This interview is part of the “A Peek behind the Curtain” interview series.
Jade is Governance Lead at OpenAI. She was the inaugural Head of Research & Partnerships with the Centre for the Governance of Artificial Intelligence (GovAI), housed at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. She completed her DPhil in AI Governance at the University of Oxford and is a Rhodes scholar.
In this interview, Jade and I discuss her thoughts on motivation, productivity, and career path.
Note: This interview is from early 2021 and some parts may no longer accurately represent the guest's views. The transcript has been edited for clarity and readability.
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Lynette Bye: For you personally, do you find that really enjoying what you're doing is correlated with or necessary for being really good at it?
Jade Leung: I thought this was a great question. For me, it's actually a relatively recent realization that I think definitely, definitely yes. More so than I realized and more so than I thought originally. I think it's probably not true for all people but at least the version of it that feels really true to me is if I don't-- I think I want to replace love with something like feel really motivated. Often that for me means that I really actually love the day-to-day thing of it but I also love the idea of the thing that I'm doing and the prospects of what it could do and that kind of thing.
If I'm feeling really motivated about something, I am much, much, much better at doing my job. Conversely, I have had some experience in the last couple of years when I've lost motivation for the thing that I'm doing. In theory, I feel like I should be able to do it or I feel like I should do it. I just totally wasn't successful at trying to make myself actually just do the thing out of sheer willpower and some abstract belief that it was the thing that I should do.
I think for me, short answer is definitely yes. Where loving my work, I think in my case, doesn't necessarily mean loving every minute of it. There are definitely some moments now when I'm very motivated to do the thing that I don’t particularly enjoy doing at the time or whatever it is. Definitely, this global pretty steadfast motivation seemed to massively correlated with me being able to do the job at all, I think, and then also just doing it better than I otherwise would be able to.
Lynette Bye: I'm curious what that looks like, if you have examples of times--?
Jade Leung: The difference between--?
Lynette Bye: Yeah, what is different about this.
Jade Leung: Good question. There's a couple of different things I could point to. Comparing how I feel now and how I felt for the first week while that I was doing- I probably won't mention the job just for confidentiality reasons, but there was some period of time when I was doing a job initially where I was very motivated.
What that looked like was, it was incredibly easy to do a lot of it. In terms of sheer hours, I just didn't really feel much friction putting that stuff in at all. It felt like it was very energizing, it felt challenging. It felt like I was able to actually do things to a pretty high quality. It felt like in instances where I wasn't, I bounced back and was very motivated to do better at it the next time. It was just like a consistently positive frame on the thing.
Then I basically had a period of kind of burn-outie symptoms where I lost a bunch of motivation because of particular things that happened. That meant that I felt like I had to push through and do the job but I wasn't as motivated to do it.
For someone like me, I'm very wired around caring about what I do. It was actually just genuinely pretty shocking to be like, "Wow, I don't really want to get out of bed," and like, "I don't really want to go work and start." I look at my task list and I'm not excited about doing any of the things there. I was much slower, just empirically slower at doing the things. I was more into satisficing as opposed to optimizing how well I was doing certain things. I would do things that I hadn't done before, I would check what time it was so I could end the day at a reasonable time whereas I just usually wouldn't be doing that at all.
It was stuff like that where at least I felt like a pretty different person and I felt like I was able to do less and do things less well for sure.
Lynette Bye: How did you get past that period? Did you change work or find something about it that was more motivating?
Jade Leung: I was stuck in it for a while longer than I probably would have been if I had just accepted the fact that I was not motivated to do it and didn't have this global thing of like, "Someone should do this so I might as well do it," kind of thing. I was stuck in there for a while because I kept having this mindset of like, "I should be the kind of person--" I think this still resonates a little bit. I still have some work to do. I wanted to be the kind of person that could push through and do the important thing, even when I wasn't motivated to do it.
I kind of wrote off the personal fit thing. I was like, "No, it's not a thing, I should just be able to power through." I was stuck there for a while because of that and then basically just quit. I eventually had a bunch of conversations with my boss at the time and a colleague that I worked really close with. They were just like, "No, you are not the kind of person that's going to enjoy this. It's not worth powering through. Sure, there are high replaceability concerns but we're going to work through it. It's probably just not a good idea for both us and you."
Having that permission, I think, from folks surrounding me was really helpful. That’s basically what happened. I’ve been super motivated since. I think the big update for me, which I've tried to stick to in career decisions since then, is just to not do the thing of try to force myself to do X when a lot of other indications about how much I'm enjoying it just aren't pointing in that direction.
Lynette Bye: When you were trying to power through of the like, "I should be this kind of person," would you have in that moment described yourself as enjoying it?
Jade Leung: No. Probably not. I think I didn't even get enjoyment out of the idea that I was being that person.
Lynette Bye: Got it. Going the other way, have you ever had doubts about whether you were good enough, smart enough, capable enough to pursue your career?
Jade Leung: Honestly, I reflected on this quite a bit when I was scanning through the questions because I feel like my answer should be yes. I think honestly, it's actually not that much. I don't think it's because I'm super confident that I'm definitely able to do the thing. I generally have an approach to career and life things where I try to put myself in pretty uncomfortable positions because that's at least one hypothesis that I have about how I get better at doing a range of things that I want to get better at.
