This interview is part of the “A Peek behind the Curtain” interview series.
Julia Wise serves as a contact person for the effective altruism community and helps local and online groups support their members. She serves on the board of GiveWell and writes about effective altruism at Giving Gladly. She was president of Giving What We Can from 2017-2020. Before joining CEA, Julia was a social worker, and studied sociology at Bryn Mawr College.
In this interview, Julia and I discuss her thoughts sustainable motivation, mental health, and finding her place in effective altruism.
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: Do you think that loving your work is correlated with or necessary for doing it well?
Julia Wise: It helps when it's enjoyable, but I also think, honestly, I've done a lot of productive work during times when I was pretty unhappy. It hasn't obviously been correlated when I do good work and when I'm feeling good about work or doing well personally.
Lynette: Sure. What do you think is correlated?
Julia: I think a lot of it has just been about what needed to be done, and how well it fit with my comparative advantage or something. I think there are times where I feel like I was able to do useful work that other people wouldn't have been able to do just because of the situation that was happening being a good match for my skills or experience. That doesn't feel like it necessarily is that predictable or something, but I think there are-- I've found this weird little niche in the community, and when work in those niches needs to be done, then that ends up being particularly useful to the community, I hope.
Lynette: Okay. Do you ever feel guilty about not being able to do more, either when you have found some niche and you're trying to do it, or looking for what you can do?
Julia: I think for some people, the relationship between the hours they put in and what they achieve is much more linear than it is for me. I think because of the weird episodic nature of the work I do, I don't really feel much guilt for not putting in more hours or something like that. Certainly, if something needed to be done and I feel like I didn't do a good job on it, then that's where I would beat myself up more. But just because of the unpredictable nature of like, when does something important need to be done, it's much less hour-dependent, that is for a lot of people.
Lynette: Do you think that this has been how you felt in the past or is this something you've arrived at through some process?
Julia: Yes, it feels fairly consistent. Even when I was a social worker but before I was working in EA, it felt like the important things to get right were when important situations came up, handling them well, more than number of hours, again. When I felt I had done a bad job, it had much more to do with not being happy with how I made a decision or something like that. Sometimes, that is like a time prioritization decision, so not dealing with something important while I instead spend time on less important things, which then means that some important thing waits too long or has some worse outcome that it might have had, or just like had a higher risk of turning out really badly. I think it's been much more about quality or prioritization than about quantity.
Lynette: Okay. Have you had times where you felt guilty or doubted about not doing more in what you were choosing to do, or whether your capable of doing what you're trying to do?
Julia: I think there have certainly been times where the workplace I was in was much more intense-feeling. For example, when some of my co-workers were doing Y Combinator, that is just a whole intense world. I think visiting them and seeing the insane number of hours that you put in during a project like that or the early stages of a start-up, it makes me realize like, "Oh, people do really put in way, way more time than I am putting in." At the time, I had two children under the age of three, and it was just not a time when I was planning to work a million hours.
I think that that was maybe the time in my life where I was mostly like, "Wow, other people really can do this whole thing, and I guess I could if I had to or if I were, I don't know, different somehow." I'm not sure what I would have done that would be that great with the extra hours or something, and in my case, it's been more about doing a good job at the most important things rather than doing more things or putting in way more time. Also, I never put myself in a like Y Combinator or start-up type position where you need to just put in a ton of hours, because I think I would hate it, and also, I have little kids. So I've just made choices that are incompatible with that.
Lynette: Yes.
Julia: But there's some chicken and egg, too, where I decided to have more kids because I already knew that I had no plans to work a ton of hours a week, so this just doesn't hamper me. If I were already working 60 hours a week, then having another child would be a big cut to that. Because I know that's not me, then it's less of a change to my work schedule.
Lynette: Yes. About how many hours do you work a week?
Julia: I've used Toggl for the whole time that I've been at CEA, which is five and a half years. I went from a job where you clocked every minute, and the higher-ups were watching when you went on lunch. Working from home, I just felt like I wanted to know for myself, even though there were no higher-ups paying particular attention. My aim is to work about 35 clocked hours a week, so I consider that that's pretty much like an 8-hour day minus an hour that office workers spend eating lunch and going to the bathroom and checking Facebook and stuff. That's my goal.
