All the evidence-based advice we've found on how to be more successful in any job

Abstract

Most self-help advice rests on little evidence — “think positively” can even backfire, since fantasising about an ideal future reduces motivation by making you feel you have already arrived. But a set of steps anyone can take does have empirical or strong theoretical support, and they compound: applying productivity and learning advice accelerates everything else on the list, and positive psychology makes you happier, which makes you more productive. The 15 areas below are ordered roughly by ease and upside, and the recommended approach is to pick one area, build one habit at a time, and focus on it for 3–12 months rather than attempting everything at once.

Framing

• The list gathers what 80,000 Hours judges to be the best available personal development advice from 15+ years, aimed at people who want both a better career and more impact.
• Selection criteria for including a step: strength of empirical evidence, whether it makes theoretical sense, the potential upside, how widely applicable it is, and the cost of applying and testing it. Steps that are cheap and high-upside are included even where the evidence is weaker.
• Applies whether or not you are changing careers: the steps build career capital in whatever role you currently hold.
• Stated reading time: 40 minutes.

0. Learn how to build habits

• Most of the advice that follows involves forming habits, so improving at habit formation accelerates everything else. Recommended: Atomic Habits; BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits for a more academic treatment.
• Make habits easy and rewarding: use environmental cues (gym bag packed the night before), accountability (agreeing to meet a friend at 8:00 AM), and rewards (Netflix only on the treadmill).
• Start smaller than seems worthwhile — five minutes of exercise a day rather than four hour-long sessions a week. Tiny habits shift identity and can be built upon.
• Ingraining a habit takes roughly 30–60 days, so start one at a time. Typically focus on a single area for 3–12 months, using each month for one habit or exercise.

1. Take care of yourself

• Ambitious, idealistic people often neglect themselves, burn out, and become less effective. Adam Grant’s work argues altruists who also look after their own interests are more productive long term and end up helping more.
• The basics matter most: rest, exercise, diet, and close friendships — these affect day-to-day happiness, health and energy more than factors people usually focus on, such as money.
• Sleep: Lynette Bye’s guide is the recommended summary of the research; small technical fixes (e.g. an eye mask) sometimes help a lot.
• Schedule deeply relaxing activities at least weekly — nature, baths, meditation, dance, time with friends.
• Exercise: aim at least for the UK NHS guidelines; the priority is actually doing it, so start with what you enjoy.
• Diet consensus points: find a system that avoids excess calories (low carb, low fat, intermittent fasting — whichever works), avoid processed foods and lots of sugar, eat plenty of protein and plenty of plants, then experiment and track how you feel.
• Friendships: the single biggest lever is scheduling regular time for them.

2. If relevant, make mental health your top priority

• About 30% of people in their 20s have some kind of mental health issue; if you are affected, prioritising treatment is among the best investments available, for your own sake and your ability to help others.
• Don’t get hung up on formal diagnostic thresholds — many conditions lie on a spectrum and the diagnostic cut-off is arbitrary. What matters is finding ways to feel better.
• A doctor, ideally a specialist psychiatrist, is the recommended first step; universities usually offer free services.
• CBT is described as probably the most evidence-based therapy, useful for many conditions and as a general emotional-management skill. Its core idea — that emotions follow from thinking, which tends to be unrealistically negative — is the sense in which “think positively” points somewhere useful.
• Feeling Good by David D. Burns has itself been tested in RCTs and found to reduce depressive symptoms.
• Related practical traditions: DBT, ACT, behavioural activation, compassion-focused therapy, exposure therapy, focusing, meditation, internal family systems.
• Finding a therapist: therapeutic alliance may matter as much as the modality; ask for referrals from friends whose judgement you trust, don’t stick with the first therapist, and note the broad split between psychoanalytic and CBT traditions.
• Condition-specific resources named: Lorien Psychiatry reviews, NHS advice, Scott Alexander’s treatment summaries for depression and anxiety, It’s Not Always Depression, Mind Ease, CBT resources for adult ADHD, and guides on perfectionism and imposter syndrome.

3. Deal with your physical health (including your back)

• Health is the area where the most evidence-based advice exists; the NHS Health A to Z and Mayo Clinic are recommended references. A study found AI roughly as good as a human doctor at diagnosis, though an expert should double-check its recommendations.
• Back pain is identified as probably the largest risk to productivity — after car accidents, the leading cause of ill health among otherwise healthy people in high-income countries. Causes vary widely and it is hard to treat. RSI is a related workplace hazard.
• Preventive steps: set up your desk correctly and maintain good posture; change position regularly (e.g. pomodoro-style 25/5 cycles); exercise regularly including whole-body strength work, especially the posterior chain (e.g. Romanian deadlifts); and treat symptoms early.