It's definitely not because I'm super confident that I could do the things that are all on my plate. I think it's more driven from a place of like, "I think it's quite counterproductive to spend that much time mulling things like that over." I think it's obviously important to be calibrated about my abilities and to pursue careers that are actually within reason for me to be able to do well. I think the data for that comes from bigger data points rather than the day-to-day data.
I think my approach to this generally is: put my head down, behave as if I can do the thing that I'm trying to do right now. Do that for a bunch of time and then sometimes bring my head up again and think about whether I've learned things about fundamental limitations that I have or in fact, whether the thing is too easy and I should pursue something else or things like that. I think getting stressed about it in the day-to-day doubtful sense is a thing that, at least I have a pretty strong prior that it's not super productive.
I just don't think I'm generally wired this way. I can't really think of times when I've been massively doubtful of myself. I think most of the time, it seems unhelpful to do it as often as I think one's tendencies would be if you come from a pretty humble place and you're actually just trying to figure out what to do. I think my general answer is something like not that much. I think it's mostly from this position of not because I'm confident but mostly from the position of I think it's just counterproductive to do it.
Lynette Bye: I am guessing that most of the people who do this don't think it's productive.
Jade Leung: Right.
Lynette Bye: They don't endorse this. but you seem to have this ability to act on that belief better.
Jade Leung: I think there are probably some people that actually feel like it is. Yes, I definitely agree that for some cases, it's a thought pattern that one falls into that's pretty difficult to shake. But I think for some folks, I think it comes from a place of “I feel like I should be entirely honest with myself about things that I'm bad at.” I think behaviors that suggest that it would be like always asking for feedback and really trying to get negative feedback, really pushing to get a much clearer sense of ways in which they're failing. Some of your organizations also just encourage that culture of always being on the edge of thinking whether you can do the thing or not.
I want to slightly push back on that. I think people would reasonably disagree with me and think of that actually as decently productive sometimes.
Lynette Bye: When you're going about your work, the times when it isn't flowing, you're not motivated, and you have to force yourself, how often has that happened in your past?
Jade Leung: Where I've had to force myself to do things? Honestly, not that often. I think this one period was a time when it's most salient in my memory that I did try to do that. I guess, no, I was going to say, my PhD was a little bit of this, but I think I felt motivated by the instrumental thing of getting it enough that it basically felt the same as if I was motivated.
I don't think I tend to, and definitely, since that period, haven't put myself in a position of trying to force myself to do it. Then before that, I think I've had a really lucky time in life to be able to work on things that I feel pretty motivated by consistently. No, I don't think I've put myself in that position that much.
Lynette Bye: Do you know other people who do put themselves in the position of really needing to push through and having a punishing approach to it that you see working well? What I'm getting at here is this a you thing or is this a thing that generalizes that it’s better to be motivated?
Jade Leung: The most productive people I can think of, I think, all of them really, really, really love what they're doing. I can't think of many. At least if I'm selecting for out-of-distribution productive people, it seems pretty strongly correlated with “I’m really actually just totally obsessed with the thing.” I can think of friends and think of colleagues who I think are less black and white about it than I am. Yeah, definitely can think of colleagues for sure who don't feel challenged or particularly excited about their day-to-day. It's this bigger vision of what they're enabling an organization to do, for example, that keeps them at the job.
It's self-punishing in the sense that they're, in some cases, just quite miserable, actually, in a day-to-day sense, but there's this higher-level thing that keeps them going. In terms of that being a sustainable thing, these colleagues bounce off those jobs within a couple of years. It doesn't seem super sustainable. The thing I'm trying to say is I think there are people who are wired to be better at pushing through those situations than at least I am. Maybe it's either that they don't suffer as much or they have this higher-level motivation thing which does more work for them than it does for me.
Lynette Bye: I know that your PhD was more research-focused. I'm curious, what do you think are the most important skills for doing valuable research that you had and how you developed those?
Jade Leung: The first caveat is that I don't actually think I'm particularly good at research. I genuinely tried and I'm reasonably calibrated on the fact that I'm not actually that great at it for whatever that's worth. I think things that I at least appreciate a ton more about being able to do research well, that weren't totally obvious to me at the start, one, is being able to write well. That's a skill that I think is under-emphasized in research and ends up being just super, super important. When I say write well, it's like a couple of different flavors of it. One is just being able to write in a clear way and to communicate things in a parsimonious succinct, streamlined, structured fashion. That's one type of write well.
I think another type of write well is actually write in a way that's pleasant to read. Write in a way that's fun to read and write in a way that's intuitive and persuasive to the extent that you want to make it persuasive in that context, that kind of writing. I think both of those throughout the course of my PhD and also the course of doing research management at GovAI, just definitely hammered home to me how useful it is to be really good at writing in those two ways. Maybe more actually the first one than the second.
Lynette Bye: Was there anything that you found that was particularly useful for developing that skill?
Jade Leung: Feedback was super helpful. One of the best writers I know is Allan Dafoe, totally privileged to be able to work with him at GovAI. I think one of the things I learned the most from him was this. He is really, really good at giving writing feedback. I think both being able to work with him on pieces of research and seeing how he would write and how he would revise were helpful. Literally to the level of he'll do suggested edits and I would read them over and try to understand what kind of thing he was going for, instead of what was there.
I think that's a huge one, feedback and learning from people who are just doing it really well. Then I think also just paying it more attention/spending more time on it sounds like a simple/obvious thing, but I think, if people were-- One thing that I learned was if I just read my work closely and actually looked at the sentence level edits that I could make to make it better, I just spotted a bunch more things that I usually wouldn't even have invested the time trying to look for, if I wasn't trying to focus on writing.
