#558: Ann Miura-Ko — The Path from Shyness to World-Class Debater and Investor (Repost)

Tim Ferriss (0:24)

This episode is brought to you by 80,000 Hours. You have roughly 80,000 hours in your career. That's 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year for 40 years. They add up and are one of your biggest opportunities, if not the biggest opportunity, to make a positive impact on the world. In other words, you wanna make the best use of your 80,000 hours until we wrap up this show called Life, Where Should You Start?

Where Should You Focus? It can be really hard and quite frankly, pretty stressful to try and figure out.

Some of the best strategies, best research and best tactical advice I've seen and heard come from 80,000 Hours, a nonprofit co-founded by Will MacAskill, an Oxford philosopher and a popular past guest on this podcast. Will is perhaps best known as being the co-founder of the Effective Altruism Movement, which has gained a lot of steam and a lot of popular coverage in the last handful of years. 80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help you find a career or path for tackling one of the world's most pressing problems. If you're looking to make a big change to your direction mid-career, say, address pressing global problems for your current job, or if you're just starting out or maybe starting a new chapter and not sure which path to pursue, 80,000 Hours can help. Join their free newsletter and they'll send you an in-depth guide that will help you identify which global problems are most pressing, where you can have the biggest impact personally, and it will also help you get new ideas for high-impact careers or directions that help tackle these issues. They also have a job board with 800-plus opportunities to work on these problems and offer one-on-one advice to help you switch paths, if that's what you choose to do. And you can check out their excellent 80,000 Hours podcast, which has in-depth conversations with experts about how to best tackle pressing global problems and really try to find that needle in the haystack. There's so many things to choose from. How do you pick the right high-leverage problem for you to focus on helping solve? My team has raved, for instance, about the interview with Ezra Klein. That's number 94 And you can subscribe wherever you find your podcasts. That's the 80,000 Hours podcast. If you join the newsletter now as an extra bonus, they'll mail you, yes, physically mail you, a free book about impactful careers, such as Will MacAskill Doing Good Better. You can sign up at 80000hours.org/tim. That's 80000hours, H-O-U-R-S dot org slash Tim. Check it out. I really encourage you to check out this site. Even if you have no plans to change your career, if you're just curious about picking high leverage targets in life to improve the world. So I will also say it one more time because it's noteworthy. They're a nonprofit and everything they provide is free. That takes a hell of a lot of work and a hell of a lot of dedication and a lot of people, a lot of hours on their part. The podcast, the newsletter, even their one-on-one advice, all free. So check it out, 80,000hours.org/tim, 80,000hours.org/tim. Take a look.

This episode is brought to you by GiveWell. I love these guys. Donating money to help other people is wonderful, but how can you be confident that your donations are actually doing things? Are they improving or saving lives effectively? It can be really hard to parse. You could do weeks of research to find the charities that are out there, what programs they run, what their admin overhead is, how effective, blah, blah, blah, on and on. It can take forever, I know from experience. Doing the research is really hard.

Or you could simply visit givewell.org for a short vetted list of the charities they've found to be best per dollar in donations at saving or improving lives. GiveWell spends more than 20,000hours each year researching charitable organizations and only recommends a few of the highest impact, evidence-backed charities they've found. They do all of this without any sign-up fees and without taking a cut of your tax-deductible donation. GiveWell wants to empower as many donors as possible to make informed decisions about their donations, so GiveWell is free. I've recommended givewell.org for a while now and donations from listeners of this podcast, that's you guys, amount now to roughly $483,399.27, so close to $500,000, which is incredible. So first and foremost, thanks to everyone who has donated. In total, more than 50,000 people have used GiveWell to donate as effectively as possible. And rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save tens of thousands of lives and improve the lives of millions more. So go right now to givewell.org and when you make your first donation, your gift will be matched up to $250. This matching offer is good for as long as the funds last. So it's time-sensitive and is a great opportunity to multiply your impact, which is something I always look for. How can I get the maximum multiplicative effect out of my dollars that I give?