4. Set goals

• Debates about outcome vs. process goals or ambitious vs. achievable goals probably don’t matter much; what matters is that goal-setting works — people who set goals achieve more.

Longer-term goals

• Clarify what an ideal life looks like: how you’d want life to look in 5 or 10 years, if money were no object or you knew you couldn’t fail.
• Don’t only consider exciting achievements — many external achievements don’t affect happiness much. Also picture an ideal “mundane Wednesday”: what you’d do from waking to sleeping, and how you’d feel.
• Ingredients most important for fulfilment: satisfying relationships; contributing to a goal beyond yourself; engagement and a sense of competence (flow); and the absence of major negatives such as financial stress, health problems or interpersonal conflict.
• Clarify values by repeatedly asking why you pursue a goal until no deeper reason remains; another studied exercise is writing your own eulogy.
• A full version of this step: a list of values to move towards, a five-year “day in the life” vision, and one or two ambitious things to achieve.

Goals for the quarter

• Set 1–2 professional and 1–2 personal goals for the next quarter or two, alongside an annual review that picks a broad focus for the year.
• Input goals (write for 3 hours a day) are under your control; output goals (finish a book this year) can fail for external reasons. Both are useful.

Learn to prioritise

• The 80/20 principle is a rough rule of thumb, but the underlying point — rank goals and concentrate on the top — is important.
• Bottleneck analysis: ask which key problem would unlock the most progress elsewhere (sleep, procrastination, a relationship).
• Pick your top three goals and put everything below them on a do not do list; those second-best activities are the ones most likely to distract you.

5. Become more productive

• Implementation intentions: instead of “I will exercise every day,” define an exact trigger — “when I get home from work, the first thing I’ll do is put on my trainers and go for a run.” A large meta-analysis found roughly a doubling in likelihood of achieving goals (effect size 0.65).

Motivation

• Gabriele Oettingen’s “mental contrasting” combines implementation intentions with negative thinking: think about the goal and why you want it, set an implementation intention, imagine failing and identify what went wrong, modify the plan to prevent that, and repeat until confident. This either produces a more robust plan or reveals the goal is unrealistic.
• Commitment devices: tell a friend you’ll do an hour of focused work before noon, with a penalty (e.g. destroying $100) for missing it. Tools: Beeminder, stickK.
• Further reading: The Motivation Hacker, The Procrastination Equation, Grit.

Productivity processes

1. Track tasks, especially small ones — Getting Things Done, or the simpler “GTD in 15 minutes”; software such as Asana or Todoist.
2. Do a five-minute review at the end of each day, optionally adding gratitude journaling, happiness tracking, and lessons learned; send tomorrow’s to-do list to a friend.
3. Start the day with your most important task (“eat that frog”).
4. Do a weekly review of an hour every one to two weeks, planning the rest of the week; also quarterly.
5. Batch your time — cluster meetings on one or two days, block solid stretches for focused work, clear email once or twice a week. Paul Graham’s “Maker’s schedule, manager’s schedule” covers this; a big-picture version is fixed work hours (e.g. stopping at 6:00 PM), which many find raises productivity and reduces burnout.
6. Block social media — task-switching costs productivity through attention residue. Tools: Freedom, AppBlock, News Feed Eradicator.
7. Build a daily routine you enjoy, using it to trigger habits automatically (e.g. always exercise after lunch); morning routines especially.
8. Avoid thinking about repetitive tasks — eat the same breakfast, hire a cleaner.
9. Use the pomodoro technique: a timer and 25 minutes of single-task focus; optionally paired with someone else for accountability, e.g. via Focusmate.
10. Track your time (Toggl, HourStack, a spreadsheet) to check hours match priorities and improve task-duration estimates.

• Not all of these have implementation-intention-level evidence; the suggestion is to try one a week, keep the ones that help, then spend several weeks ingraining them.
• Further reading: Deep Work, Stephen Wolfram’s “Seeking the productive life”, Peter Wildeford, Sam Altman.