I think it's just wearing this extra lens of trying to improve one's writing. Then spending more time than I expected I would need to trying to make it better was actually just a massive, massive improvement.
Lynette Bye: How much of your research process was like targeted reading to learn something versus general learning versus thinking over ideas, that sort of thing versus actually producing written output or talking to people?
Jade Leung: If I'm thinking about mostly the PhD, it was super-targeted reading. I don't think I did much general reading. Most of the time, I would have some question that I wanted to find an answer to and then I would look specifically for reading that would help me answer it and then read that. I think a bulk of it was targeted reading in terms of how it's split between readings/thinking/writing/other things. I spent a lot of time reading. It was probably something like 30, 40%. Then I didn't actually spend that much time talking to people, but I think in retrospect, I wish I did.
I'm a bit odd in that I think I'm just quite shy and self-conscious about talking about research and ideas. I have this thing of feeling embarrassed about not being smart on the spot and I generally get nervous about pitching ideas that I have, particularly to people who I think just know a bunch more about their field. I didn't work super actively on trying to get over that. I think that if I was to do it again, that would definitely be like a method that I would use more, just like chatting to people about things.
I think since I've done a lot more with non-research ideas. Depending on who I'm talking to and what conversation we're able to have, most of the time a good conversation just really is super useful for progressing ideas and making things better in general. I spent barely any time on that, was like 5% to 10% maybe. I wish I did that.
Then a lot of the other time was writing. I think through writing. A portion of the writing was doubling as thinking, if you will. The thing that I use writing for most of the time is I have different modes of writing and research. I think one mode of writing is just like “talking to myself” writing. It's not intended to be read by anyone and not going to go into a paper. That's how I think, I try to structure it on paper and describe it to myself in various ways.
Then other versions of writing are closer to preparing it for final output. Then near the end of the PhD definitely spent a ton of time on that and related to the thing that we were just talking about, ended up spending a lot more time than I thought I would have to to try to improve at the sentence-level clarity form of writing.
Lynette Bye: I'm guessing you came through a lot of ideas in these processes. Did you have a process for deciding which kinds of things you were going to pursue further versus what you were going to set aside? How did you decide which ideas made the cut?
Jade Leung: I went into the PhD very instrumentally focused on getting it as opposed to using it as an opportunity to research a thing that I was excited about. I think that shaped a lot of the fact that I came into it with a pretty narrow scope and I didn't find it super hard to just do the things that were enroute to getting it.
I don't think this is how people should normally approach research. I think it should normally like involve a bunch more ideas and a bunch of culling of ideas. I think from personal experience I don't have much to say there. I think I mostly just ended up being like “Here's what I need to do. I'll do it.” Then I didn't feel much of a pull towards working on ideas that I ultimately had to discard just because I wasn't really focused on finding them.
One thing that Allan, this is mostly proxy learning via Allan and how he engages with the research thing. One thing that I think Allan does really well, which I think is a cool way to research, is he does always have a list of ideas and strongly recommends that all people do and like has a running list of research ideas, way more than you could ever get done. Then at least by observation, I think the thing that he does is he spends some amount of time chipping away at some of them, like more than he would actually be able to follow through with.
Then by this process of light experimentation-- It's like you're actually delving into the idea and try and understand it a little bit better. Maybe writing up a couple of pages on it and getting into the mode of actually investigating it. I think that gave him a bunch more data about whether this was a project that actually had the legs that he thought it could have, whether it felt pleasant and fun to work on too. Whether it felt like it was exploring a bunch of other ideas or whether it felt a bit flat. I think that light experimentation across a wide set of ideas is a pretty informative thing, at least for him or as a researcher like him to be able to choose ideas from there.
I think it's more informative than scanning a list and trying to pick. That's a practice that if I was to do a research career, I'd actually try and see if it works for me too.
Lynette Bye: Makes sense. What other things have you found to be good practices or predictors of success for people trying to do research if you're evaluating candidates, for example?
Jade Leung: The clear writing one is a huge one. The concrete experience that I'm mostly thinking about here is hiring researchers at FHI and GovAI. I think the things that we found were super useful as predictors is clear writing and then this-- I haven't really been able to find a way to describe it, but it's something like a structured, causal mechanistic style of thinking. I don't know if that makes sense. It's something like being able to look at a problem and try to pick it apart and a pretty analytical break-it-down, reverse engineering kind of way.
At least for the kinds of research that we were looking at where there's somewhat limited empirics you can do on a fair number of them and a fair amount of the time it's decently abstract or like an abstract space. I think that style of thinking goes a long way and being able to just pretty naturally without much like effort and nudging, like break apart problems like that, is super useful. Then another big predictor was people who had good ideas. We'd often ask people to submit research proposal ideas.
We chat to people about a bunch of ideas and people who just have this consistent taste for research questions that are both interesting and important and precise enough that it could actually be tractable. Actually precision in ideas is like a sub-bit of that that I think is actually quite important. In general, having good ideas and having a fair number of them, it's a pretty good predictor. Then the last thing that comes to mind is something like curiosity which I mostly emphasize in the context of EA researchers.
I think the pool of researchers who at least we encountered, who were coming at it from an impact motivation standpoint, by coming from a very good place of wanting to work on research because it's important, a lack of genuine curiosity felt like a thing that happened a bunch of times. It was like people thought it was important, but they didn't necessarily feel this natural gravitation or ability to become very interested in this topic. They were mostly, I guess, like mirroring the thing I said earlier about motivation too. It's like there's something different about feeling it is a thing that’s good to do because the world says that it's so versus actually feeling naturally pulled towards it.