These days, I'm typically working quite a bit less than that, and I take vacation. Since it's COVID, I'm not going on vacations, and I just work shorter weeks, and I know exactly how many hours I work each week, and I just take the other hours as vacation. That's been working well for me as a way to just like, instead of working for weeks and then periodically taking off entirely, I'm just having some more time to do some reading, or napping, or whatever during the day when I feel like it.
Lynette: Yes. Do you find that this rhythm of having your work spread out more works well for you versus, I know some people are like, "Oh, I need some time off or this vacation will make my life perfect."
Julia: Yes, I've tried that to some extent. I think some people say like, "No, you really need vacations. It's not the same to just sit in your office and read a book or something like, that's not real break." Some of it, honestly, is that I have little kids and a vacation is not a break either. It's just like trying to childproof a vacation rental and making sure my kids don't drown. We've done some proper vacation-y stuff, and it's fun but not what I would call relaxing in the same way that childless friends describe a vacation.
Lynette: Cool. I'm closer to that myself, just minus the kids. But, it's always interesting to see how people differ about when they need their time off.
Julia: Yes.
Lynette: In general, what does self-care look like to you as a mom, also working? What do you do to take care of yourself and make sure you stay happy and sane?
Julia: I think for me it's much more like-- I guess I’d break it into some amount of just doing things that are for my own enjoyment. For example, I have a bunch of different housemates with different special food needs. I really like cooking, and I felt sad that it all had to be vegan, tomato-free, spice-free, and without cooked vegetables or something because those are the different housemate requirements, and now I just cook things that don't need any of those requirements and eat them all myself, because that just feels luxurious to me.
I think, yes. Some amount of just like, do things that feel like they're just for you or something and you're not meeting a responsibility to someone else. Some of it is being more willing to spend money to free up time than I used to be, I think particularly with childcare, it's very expensive. Childcare is very expensive. Also, I feel done with scrimping on it or something. The extreme was when our first baby flunked out of daycare basically, she wouldn't eat there, and so, we couldn't keep her there, and it was just awful for everyone. At eight months, I had tried to go back to work, and then we had no place to put her.
Jeff moved his schedule to where he was working 7:00 AM to like 3:30 PM, and I was working 4:30 to like 10:00 PM in-person in the office, and we would meet each other on the train and hand off the baby, and we would ride the train for like 15 minutes together, and that was our time together, basically, and then he would take the baby home, and I would go into work. Luckily, we were on the same train liner, I don't know how we would have done it otherwise. That was the extreme of like, “we had no paid childcare, and it was terrible, but we made it work because we had to,” and we got lots of time with our daughter, and that was great.
Paying more for childcare that's convenient is just like, feels like a good use of money at this point in my life. Then, another piece I guess is like, maybe four pieces are minor luxuries or something, like pay for convenient childcare. So, we've had in-home care, which is just great because, otherwise, your daycare adds another commute, you have two parents who each have a commute, and then the baby has a commute as well. Then if you have multiple kids at different places, then you potentially have like four commutes or something. Consolidating childcare into our house has been great, and we also really like that. That means we all get to see each other more, especially with everyone at home.
I guess, keeping on top of my mental health situation and going to the doctor and trying new antidepressants and stuff like that, and being willing to track. Man, I was not keen on happiness tracking or something, and then at some point, Jeff was like, "You got to do it, you got to track your happiness every day and see," and damn it, exercise helped. I was really hoping that this would not be the finding, but it definitely did.
Now I have a little more data on some stuff, and meds are one and exercise is one and sleep is a big one that are correlated with better mental health, and so, some of it is also shifting things around within us as a couple and me being like, "I just am going to sleep an hour a day more than you are, Jeff." He's totally cool with that, and he's been telling me like, "Okay, what can I do? What can I do to shut things off?" I didn't want to feel like the lazy partner and yet prioritizing sleep, and to downtime and introvert time away from the other members of my house are just helpful.