6. Get better at using AI tools

• AI already functions as a team of expert advisors available 24/7 — as tutor, editor, critic, or source of ideas and personalised advice.
• As models improve they become more like “digital workers,” and directing them effectively is expected to become one of the most valuable skills in any job.
• Practical points: pay for the latest models, which are significantly more capable than free ones; get into the habit of running your problems past AI and then checking its answers, building a sense of what different models can and can’t do.
• Provide lots of context and 2–5 clear examples of the desired output — most people write a few sentences, far less context than they’d give a human.
• Use projects with preloaded context and custom instructions for recurring task types (e.g. editing writing in your own style); long rambling voice notes can be summarised by AI into project instructions.
• Look for larger chunks of routine work to automate wholesale. AI is best at manipulating data that exists on the internet and at maths, coding and science questions with known answers, but the scope is expanding rapidly.
• Historical caution against overreading current limitations: critics mocked models for miscounting the “r”s in “strawberry” through 2025, a limitation o1 had already overcome in September 2024 behind a $20/month paywall.

7. Improve basic social skills

• Social skills mediate relationships, which matter for both work and happiness, yet good advice on improving them is scarce.
• Basics that anyone can learn — better habits, small talk, changing how you think about social situations — make a large difference.
• How to Win Friends and Influence People is the most popular guide and a classic despite advice worth taking with a pinch of salt; Bryan Caplan’s notes offer a summary and steelman. Succeed Socially by Chris MacLeod is a modern alternative.
• More advanced: The Charisma Myth; improv and Toastmasters.
• Ultimately it comes down to practice and getting comfortable talking to new people.

8. Surround yourself with great people

• The eventual goal: a couple of strong allies professionally and personally who can advise on difficult problems, plus a wider set of weak ties across relevant industries and scenes, and a role in one or two communities. This takes time and grows as your skills and accomplishments do.
• Start with one or two regular habits that introduce you to new people (running a useful social media feed, attending or hosting events), habits for following up, and ways to help people out.
• Location is the other major lever: industries still cluster — Silicon Valley for software, Boston for scientific research and biotech, Taiwan for semiconductors, New York and London for finance. Innovation globally is concentrated in under 20 mega-regions.
• Caveats: building a friend network takes a long time and moving means leaving relatives behind; close relationships are perhaps the most important ingredient of fulfilment, and a survey of 20,000 people in the US found location satisfaction a major component of life satisfaction. Many people move and then move back — including the author, whose team moved to the Bay Area in 2016 and back to London in 2019, partly over social life.
• Suggested approach: try living somewhere for a few months first, include a cooling-off period, consider moving for 1–3 years to make connections, or capture much of the benefit with one or two longer visits to a hub each year. Settling in properly can take several years.
• Further reading: The Startup of You ch. 4, Give and Take, Never Eat Alone, “How to become insanely well-connected”, Barking Up the Wrong Tree, Paul Graham’s essay on cities.

9. Apply research into happiness

• Being happier is good in itself and also makes you more productive, a better advocate, and less likely to burn out. Positive psychology has developed and tested practical exercises; a 2020 meta-analysis found positive effects for all the intervention types listed below.
• The list, largely from Martin Seligman’s Flourish:
  1. Gratitude journaling — three things you’re grateful for each day and what caused them; also the gratitude visit.
  2. Learn basic CBT for emotional management, e.g. the ABC exercise daily.
  3. Use your signature strengths — take the VIA Character Strengths survey and use one of your top five each day.
  4. Craft your job — adapt it to include more satisfying ingredients (flow, visible effects of your work, time with a friend at work). Adam Grant found fundraisers who met scholarship recipients became dramatically more productive.
  5. Do something kind each day — random acts of kindness significantly boost the mood of the giver.
  6. Practise “active constructive responding” — respond enthusiastically and authentically to others’ good news, and ask to learn more.
  7. Schedule something you enjoy each day and savour it.
  8. Meditate — substantial trial evidence for wellbeing, stress, mental health, focus and empathy; try 20 minutes a day via Waking Up, The Way, or Effortless Mindfulness; Altered Traits reviews the literature and Mindfulness offers an eight-week MBSR-style course.
• A retreat gives a larger dose and a better read on the benefits, but carries more risk of negative effects — find a good teacher and stop if it consistently makes you feel worse. The author reports meditation as the single largest boost to his wellbeing but only after ~1,000 hours of practice, so recommends it after the lower-hanging fruit.
• Rate your happiness 1–10 at the end of each day: memory of what makes us happy is unreliable, and tracking builds a more objective picture. Moodscope is suggested.