This natural curiosity, at least towards some subset of questions that folks want to work on, and having this natural research curiosity is a thing that I think is maybe a tad missing in the average/median EA motivated researcher. That I think could be boosted a bunch more. I think when it does exist, it actually just really pays off because it's like you've got your own motor to go on. You've got a natural “sniffing things out because you're curious about them” ability. Which I think is super useful.
You're able to spot insights that other people won't spot because you're more likely to investigate weird rabbit holes and investigating weird parallel adjacent literatures that someone who's just more instrumentally focused on answering the thing wouldn't necessarily go down.
Lynette Bye: I'm curious how you think people came to have this probably more of the analytical thinking? Is this like they've spent time understanding the field and building models?
Jade Leung: I don't really know to be honest. I wish we'd figured it out because then we'd have a bit more ability to actually recruit for people like it. I think maybe the only thing that I could more generically point to is folks who are pretty comfortable with quantitative fields and quantitative research seem to do better at this deconstruction thing.
I think folks who have just mostly at university level studied things in the domain of social sciences that aren't economics, it just wasn't as common. Definitely found in some folks for sure, but it just wasn't as common as it was if someone had at least a somewhat broader liberal arts degree. A lot had done STEM type of things and had done decently high-level mathematics, at least early-stage mathematics, something like that.
Aside from that, not really. I'd be curious if there's stuff out there that suggests that people can learn the skill too. For example, I can imagine, if you spend a bunch of time doing model building and fermi estimates and whatnot, you'd get better at it. If you spend a bunch of time doing forecasting, you'd probably get better at it. That'd be cool if we could figure that out and encourage folks to skill up that more.
Lynette Bye: Moving on to productivity. I'm curious which activities on day-to-day you found easy to do or enjoyable and how that's influenced the direction you're taking in your career.
Jade Leung: I really like this question. It's cool. I think the thing that I find easiest is starting new things, generating ideas, riffing off ideas. Generally, things that look like initiation and ideation, I find super fun and don't struggle much at all with getting motivated and finding the willpower to do. I think that is a large part of the reason why I just keep coming back to startup stuff. I've come back to it again and again because basically, the whole day job is basically doing that. That's one thing.
I think another thing that also somewhat explains where I've landed is I find it-- I don't know if fun is the right word, but I definitely find it very intuitive to think about the people and organizational side of things. If I look at a problem or I look at a space or if I look at a challenge that we need to solve, I think my intuition is always to focus on the dimension of it that has to do with people and incentives at both the people level and organizational level.
Relatedly, I find it pretty natural thinking about tactics for people organization and strategies for getting people on board with various things and that kind of thing. I find that mode of thinking pretty natural or that's some default state by which I look at problems, particularly organizational-type problems. I think that has led me more towards careers where I'm doing a fair amount of people-facing stuff and a fair amount of convincing people of our vision and trying to get them onboard. I find that stuff intuitive.
The reason why I don't want to label it as fun is sometimes I get this feeling it's kind of icky. I haven't really been able to shake it, but anyway, it feels pretty useful, at least in that sense.
On things that I find hard, which have also led me to navigate my career in certain ways, maybe the most difficult realization that has taken me some time to accept is I find it quite hard to get things to the last mile.
In research for example, I found that I lost patience with research way before it was done and way before it was ready to be published. The last-mile, detail-oriented, really pushing it through, I think it's just hyper important work and nothing will get done in this world if we didn't have that capacity. I think I'm just actually quite bad at it. I think I'm quite bad at it from an "I'm just a very impatient person" perspective, and I think I'm also just quite bad at it in the sense that I don't feel super motivated to get to that level and so I end up being just bad at executing on it.
Because of that, that was maybe the biggest reason why I updated against research as a career. Then, in general, I think I've moved more towards careers where I'm empowering and leveraging other people to do things rather than doing the full lifecycle of execution of a project. That's conversely things that I don't actually find all that useful and so I've updated against it.
Lynette Bye: What does this story of figuring this out? Were you deliberately trying different things and seeing what you felt good at or you were just paying careful attention to see what clicked?
Jade Leung: It was a bunch of research projects at GovAI where I was in a research management/lead role. Then I think for a couple of them, I wanted to try being the main author on a bunch of things, which was a pretty different mindset to be in. I basically found that in the process of trying to do that I was very impatient with the whole iteration process that is just definitely required to make a piece of research good. I found that I wasn't really able to-- It wasn't the feedback that was the problem. I think it was just the time it took to integrate it, iterate on it, do it again and again and again to get it to a place where it was properly rigorous.
Then I was really slow, slower than I usually am at things because I wasn't feeling motivated to push it to that last mile and basically dropped the ball on some projects because I wasn't able to muster up enough motivation to do it. It was two specific research projects where I was the person who had the ball to do the last mile of work. I eventually got it done, but it was just much harder and hard in the way that I didn't really want to lean into it and get better at it.
It just felt unpleasant and unnatural for me at the time. I genuinely mean it when I say I wish I was the person who could do it because I feel like it's a very useful skill. Maybe at some point, I'm going to try to apply myself and learn it or learn how to muster up that, whatever it is, to be able to do it. At least those two experiences were the main things that made me think I wasn't naturally pretty suited to do it.
