Problem-First Career Choice
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- —
The problem-first approach reverses conventional career planning. Rather than beginning with an existing passion or a path inherited from school, family, or recruiters, first identify the problems for which the world most needs additional capable people. Then determine which skills are bottlenecks within those problems and assess where your abilities, motivation, and potential for mastery provide the strongest fit. This preserves the valid part of following your passion—finding work you can excel at and enjoy—without assuming that people are born with one predetermined vocation. Research into the labor market and direct career advice can then turn the shortlist into an actionable plan. The goal is a career combining personal fit with unusually high social impact.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Investigate the world's needs
Identify pressing, neglected problems that could benefit substantially from more capable people working on them.
Pro tip Look beyond the causes most visible in your immediate social circle.
Watch out Popularity and importance are not the same thing.
- 2
Study the labor market
Learn which career routes, training programs, and opportunities actually exist instead of relying only on advice from friends or family.
Pro tip Include emerging paths that may not have been visible when you first chose a subject.
- 3
Find the skill bottlenecks
For each promising problem, identify the technical, operational, research, policy, or communication skills most in demand.
Watch out Do not assume that every useful role requires direct frontline work.
- 4
Assess your comparative fit
Determine which high-need roles best match your talents, motivation, learning potential, and ability to develop mastery.
Pro tip Consider small experiments, mentorship, and one-to-one advice before committing.
- 5
Choose and test a path
Select the strongest overlap between world need, scarce skills, and personal fit, then gather real-world evidence through work or training.
Pro tip Reassess as you learn more about your performance and the state of the world.
Watch out Do not treat the first choice as irreversible.
In the wild
MacAskill initially studied highly esoteric areas such as logic and philosophy of language. After confronting arguments about global poverty and meeting Toby Ord, he redirected much of his work toward donations, career impact, and effective altruism while retaining enough academic philosophy to preserve his options.
→ He combined academic research with the creation of organizations focused on helping people use money and careers more effectively.
Someone seeking impact could begin with pandemic preparedness as a high-need problem, identify scarce skills such as policy, biological defense, or technical research, and then assess which route best matches their capabilities.
→ Career choice becomes a search for the strongest contribution rather than a continuation of an inherited path.
Common mistakes
Following passion in isolation
Beginning only with current interests can funnel people toward oversubscribed careers while overlooking urgent problems.
Drifting along an inherited path
Subject choices, parental examples, and campus recruitment can determine an entire career without deliberate reflection.
Ignoring personal fit
A globally important problem is not automatically the right career if the person cannot develop the required skills or perform well.
From the transcript
“start off having an understanding of what the world most needs”
“within those top problems what are the skills that are most in need and then thirdly thinking and what do I most provide where the…”
“starting with the world's problems rather than starting with kind of myself and my particular interest”
From the episode
Moral Philosopher Will MacAskill on What We Owe The Future