He's just built more resilient and doesn't need as much sleep and loves being around people all the time and stuff like that. We just have different needs and just being like, "Okay, yes. It would be cool if I were a bit like you, but I'm not, and I'm going to go to bed early now." I think that being realistic about that has been very helpful. Then maybe the fourth thing is making big life decisions in a way that we thought would be good for us, so we've chosen not to leave Boston where we've lived since college. There's certainly been times when like, "Oh, all the cool EAs are moving to the Bay, maybe I should move to-- should we be in London, should we be in Oxford, should we be in the Bay?"
At different times, that has been the real push both professionally and socially, but we just like staying where we are. We own a house, we don't want to move, we're near Jeff’s extended family, and keeping those older ties rather than moving to being near newer ties I think has been a really good call for us, and now I'm seeing everyone really questioning whether hubs are like that great, and some of it is pandemic, but I think some of it is also just cost of living and commute and everything else. We think making that life decision, making the decision to have all the kids we wanted to have, so we're expecting a third in June.
Lynette: Congratulations.
Julia: Thank you. I think at first, that was a huge source of angst for me just thinking like, "All this money we're going to spend on raising a child," and later, as I was more valuing my time more than the money, and think like all this time that it takes felt like a really big deal. It is a big deal. Also, I think it's a good call for us in terms of life satisfaction, and I think it's really valuable that I don't feel like EA has taken away anything irreplaceable from me. I think, to some degree, not having kids at all would be a much better deal than having one fewer or something, and three really feels like, "Okay, it's getting very optional at this point."
I think I just feel better about my future in EA because I don't expect to regret it. There's nothing in my life that I feel like I will be better without EA taking from me.
Lynette: What has changed about the way you manage your time, your work since becoming a mother, probably post “trading off the baby on the train” days?
Julia: Some people describe like, it's made them so much more efficient and stuff like that. I don't know that I can claim that. Definitely, during the period of sleep deprivation, you just can't think as well as you normally do. I remember just feeling robbed of proper brain function or something during the period of sleep deprivation, but it doesn't last forever. I think it means that I'm much more aware of when during the day's work time because when you're paying someone however many dollars an hour to watch your child so that you can be at work, it's like, that is your time.
There will be no working past 5:30 because that is the end of the childcare. It does mean that there's a clear delineation between work time and home time, and it's not always completely clear, and certainly, our kids walk around being like, "Hold on, I have a meeting," and they're pretending to be on the phone with someone else as we’re trying to talk to them. We're like, "Okay, I know where you learned that."
In general, there's no question of, "Am I going to work all day Saturday or something?" Because I don't have childcare Saturday, like, "No, we're not going to work Saturday. We might get something done during nap time or whatever after they're in bed." It means that some boundaries are clearer, because you just can't do good work and watch kids at the same time."
Lynette: Do you think that having that boundary be clear feels important, or is this just an artifact of the way your life is structured right now?
Julia: I've wavered on it. I know some people have really clear boundaries where like, even when they're like working in the house, they just don't even go into their workspace at all when it's not Workday, or if they do, they have to go walk around the block or something like that to have a little commute before they get to their room in their house that is their workroom if it's not work time.
I guess I like the idea of that in theory. I've never actually used that method. I can't tell that it's having long-lasting bad effects or something like that. I don't know, it's something that I feel a little skeptical of the fact that I'm not doing it or something, but it also seems to be okay to have. I'm definitely happy that I'm no longer working from my bedroom anymore. I do like having more than four feet between my desk and my bed so that I'm not just spending like 18 hours a day or whatever in the same physical space, but I'm not super strict about not checking email on weekends or things like that, and that seems to be okay.
Lynette: Yes, if you're comfortable talking about it, you mentioned that for mental health stuff, trying antidepressants and seeing the doctor had been important, what has been your journey here? I know that this can seem like a really dense, confusing topic for people who are trying to navigate it themselves.
Julia: Yes. I think I grew up in a family that was a little clueless about it or something, and my mom didn't realize that she needed to be getting some professional help for depression and ADHD until midway through my childhood, and that was not so great for any of us. I think it's been helpful that now I've worked in mental health care with Jeff's dad, who's a mental health professional.
I think it's just a lot more open now or something where I just know which of my friends are on meds, and when they're feeling off because they're changing a med or something's not working anymore or whatever, and it feels within my family and friend group, that's just something that's a lot more default of like, "Yes, you might need to deal with that, and here are some of the tools that you would use, and here's how it's going with my therapist or whatever."