Lynette Bye: It sounds like you're leaning into what things can you do that don't feel like hard effortful work that you're having to push yourself into.
Jade Leung: Yes. I feel like the thing that I find hard to square is, I think, on the one hand, I'm a pretty strong advocate for putting myself in positions where I feel like things are hard, and so I check that I always have when I'm about to make a career decision or take on a project is, is there a thing here that I feel somewhat nervous about doing, I actually feel like I'm incapable of doing it, and so I'm more likely to learn something? I think, on the one hand, that feels like a thing that I both think and actually follow through with on decisions.
I think in this case, either I wasn't bought into the learning value enough to want to follow through or I just didn't have enough of whatever. Even if I thought it was a good thing to commit myself to engage with the hard stuff, I didn't have enough something to get through it. I think it's some combination. I think there's some feeling that I get when I'm maybe not naturally good at it and it feels hard to do it but I want to try to be better at it compared to when I don't actually feel like I want to try to be better at it or sufficiently want to try. Negotiation is one thing that I'm like, "I'm really bad at this." I'm really bad at asking for what I want.
I'm generally naturally very accommodating and naturally more in listening mode as opposed to being in naturally a conversational mode where I'm very active. Anyway, there are a bunch of things about my personality and traits that make me a bad negotiator but I think I feel like a genuine level of excitement about getting better at it. I really want to get better at it and so I'm actively seeking out ways in which I can do it. I don't have that same level of like, “Oh, I really want to try, even though it was hard,” at least with this type of skill which I'm a bit confused about to be honest because I think like I do actually think it's just an important thing to be able to get things done in the world. I don't really know what's going on there.
Lynette Bye: Okay. Some intuitive “pick your battles” type of thing.
Jade Leung: Yes. Maybe.
Lynette Bye: Okay. Looking back at your career, if you could send a message back to your freshman college self, what general advice would you give them that might've helped speed up what you accomplished or get to more useful things faster?
Jade Leung: Three things come to mind. I think the first thing, the most obvious thing for me is I feel like I didn't spend much time early in life learning and reflecting on what I think is true and important about the world and where my moral viewpoints land and what kinds of things I hold as deep-seated beliefs and how I can challenge those and like trying to really probe at that side of things.
I basically just wasn't a super reflective kid and didn't do a bunch of-- I didn't spend a lot of time reading, reflecting, introspecting. I spent a lot more of my time, if not all of my time, just externally focused doing a bunch of things. I definitely think I could have traded off, I don't know, at least 20% of my time when I was doing a bunch of running organizations or doing campaigns or whatever for time when I was just in my own brain trying to understand my views and learning about how to develop views in a rigorous way.
I think if I did more of that or if I invested more in that, I probably could have just steered my career more intentionally towards things that I actually cared about earlier on. Maybe earlier on would also have formed a stronger set of hypotheses about how I'd want to be able to contribute to doing good things and then being able to just be more systematic about the way I explored.
I would have spent less time doing basically-- I think a lot of my early career in college, I spent a lot of time doing basically the same thing where it was like different non-profits or different organizations or different campaigns, but I was basically doing the same thing. It wasn't progressing in some particular way. I felt like there was some wasted time there.
Then the second thing that comes to mind is practicing this thing we were chatting about before about having this structured mechanistic approach to thinking and then more generally just having grounded epistemic skills. I wish I spent more time on trying to develop that cluster of things earlier on as well.
Lynette Bye: Yes.
Jade Leung: I don't really know what I would've done to try to do it.
Lynette Bye: That was going to be my next question.
Jade Leung: I don't really know what I would've done. Definitely, being exposed to rationality methods and techniques has been really cool and came pretty late for me. That earlier probably would have been cool. I don't know, that cluster. I don't really know what I would do with it, but I think investing in it would be a piece of advice that I'd have for past me.
Then I think the third softer side that comes to mind is I was super into pushing myself super hard. I feel a bit mixed about this one and then I feel like they learned a fair amount about how far I can push myself and what my limits are early and I think that's paid off. I definitely wasn't living a particularly healthy sleep balanced life thing at the time. I don't feel like I suffer for it currently, but I feel like I was less happy at the time for it. Aso under-invested in relationships too, which if I were to play it again, I would do that a bunch more. That cluster feels mixed, but I feel something nudging myself a little bit more in the direction of becoming a well-rounded person, as opposed to do all the things, which is roughly the mode I was in all the time. That would be a thing that I consider doing more of.
Lynette Bye: Makes sense. I'm curious, have you seen other people take some of these approaches where they did invest more early on in this strategic thinking or exploration that paid off?
Jade Leung: That's a good question. Off the top of my head, I can't think of people who I know tried really hard to do it. I definitely know people who've spent a bunch more time reading in earlier college. I find it pretty hard to put a finger on what difference that made. I definitely think there are people who think more clearly and understand their views better than I do, who are younger or roughly the same age. I guess to the extent that they aren't just naturally that much better at it and they like invested some time in it, I suspect it paid off. But, yes, good question. It'd be fun to figure out how people actually did it if they did it, and where they feel like it paid off.
Lynette Bye: Moving on to other productivity stuff, what is your process for deciding your high-level goals? Explicit prioritization versus gut level intuition? How do you handle uncertainty? That sort of thing.
