Day 21: Choosing Strategies to Achieve Goals

Today you will learn what strategies are, why autonomy is required for choosing strategies, why choosing strategies is important. and how to choose strategies for achieving your purpose.

Summary

What are Strategies?

Strategies are interchangeable plans of actions that you can use to achieve your goals.

• Strategies are switched out based on who you are and the circumstances that you're coming across in the world.
• Because we can't approach anything with a hundred percent certainty, selecting a strategy from the very beginning can be a little bit of an uncertain proposition.

Choosing strategies is a matter of trial and error, much like the scientific method.

• You propose a hypothesis about the strategy that works best, put it to the test, and when it fails to prove out as it usually does, you come up with a new hypothesis to test.
• If a hypothesis does hold up, you never stop proposing new ones that might work even better than the last.
• Failure is the defining component of the process of developing excellence. Failure is the only way you actually unearth your capabilities, your strengths, and your weaknesses so you can choose better strategies in the future.

What is required for choosing Strategies?

Having choice of strategy requires autonomy, which is the freedom to choose how you spend your resources, including time and money, in pursuit of a goal of your choosing.

To be best equipped for choosing strategies you will need autonomy of:

• Money: the capital needed to apply towards resources for implementing solutions and for sustaining your lifestyle while pursuing your purpose.
• Creative Control: the ability to make decisions about about how to move forward and progress with your purpose and what to be working on.
• Company You Keep: the people who support your path to purpose

Why is choosing Strategies important?

When we choose a strategy, and it fails, we gain rich data into the weaknesses of our abilities and thinking which we can change in order to get better.

• In order to develop your potential to the fullest, to actually reach your purpose, you need to get better at the things you care about most.
• Getting better consists of climbing toward a personal peak of excellence. Only by advancing towards that peak of excellence, can you experience fulfillment.
• And this means that fulfillment and excellence come under your conscious control.

How to choose Strategies

To make decisions between strategies we can use 80,000 Hours decision framework

Consideration One: Short Term Impact

• Role impact: the extent to which the role gives you opportunities to have a large social impact.
• Personal fit: the extent to which you will be able to take advantage of these opportunities, which largely boils down to how good you’ll be in the role.

Consideration Two: Long Term Impact

• Career capital: the extent to which the role gives you opportunities to put yourself in a better position to make an impact in the future.
• Personal fit: the extent to which you will be able to take advantage of these opportunities.

Consideration Three: Supportive Conditions for Personal Satisfaction

• These include having engaging work that absorbs your attention, working with people you like, the job meeting your basic needs (with regards to salary, working hours etc.) and it fitting with the rest of your life.

Here are some tips for balancing the different factors against each other:

• If you are still early in your career, then it’s best to place greater importance on career capital than on role impact, as you’re likely to be able to find plenty of good opportunities to invest in yourself. If you’re late in your career, place less importance on career capital and more on making an impact now. That said, the amount of weight to put on career capital can also depend on which problems you want to work on.
• The more uncertain you are about the long-run, the more you should prioritise flexible career capital over narrow career capital. Flexible career capital is career capital that’s useful in many different roles.
• The more altruistically-minded you are, the less weight you’ll need to place on job satisfaction relative to the other factors.
• Bear in mind that personal fit is potentially the most important factor because it can improve everything else.

Questions to Consider:

Personal Fit

• Predictors: What are the best predictors of success in this field? Do any apply to you?
• Track record: What’s the most similar work you’ve done before? How well did you perform? How quickly did you improve?
• Interest: If you totally failed for a year or two, could you easily imagine persisting? Could you develop an interest in this area?
• Edge: Does this path make use of your most valuable career capital? I.e. does it play to your special edge?

Role impact

• How pressing is the problem?
• Is it big in scale?
• Is it neglected by others?
• How possible is it to make progress?
• How large a contribution can you make to the problem?
• Contribution through your direct work
• Contribution through your donations
• Contribution through using your position for advocacy
• Will you have flexibility over which problems you work on?
• Have people who’ve had a lot of impact pursued this route in the past?
• Do people neglect this path for bad reasons?
• Do you have a theory of how you can use this route to achieve much more than normal?

Career capital

• Skills – What will you learn in this job? You can break skills down into transferable skills, knowledge and personality traits. You’ll learn fastest in jobs where you receive good mentorship.
• Connections – Who will you work with and meet in this job? It’s important to make connections who are both influential and who care about social impact.
• Credentials – Will this job act as a good signal to future collaborators or employers? Note that we don’t just mean formal credentials like having a law degree, but also your achievements and reputation. If you’re a writer, it’s the quality of your blog. If you’re a coder, it’s your GitHub.
• Runway – How much money will you save in this job? Your runway is how long you could comfortably live with no income. We recommend aiming for at least six months of runway to maintain your financial security. Having 12-18 months of runway is even more useful because it gives you the flexibility to make a major career change.

Supportive conditions

• (Impact and personal fit – already covered above)
• Engaging work – Will you get freedom to decide how to work, clear tasks, clear feedback and variety in what you do?
• Colleagues – Will you like them and will they support you?
• Basic needs – Will you earn enough money, will the hours be manageable, and will the commute be reasonable?
• Fit with rest of life – Will you be able to improve your personal relationships, and uphold any other important personal priorities?

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Activity

Spend some time looking at possible strategies that you could use to fulfill your goals.

Use the framework that I showed you today, or find another, to help you decide between the different strategies that you could use to reach your goals.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.