I think that's just like your car broke down. Like, of course, you need to go to a garage and figure out what to do about it, and you need to tune up sometimes or whatever. I think just having it be a normal part of like, well, yes, my friend is diabetic, then, of course, they see the doctor about that and need to have to deal with that and have some stuff that's part of her life because of that, and that in my case, depression is like that too.
Lynette: I like that analogy. How do you feel about the role that social media plays in your life? Jumping topics here.
Lynette: I think one downside of my job is that social media is part of my workspace. Like, there is no taking a break from Facebook or something like that because I need to be on it for work. I think one reason I'm pretty bad at having focused work time or something is just, a number of parts of my work require going to Facebook, and then, that's just designed to make you not be focused on whatever it is you initially came there to find out. I think the unclear distinction between professional me and personal me and the fact that who I am personally is like part of the work I do as well or something, and so, it feels very different, I think how I use it and how I see it than say like friends whose work is very unconnected to it.
Lynette: Is that a bad thing? Neutral?
Julia: It has some enjoyable parts. I think when I'm able to write about how EA intersects with my life in a way that resonates with other people and can help them realize like, "Oh, yes, EA is made up of real people with life stuff." That can feel really good, and I think be useful, and I'm happy when that has an impact and can be good for the community. It's unclear when something is going to come back to bite me or something and something that I said and what I felt was a personal context ends up being seen as a professional comment or something like that.
I think maybe that feeling of not knowing when I get to be a private citizen or something versus a public speaking in some official role or official capacity somehow, and it's both convenient for me in some ways or something, because I like talking about myself and I feel lucky that I get to use my own experience as a tool to hopefully improve EA, and also, sometimes it stinks.
Lynette: Got it. Okay. About some productivity stuff. How do you decide what your high-level goals are for work and what you should be prioritizing?
Julia: This is my weakest spot. I do a lot of reactive work, I do a lot of like working on what I feel like working on, and my manager always needs to help prod me to work on prioritization and goal setting and stuff like that. It feels like it does happen to a degree, but I'm definitely not an example that I would want people to follow here or something.
Lynette: When you try to do it, maybe after your manager prodded you, how do you go about it?
Julia: I've been lucky to have a lot of freedom at CEA in figuring out what I think is important, and working on that, and I don't have to jump through a lot of hoops that other people set. That's been really freeing, which sometimes also then just means I don't know what to do. Thinking about some combination of, where do I feel personally drawn to? I think there are like pieces I've written where it was not on anybody's plan for what I needed to get done that quarter, including mine, but I'm just particularly interested in this topic right now, and I'm just going to crank out a forum and post about it. So, some amount of just following my interest.
Some amount of reactive things that need to get handled because they have come from externally, and I need to figure out what to do about them. Then, probably where I'm weakest is figuring out like, what are the ways where I could proactively benefit the community and, what would a better community look like, and how could I take steps towards that or that kind of vision, mission stuff that feels like less my thing than the more quick reactive stuff?
Lynette: Sure. When you're looking back, do you think that you can see a clear difference in how valuable the more explicit planning versus this reactive or following curiosity stuff is?
Julia: I guess I can find more wins or something from some of the more reactive or really quick turnaround projects. That might just be just because I actually do them. [chuckle] The other long-term planning, pro-active stuff, maybe I just do little enough that there haven't been a lot of wins there. I don't think I have anything interesting to say about this one, sorry.
Lynette: What would you say are the foundations of your productivity? The key things that you need to do in order to get stuff done that you care about?
Julia: There's nothing that obvious or recipe-ish about it or something. Even stuff like taking care of my mental health, there have been times when I was really pretty miserable and got a lot done because it was the EA Global season and we just needed to get a lot done, and things were very busy. I just did the very routine work that needed to happen. I don't think I could do that forever.
Like right now, I'm pretty happy. I'm not working. I'm probably working like half the number of hours that I did at my worst. It's correlated, but now I have downtime, and that's pleasant. Then I didn’t, and that was very unpleasant. There's nothing that obvious. I don't have that much of a routine or something like that other than just like during the time that I'm paying someone to watch my kids, I better go use those hours, but I might use them also on having introvert time and other stuff that’s not work. That might be about what I have to say.