Jade Leung: My current process which has stuck for two years or it's stuck for two years, so maybe it's here to stay, who knows. My current process is at the highest level, I have a big annual review thing that I do. That includes a bunch of reflection and also includes a bunch of goal-setting. The goal-setting that I do there is not super-specific. It's like directionally, things that I'd be excited about, being able to achieve or make progress on in various facets of my life but there aren't metrics or specifics really tied to it.
I guess that gets a little bit to the uncertainty thing and that I've mostly learned with time that my goals end up falling out of relevance in various ways anyways. I've gone more for directions rather than goals, at least at that level.
Every quarter, I have quarterly goals, and those get pretty specific. I try pretty hard to tie those into the annual direction type things. I think it's helped me streamline things like tie all the levels together a little bit more.
With my quarterly goals, tying it a bit closer to my annual directions and at least being able to tell myself the story of why it gets me to a place that I said I wanted to get to. Then I do monthly goals, I thrive off those. I don't really do the weekly goal thing. That's because I've tried and things end up just changing a lot more. I end up mostly doing like the week ahead. I have a rough plan for the things that I would do. Then I make sure I square those to my monthly goals, roughly, but I don't get too stressed about that. That's roughly the thing that I do.
In terms of handling uncertainty, the main thing that I've mostly done is not get too specific, as a way to handle it. It's not for want of trying. I think I like precision quite a bit. I've tried harder before to try to make things quite a bit more specific, but it ends up being unhelpful at least in the jobs that I've been working in because things end up changing quite a bit. Also, somewhat recently I've been leaning a little bit more into doing things that feel like the thing that I'm most excited about doing at the time, rather than the thing I said I would do, like past-me said I would do today, kind of thing and so because of leaning into that a little bit more, I've just preferred to leave things a bit more flexible.
Lynette Bye: How much do you find that this changes, that for things you feel excited at, at one moment aren't the things that you feel excited at, when you don't do it?
Jade Leung: I think the thing that I'm responding to most of the time is whether I have the right energy levels and the right headspace to do the kind of task. One bit of my productivity, which I wish I was better at, is being able to consistently have a clear brain and decently good levels of energy and that just currently isn't the case. Sometimes there's particular pieces of work which require me to have an unusually common clear brain, and I just wake up sometimes and that's not the case, and I haven't really found a hack to be able to engineer in such that I can get there.
That's most of the things that I end up responding to. It's like in the morning, I'll look at the plan for the day and I'm like, do I feel like I have the right capacity, or whatever word you want to use for it, to be able to tackle this thing? Then if I don't, then I end up looking elsewhere or looking at things that are a better match for what I can do that given day.
I used to try-- Maybe I should actually try this more. I used to try it for a bit and see if I make more progress. I think that sometimes helps. I think what I've ended up learning about my productivity, is I'm just a bit of a princess when it comes to having the right head state and mostly clarity or something to do with clarity of the brain and then I just find it pretty hard to do the thing that I need to do if it requires that.
Lynette Bye: How do you measure whether you had a good day? It depends on so many factors that aren't fully in your control. Is there something that you track like, given my available inputs, today was a good day because of X?
Jade Leung: Yes. A thing that I've found pretty helpful is generally the way that I organize my day, which is working well for me currently is I have one pretty meaty goal. I start off the day, and I assess whether the meaty goal that I'd said I would do is the thing that I feel I'm capable of doing. If not, I change it around. I try to pick a pretty substantial thing that feels like if I tick this off today, I'd have made good progress, and I'd feel pretty satisfied about that. Then for the other bit of the day, I'd have some set of less cognitively intensive tasks or just tasks which I know I can just really push myself to do without requiring the particular state of brain or whatever that I need for the first type.
Successes for my day are both when I tick-off that first meaty goal, which tends to be pretty calibrated to what inputs I feel I have at the beginning of the day and then I do a substantial amount of the second type. Substantial amount is for me, mostly just feeling tired by the end of it, I don't have a particularly better metric for that, but some combination of those two ends up being the thing that I use.
Lynette Bye: Do you find that this “work until you're tired” mentality tends to work, do you need to schedule time off or pay particular attention to that?
Jade Leung: Yes. I found it's totally fine for me. I don't feel like I have the tendency to push myself further than I want or should or something like that, or that doesn't really happen to me that often. One rule that I found really helpful is, I have Sundays, definitely 100% off. That has been a struggle at times. I feel like I haven't really figured out exactly what feels rejuvenating, but I definitely at least commit to trying to make Sunday that kind of day. Aside from that, I don't really do that much to try to limit it, and at least so far, I find that that's been super fine.
Lynette Bye: Okay, what are some of the key things your past self was mistaken about with regards to productivity?
Jade Leung: The main thing that comes to mind is, past self definitely thought that productivity was sheer number of hours worked. I've definitely updated against that or at least added more nuance to that. I think currently my view is closer to something like, it's more about stuff done than sheer hours. I think the thing that reframe does for me is, I can push really hard and sprint for a short amount of time and get basically the same amount of stuff done and I think that should be interpreted as at least equally productive or something. I think that's a reframe that I feel like past-me was mistaken on.
Then I think another version of this too is I just care a lot more about quality-adjusted hours than I do sheer hours. I think past-me, either I was working on things where the quality didn't differ that much, or it wasn't that important, but I learned this a bunch in research where I was like, it's super not helpful for me to spend very average/low-quality hours, just because I feel like I need to cram those in. It's much better for me to go off and figure out a way to re-energize or get my head into a clearer state and then I'll come back at some later point and get higher quality hours in. Research is maybe a uniquely weird activity. The quality of brain matters a bunch but I think I found that it carries decently well over into other things that have large variations in the quality of thing that you could be doing.
