EA - Is there any general advice you have? by lynettebye

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Is there any general advice you have?, published by lynettebye on October 10, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The Peek behind the Curtain interview series includes interviews with eleven people I thought were particularly successful, relatable, or productive. We cover topics ranging from productivity to career exploration to self-care. This ninth and final post covers general advice from my guests. You can view bios of my guests and other posts in the series here. This post is cross posted on my blog. Backchain We want to think, figure out some things to do, and then, if we do those things, the world will be better. An important part of that, obviously, is making sure that the things you think about, matter for the outcomes you want to cause to happen. In practice, it seems to me that what happens is people get into an area, look around, look at what other people are doing. They spend a few minutes, possibly hours thinking about, “Okay, why would they be doing this?” This seems great as a way to get started in a field. It's what I did. But then they just continue and stay on this path, basically, for years as far as I can tell, and they don't really update their models of "Okay, and this is how the work that I'm doing actually leads to the outcome." They don't try to look for flaws in that argument or see whether they're missing something else. Most of the time when I look at what a person is doing, I don't really see that. I just expect this is going to make a lot of their work orders of magnitude less useful than it could be. Rohin Shah Fail often One thing on my to-do list is to make sure I fail every month at something because then that means that you have been reaching your max. When I was applying for fellowships, scholarships, internships in policy and whatever, if I had looked at every single rejection as a failure rather than just expected, then I wouldn't be here. Abi Olvera Guilt is a symptom, not a motivator I think guilt is a feeling I have reasonably often, not too intensely, and not all the time. It doesn't generally cause me to be motivated. It's more usually a symptom of being in an unmotivated place. Or being in a place where there's not so many hours I can pour into my thing and I'm wandering in the desert. I'll often feel, less frequently now but still sometimes, I'll feel guilty and frustrated that I haven't moved on something yet, things haven't moved forward, I haven't put in a lot of hours. Guilt can get you to do some things, like call your parents or maybe even run an extra lap or something. The bottleneck for finding traction in research isn't something that I find I've been able to usefully address by feeling guilty about it. It's more like an effect of being in a place where I'm for whatever reason not that productive. Ajeya Cotra It’s okay to skill up before doing impactful work I made a mistake of feeling I needed to be working on some really impactful thing right away. I think that worked out okay, in my case. I got somewhat lucky in that regard, but I should have been totally happy to take at least a year or two and just try to find the place where I could skill up as well as possible. Daniel Ziegler You don’t need to be impactful immediately in your career Maybe don't stress out about the fact that you're not impactful now. Abi Olvera Competing with the very best takes a lot of time and effort It's really hard to be the top percent, to compete with people who are the 20 who get the national scholarship. I feel like if I would have eased up, it wouldn't have happened and then I would have had outcomes that are more typical of people from my socioeconomic background. I would say I actually wasn't unhappy but I had reached, probably, the max of what I could do, at least in terms of time. Abi Olvera Calibrate recommendations Maybe ...