Lynette: Do you do any regular planning or scheduling of your time?
Julia: Not reliably. I've gone through various attempts of blocking out focus time and Pomodoros and all those things that everyone does in EA. I did do an actual two Pomodoros this morning, but that was unusual. I've always just fallen off that wagon. I don't know how to feel about that. I think every time I have a new manager, I'm like, "Well, here's this thing." They're like, "Maybe you could try this thing." I'm like, "Yes. I did that two years ago." I don't really know what to make of it. Maybe I would just be way better if I really stuck to-- I've read all kinds of productivity books. I think I kind of know what's out there. I know what other people do. I just don't feel like doing it. I don't know whether to think of that as just like, "Okay, I guess this is just how I am," or just like, "Oh, I'm losing a ton of value by not staying up on this."
Lynette: Do you find that you procrastinate or avoid working often?
Julia: It's less that I avoid working period, and more that I spend my time on more trivial or tasks that aren't the ones I particularly need to get done. Then the important stuff, if it's not yummy, just waits a long time.
Lynette: Got it. What do you do eventually to get to that important stuff if there's not an external deadline?
Julia: Some of it is telling my manager. In terms of routine, I do set quarterly OKRs because that's a thing that EA recommends and I find that helpful enough to be worth doing. I fill out a form once a week about what I accomplished in the last week and what I plan to accomplish in the next week. Then my manager will see that. If she sees that I haven't done any of the things, then it's embarrassing. I definitely am motivated by, “my manager will know that I did not do the thing that I said I was going to.” I can be motivated by embarrassment. Ideally, I'm sure I would find something a little more positive to be motivated by, but it is very effective.
Often, the important things getting done is just because I have to fill out that form once a week or something, and I'm like "Oh, I guess I should do some important things the coming week," or I'm like, "Oh, it looks like the important things that I said I was going to do last week, I've only done half of, so I better actually get this done this week or something." I think ticking boxes like that can be pretty motivating. Like setting up a call with someone to discuss something and then being like, "I have to finish this draft so that they have two days to review it before I call because it's scheduled."
Lynette: Okay. A bit of planning there. A bit of social accountability with whoever else. Okay. What are some of the key challenges you've faced in your career, stuff with EA that you had to overcome?
Julia: I think one was when I was first hired, nobody really had a good idea of what we wanted me to do. I really spent that first year floundering, trying to figure out what was I supposed to do? There were multiple factors leading to that situation, but everything was much more new start-upy mode, and I had been plunked into this role, but it was so open-ended that I really did not get a lot of time, and didn't know how to go about figuring out how I could contribute.
That year was definitely-- I just needed to figure out a lot of things about what I was good at, and how I could contribute, and how to work remotely, and how to work when there's not a clear other person telling you what to do, and figuring out, here are things going on in the community and what reactive work is needed, what proactive work is needed so that they don't happen again next time. That was a bumpy learning curve.
Lynette: Yes. How did you deal with that?
Julia: Some of it was just, as reactive situations came up, I realized like, "Oh, here's where I was good at handling that. Here's where I wasn't good at handling that other thing or whatever."
These are the things where I really do feel like I know what to do to contribute, and these are these other things where I really don't, and maybe we need to find someone else who can do those things, or at least spell out what they are so we can know where the gaps are. Some of it was like trying out new types of work and realizing like, "Oh, this thing seem to be working, we'll scale this up." For example, the community contact rule, initially, it was like secret or something that I would be the person that stuff was referred to if they were these interpersonal problems in EA or something like that.
Then eventually, I just made a forum post about it and was like, "Hey, if you're noticing problems in EA, I'm a person that you can talk to about that," and then, way more people just know about that now. I think that's where some of my most useful work has happened, is just having lots of people know about that rather than this weird trial stage where we weren't sure if it was going to work, or was it going to be terrible or something, and now it's just like, "Nope, it seems to basically work." Now it's just functioning at scale in a way that it wasn't then.
Lynette: Oh, I think this is a really interesting story actually, because I think that this thing is really common, of trying to do something and not having it be clearly laid out for you and just floundering around. It sounds like you were like, "Well, it took a while, and yes, it worked through some stuff," but as you worked through it, you got better and some environmental things changed, and eventually, you got to a better footing. That's something that I think young people coming out of college don't always realize is a natural transition process.