Then I think the other one which we've touched on a little bit too, is thinking that the only thing you need to be productive is sheer willpower, being able to just get high horsepower stuff done. I still think willpower is very important, but I think that the thing that I've learned is motivation and love for the work ends up mattering a bunch and that's, at least in my case, not worth disregarding because I ended up just being bad and unproductive regardless of how much willpower I think I have.
Lynette Bye: I'm curious how, from an outsider looking in, how would your daily work have changed based on these understandings of not just relying on willpower and a sheer number of hours?
Jade Leung: Good question. Superficially, I don't count the number of hours that I work. I used to use things like toggle and then before that, I used to at least feel proud about working longer hours or something, but that's not really a super meaningful metric. The thing that I've replaced that with is just “Have I gotten the thing done that I ex-ante said I wanted to be able to get done?”
Then other things that have changed would be things along the lines of being more responsive to my energy levels. Being both more reflective and reactive to the fact that, in some cases, I might feel low energy and I think I'm producing low-quality hours. Past-me would have just kept doing it. Current-me would at least stop and consider whether I should use that time to re-energize instead or turn my head to a different task or something like that. More like pausing and reflecting and being reactive to energy stuff, I think is probably the other main thing that comes to mind.
Lynette Bye: When you think of the quality of work, how does prioritization play into this? There are some people I know thinking about what is actually making progress versus what looks like productive time but you're just answering some unimportant emails or something like that.
Jade Leung: Generally when I'm prioritizing things, at least for the job that I'm currently working at and the recent job that I was in, I think the thing that I focus on with prioritization, there's the somewhat obvious things that are actually important and useful for getting the things done that I want to get done ultimately but I think the heuristic that I use for a day to day prioritization thing is “Is this going to unblock a bottleneck?” Like am I the main bottleneck here? If so, am I the next thing on the wrung that is stopping this thing from moving ahead? Then I mostly use that as a filter for prioritization.
In terms of that, I think quality comes with something like “Do I feel like I have enabled work to happen as a result of me being able to work on this thing? Have I meaningfully unblocked something?” Probably there's a bit of a downside to this in that it makes me focus on things that are moving faster or things that have some momentum behind them.
Then it probably makes me focus on more urgent things which hopefully are also important, but then maybe it makes me neglect important things that maybe I shouldn't neglect that much. There's probably downsides to using that heuristic, but in any case, I think that's at least one way in which I both prioritize then and then I end up thinking about whether I had quality stuff done that day, was like “Did I unblock a bunch of things?”
Lynette Bye: Makes sense. Closely related to prioritization is judgment. I hear it pretty even more simply within EA as thinking well. How do you think about this?
Jade Leung: I think one bit of good judgment, which I don't think is the whole definition of it, but is at least a thought that I often have which I don't see as articulated as much, is, I think a fair amount of it is about something like knowing how the world works and having a worldliness and groundedness in reality which enables one to exercise good judgment.
I think the kinds of things that I mean here is just having an understanding of how stuff in the world actually works, how institutions are built and how they function, how people work, how they think, how things will be perceived by folks outside of your main group of people that you spend a bunch of time with and understand well. Having some way to assess how realistic it is that X things happen or Y person can do this thing or that Y person will do this thing.
It's having more of this, actually grounded in a realistic model of how things get done and how things happen in the world, I think is one pretty core pillar of being able to have some starting point to exercise good judgment. I think having a very theoretical, non-grounded way of viewing the world ends up, I think, in a bunch of cases leading to poor judgment or at least not calibrated judgment because it's just not particularly realistic in terms of what assumptions are being made.
Lynette Bye: Is there anything that you think helps one develop this groundedness?
Jade Leung: Yes. Honestly, working real jobs, working outside of-- I think I wouldn't necessarily advocate for this for impact reasons, but I think in terms of a way to build up the skill, I think working outside of EA organizations and outside of the community does a lot of work.
I think also maybe understanding what types of people you don't understand well-- either people or scenes or particular forms of dynamics that are powerful and important in the world like governments or investors or Silicon Valley or whoever. If there's a particular scene that you feel like you have a black hole around, spending some time with that scene or in that scene, I think it's quite useful for fleshing things out too.
Oh, and then probably just actually trying to make stuff happen in the world tells you quite a lot. Trying to build stuff and trying to sell things and trying to pitch things to different people and trying to actually raise money and trying to do all those things. I think that tells you quite a bit quite quickly about a bunch of that stuff.
Lynette Bye: Nice. What's a skill you've spent deliberate effort developing that's paid off a lot?
Jade Leung: I spent a bunch of time and I'm still spending a bunch of time working on listening as a skill. I initially started off developing it for non-career related reasons. I was spending a bunch of time in late high school, early university supporting a bunch of friends who were struggling a bunch with mental health and I worked a bunch on listening as a skill to be able to support them better, basically. I felt a lot of it came from not being able to firsthand empathize with the situations that they were in, but really feeling strongly pulled towards wanting to support them as best as I can. The main thing that I could think to do that was at all helpful was listening.
I think doing that a lot has made me really attuned, I think, to what it feels like to be a good listener in a conversation. Generally being able to listen to a room or a person's perspective across time or understanding an organization's perspective across things I think is in some part about listening closely and actually just trying to be able to view and objectively parse things in a way that is coming from a place of wanting to understand, in quite a blank slate version of understand.