10. Save more money

• Aim for at least six months of “runway” — how long you could live without income — ideally 12, depending on how long finding another job would take. Runway buys security and the flexibility to make big career changes, navigate turbulence, and take risks.
• Conventional advice adds saving ~15% of income for retirement. The possibility of AGI arriving in the next decade might increase the importance of saving: careers may not last as long, investment returns could be very high for a period, and new technologies and goods might arrive sooner than expected.
• Make saving automatic with a direct payment into savings on payday.
• Focus on big wins rather than constant scrimping — often rent, by moving somewhere smaller and cheaper or sharing. Until you have six months of runway, cut charitable donations back to 1%.
• Moving somewhere fun and cheap temporarily is easier with remote work (a nice apartment with a pool in Chiang Mai for ~$500/month).
• Beware swapping money for time: saving $100/month by adding an hour to your commute is a bad trade if that hour could earn or advance more — you’d only need to earn an extra $5/hour to break even. Focusing on earning more, especially by negotiating salary, is often more effective than spending less.
• Further reading: the FIRE community, Mr. Money Mustache, and introductory and advanced guides to personal finance for donors.

11. Use research into decision-making to think better

• Intelligence and rationality are distinct: people can be great at narrow problems and bad at real-life decisions. The same research finds rationality is the easier of the two to train.
• Accurate beliefs and good decisions are meta-skills that determine everything else, and matter more still for impact, where differences between paths are large and judgement calls unavoidable.
• Philip Tetlock tracked pundits’ predictions and found most couldn’t beat chance, but identified a minority — “superforecasters” — who were much better, and showed training measurably improves forecasting. Better judgement comes down to mindset, habits of thinking, and practice.
• Mindset: the best forecasters are “foxes” — many points of view, cautious and humble about what they know, treating beliefs as hypotheses to test — rather than “hedgehogs” with a single worldview applied to everything. Recommended: Scout Mindset.
• Habits: awareness of biases alone is insufficient. Break questions into smaller ones; start from a base rate and adjust for what’s unique about the situation; consider any kind of evidence but weigh it by strength; take many angles and average across perspectives, weighted by how much you trust each. Broad knowledge across fields helps, and basic statistics and decision analysis matter because the best forecasters think quantitatively. How to Measure Anything is recommended.
• Practice: most people are overconfident — 80% confidence intervals contain the answer only half to two-thirds of the time — but an hour of calibration training significantly reduces this (e.g. Coefficient Giving’s calibration quiz). Make predictions about your own life and track them (Fate Book), or join a forecasting platform such as Metaculus.
• The author’s most useful technique for thinking clearly about a topic is writing about it; Holden Karnofsky has a guide to learning through writing.

12. Learn how to learn

• Thousands of hours of driving don’t make an expert driver. K. Anders Ericsson’s account is that expertise depends on hours of deliberate practice, characterised by: specific goals focused on weaknesses and new techniques; intense focus that feels effortful and slightly uncomfortable; rapid performance feedback; a good coach or teacher; and progressively increasing difficulty.
• This explains why the correlation between years of experience and job performance is very weak: people improve rapidly while stretched, then plateau once they can basically do the job.
• Ericsson’s claims about practice being the sole determinant are contested, but the usefulness of deliberate practice for gaining skills is broadly agreed. Peak summarises the research.
• Real work rarely allows all five criteria, but “deliberate performance” gets closer:
  • Experimentation — vary technique rather than repeating the same approach (e.g. try a new public-speaking technique each talk).
  • Debugging — after a problem or near-miss, explain what went wrong or ask an expert.
  • Estimation — predict how long tasks will take and check accuracy, improving mental models of the activity.
• Deliberate practice works best in predictable domains with standardised training (chess, sports). In less predictable fields (disaster response, business strategy) practice correlates less with performance, but experts still build tacit knowledge; time with experts and exposure to many real cases is what matters, and AI can substitute somewhat for a mentor.
• Spaced repetition exploits the forgetting curve: there is an optimal review frequency for memorisation, supported by tools like Anki.
• Recommended: the Learning How to Learn Coursera course and the book it’s based on, A Mind for Numbers.
• The 80/20 principle applies to learning: the top 1,000 Chinese words cover ~80% of daily usage, so learn the most common material first — and pick the subset most relevant to your actual use case.

