to say a sincere thank you for your help!

And to all of our readers over the years: we hope we’ve been able to be useful for your career journey, wherever it is taking you.

Finally — here’s a sneak peek at one of our new cartoons from the guide (which depicts the fate of all who fail to read it…)

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. ^{^}

    E.g. EA Pulse

3. ^{^}

    And if you want to be especially extra helpful, please preorder from a non-Amazon retailer: we expect most preorders will come from Amazon, so this would help us get stocked in a wider variety of stores.