I think that skill, I've really enjoyed developing it, so I think that's helped me invest a bunch of time in it. I think it's paid off in a bunch of different ways. I think the most obvious ways I can think of is that it's really helped me with this cluster around people and understanding organizations and being able to navigate that piece well. I think it's also helped me a bunch in terms of leadership and management too.
I think a lot of the way in which folks describe my style is that I’ve ended up being able to use this listening skill very well, and folks feel pretty well understood and it feels like a pretty comfortable empathetic understanding kind of environment which I think, at least for my style of leadership is pretty important for me. I'm happy that I can create it by using the skill, in some ways. Then I think also it's helped me just become more attuned to communication and sentiment, which I think is also in turn just helped me build up public speaking skills and communication skills more generally. I think it's paid off in a bunch of different ways.
Definitely, I think it's harder than people tend to think it is. I think I'm still trying to make progress on it, having spent a couple of years on it so I think there's a fair amount that I can still improve. It's been actually fun realizing how much deliberate effort I can put into it and how much difference that makes I think in terms of just being able to be more attuned to how to get better at it and really trying to get better at it.
Lynette Bye: What ways have you found most useful for going about practicing this? Like resources or exercises, that type of thing?
Jade Leung: Yes, good question. Using most settings to practice it is kind of my default. I'll always be the person at a party in a corner having a one-on-one with someone and really trying to try to do the listening thing in most social settings. Working with my teams, I try to turn on that mode quite a lot with people that I manage, and that kind of thing. Finding in most instances ways in which I can practice it, in general, is one thing.
I haven't really tried this as much but I imagined it might help and maybe I'll do it now that I've said it, is trying to listen in a situation where I have a very strong opinion and/or when I feel I'm just predisposed to disagree. The reason this comes to mind is I think I'm actually quite bad at listening in some settings, in particular, and those settings are things like when I think this person is wrong, or when I have some predisposed view. I don't know, like I've read a doc or I've read a piece of research that this person has written. I already know that I disagree. I think in those settings, I'm unusually bad at listening, for sure. I can imagine actively trying to turn that on, then it's a better learning experience than the default.
Active listening is a practice where there's a lot of stuff around, I haven't personally looked a bunch into the literature and theory around it, but I've been to a couple of workshops and things and I've enjoyed the workshops. Maybe that's also a body of things to look into.
Lynette Bye: Kind of going from the opposite angle, what's the thing that you think you're not particularly good at, maybe even worse than average, and it hasn't seemed it's worth pouring that kind of effort in to try and get better?
Jade Leung: Yes, good question. One thing, it's not quite a skill, it's more a trait, is that I'm very impatient as a person and definitely have suffered for it. A bunch of things that we've talked about not being able to do the last mile thing is one version of this. I think I'm quite impatient in terms of just like-- I think one big downside of my leadership style ends up being rooted in the fact that I'm impatient and so people feel quite pushed or something. A bunch of other things I could say about the reason why I think it's a negative trait, so I think that's a thing.
Reasons why I haven't decided to pour much effort into improving it, I think it's both that I guess, on the one hand, I feel like there are some benefits to it, so it makes it hard to fully swallow the pill of trying to fix it. Because I think a lot of the reason why I managed to get things done, and a lot of the reason why I've succeeded at particularly startup-oriented careers that I've had is partially because of this trait. I think that's one thing and then I also think some bit of me just feels kind of deterministic about it, but I find that pretty hard to conceive of how I would shake it. That's probably for want of trying, I think, to be fair.
I think those few things have meant that I haven't actively really tried to work on it. In terms of ways that I work around it, I think a lot of what I do now is I pre-warn people and so I like to tell people that I'm working with or that I manage that this is just a very stark thing that I have and tried to apologize in advance for various things that it causes, and just tell people how to deal with it if they encounter me in this mode. I try to do a bunch of that and then, honestly, I just try to steer towards careers where it's more rewarded than it's punished. For example, research definitely doesn't reward it that much. Whereas startups do. I've kind of made those decisions too at least career-wise.
Lynette Bye: Last question here, how is producing public-facing work valuable? So the tangible record that people can see, like paper trail reputation type of thing?
Jade Leung: I haven't really optimized for this that much in my life so far and I don't really regret it. That's a bit different to saying I'm quite sure that I shouldn't have done it, so there might be a world where I don't understand the upsides of it as much. At least my experience so far has been for my particular life and my particular aspirations, a lot of what I ended up doing is working on hard projects with people, and either getting things done via those projects and/or having it such that people that I work with are able to see what I'm capable of.
Then references have done basically a bunch of the work for me in terms of replacing what public-facing work would have done. Then I think I also have a slight bias against optimizing for it particularly in the research context. Maybe I'm a bit jaded but having spent a bunch of time trying to do impact focus research in an academic institution, I just get pretty annoyed at this publication bias problem. I really appreciate the existence of places like FHI where I think that pressure really doesn't exist much at all. I've been able to see the benefits of not having that pressure exist.
I think like, at least, particularly in that context, I don't think it's as important as being able to produce legible work for the audience for which it matters which a lot of the time doesn't really mean the public. Not to say that it probably wouldn't be valuable for some careers but probably I think, maybe on net, people overestimate how legible to the public one’s achievements need to be. I think the world works in a fairly reference-based way for at least some career paths anyways.
Lynette Bye: Makes sense. Okay, cool, thank you very much.
Jade Leung: Yes, of course, this was fun.
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