13. Be strategic about how you use your time at work

• In most jobs a minority of tasks determines most of your success: a salesperson is judged on revenue, an academic on quality papers, a YouTuber on views. Identify and focus on the tasks that drive those results.
• An entrepreneur who builds product and gets feedback from real users progresses faster than one doing conferences and media, even if the second works longer hours. Work harder especially in winner-takes-all situations, but only after taking all available steps to work smarter.
• To identify the crucial activities, talk to people who have succeeded in your path — and work out what they actually did rather than trusting what they say.
• Where impact is indirect (e.g. government), a suggested split: spend most of your time on what your boss or seniors care about most, and ~20% making a bid to work on what you think is most impactful. The first advances your career and builds the workplace capital to make requests later; a well-targeted 20% can deliver most of the impact you’d achieve with 100% of your time. A similar dynamic applies in media careers.
• Further reading: the Top Performer course, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, “Why most people get stuck in their careers”, “Four principles for decoding career success in your field”.

14. Become an expert

• The endgame after the basics: becoming an expert in a valuable skill and using that expertise on a meaningful problem. Unlike the other steps, this is a life-long task rather than a few months.
• Choose an area that is valuable — this can mean a combination of skills, or expertise as a generalist, which suits roles running organisations, research spanning fields, communications, grantmaking, and policymaking.
• Choose an area where you have a reasonable shot at attaining expertise, which requires personal fit, deliberate practice, and good timing. Since this can’t be fully predicted, try different areas, then set up the best conditions for practice — mentorship and rapid feedback — and practise as much as possible.
• What sets true experts apart is the ability to make creative contributions; recommended: Originals, Wired to Create.

15. Become a better person

• Nothing on the list is worth much unless used for good ends. Becoming a better person means clarifying what you value and living in line with it — worth learning from moral philosophy (Being Good by Simon Blackburn) and spiritual traditions rather than relying on self-reflection alone.
• Moral traditions emphasise character: habits of behaviour supporting a flourishing life — kindness, courage, curiosity, humility, respect for important norms, integrity. Psychologists studying character strengths valued across traditions found convergence on 24, grouped into wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence.
• These strengths help overcome the tendency to do what’s easy short-term (asking your boss for feedback requires courage and humility). Rather than being courageous once, make courage part of your character — a habit and part of your identity.
• Character virtues matter for working with others: a reputation for dishonesty harms impact, and within a community it can undermine trust and damage the community’s external reputation. The Road to Character explores character in historical figures such as George Marshall.
• Game theory and evolutionary psychology support cooperative behaviour benefiting both individual and group. In Axelrod’s iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournaments, the best strategies cooperated first but retaliated against defectors while giving them a chance to change — be kind to strangers, be forgiving, but don’t tolerate exploitation. These strategies also made it easy for others to score well.
• Character matters most for those seeking influential positions: more influence means more temptation to act unethically to preserve power, so build character while the temptations are smaller.
• Many traditions hold virtue as intrinsically good; utilitarian philosophers have long argued that behaving virtuously tends to lead to better outcomes (“Virtues for real world utilitarians”).
• How to build character: character traits are habits ingrained to the point of automaticity, so build them as you would other habits — e.g. practise honesty in small-stakes situations daily and surround yourself with unusually honest people.
• Communities with an explicit moral focus help; so can meditation practices that increase compassion and the ability to act virtuously (Altered Traits, Buddhism and Modern Psychology, Waking Up).
• Emotional triggers prevent people from being their best selves. CBT-tradition tools address this: exposure to triggering situations and memories, examining unconstructive beliefs behind triggers, awareness of emotions, self-regulation habits, and communication skills. Also suggested: The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, the Art of Accomplishment.
• Suggested exercise: pick one character strength or emotional-management habit per quarter, and occasionally take a bigger challenge — change jobs to help others, give more, or take a stand on an unpopular issue — aiming for one big moral challenge a year.

The compounding case for investing in yourself

• People keep improving their skills for decades, so even a non-ideal current job leaves substantial room to become happier, more productive and better placed for impact. Small adjustments snowball.
• Quoted, Richard Hamming, You and Your Research: knowledge and productivity are like compound interest — of two people of similar ability, the one who works 10% more will more than twice outproduce the other, because the more you know the more you learn, and the more you can do the more opportunity you get.
• The steps interlock: productivity and learning make everything else learnable faster; positive psychology makes you happier and so more productive; supportive people help with everything.

Put into practice

• Which of the 15 areas seems most useful to focus on right now?
• What are 1–3 small ways you could improve in that area, and when and where will you do them?
• When will you next review which personal development topic to focus on?