Julia: One question I'm realizing actually I would particularly like to get to, it's just my career trajectory of how I came into EA. I had always been really interested in donation. That was my preexisting interest, and then when my husband and I were right out of college, he found the very beginnings of EA, and was like, "Hey, these people agree with you," which was a big deal because we just didn't know anyone before who had any interest in this stuff. The idea that I should try to earn more money was very both fascinating and horrifying to me, because it could have come from this more hippie culture where, yes, I was going to live very simply and donate a lot or donate a high percentage, but have some low-paying, non-profit job, that was my plan.
Then as Jeff is pointing out like, "You could turn in a lot more if you earned more." I was just so not into that. I worked at a nonprofit for a while. I wasn't very useful there because I didn't have any useful skills, and I wanted to work in international development, but all I was good at was like answering the phone basically, because I had no work or academic background in that area. Then I decided to go to social work school because I really liked that type of work. I'm midway through social work school and Earning to Give is starting to come as this big thing in proto-EA, which they didn't even have a name, and I wrote this post on LessWrong.
It was called something like Career Choice for Utilitarian Giver, because neither Earning to Give nor EA had names at that point. I wrote this post about basically like, "I'm in social work school, I'm not going to earn that much money. I donate as much of a proportion of my money as I can, and so if I earn more, then I can donate way more, and we're talking about people's lives here and is my happiness really worth other people dying for?" That was how I met a bunch of people who were also thinking about these career things. I got career coaching, and this was probably in 2011 or so, 2010, 2011 from the very beginnings of 80k, like before it had a name.
We had this call and I was like, "Maybe I should become a doctor," and that was basically the best thing that we could come up with, was like, "Yes, maybe you should go to med school and be a doctor so you can earn more money and donate more money." I just hated the idea of it. I thought I would hate med school. I didn't want to do it, I didn't want to study all these classes that I had never taken because I never intended to go to med school, so I didn't take the prerequisites, and I didn't do it. I just felt awful, but I was just like, "No, I'm just going to stick with social work school. I'm just going to be a social worker.
I'll earn more money than I did answering the phone, but it's not going to be what anyone would call Earning to Give exactly." At the time, 80k also had a bar where if you could only join, it was a membership thing at that time, and so, you could only join if you had taken a career that earned significantly more than you would've been able to, or had significantly more impact or something, and social work didn't qualify. Of course, I just wanted to join their club. I was just so disappointed that I didn't meet the bar.
Then I did social work for a few years, and at some point and some other years I'm like, "Are you sure you could--" I started writing the Giving Gladly blog, because like, everyone in EA talks book, and can I please explain this in a way that my parents could understand? I find this niche, and I'm also starting to organize, because I like organizing. My husband and I are organizing the first meetups in Boston around EA, which, again, didn't have a name. We were calling them Smart Giving, and we would just cook dinner and have a bunch of people over to our house. Then, after I'd been doing social work for a few years, I was working in a jail.
Then CEA is like, "Oh, crap, wait, we need someone who can do community stuff and who knows EA." Here, I'd been organizing and blogging and people knew who I was. Also, I was doing social work and I tried to focus on like, "Okay, how do we make this work for real people?" They literally texted me and were like, "Hey, do you want to work for us?" I'm like, "I'm eating dinner, but yes." It was just the most weird-- People are like, "How did you develop your career?" I'm like, "It's never going to happen again, I'm sorry."
Obviously, it wasn't the most well-planned on anyone's part or something, but looking back, it's just crazy to me that I literally had an 80k coaching call and all we can think of for me was Earning to Give, and I think it just shows how narrow the focus can be, because that was the cool thing at that point, that was the thing that everybody did-- and EA was super funding constrained. We probably couldn't have hired a community person at that time because there was no funding for it, and so, instead, I became a social worker and made one of the first donations to let CEA rent an office instead of working from the back of some other building.
I can see how it made sense at the time and how we didn't think of like, "Maybe I should work on community stuff," but it truly didn't occur to any of us or something that this would be an actual job that I could have, and now I look back and I'm like, "Oh, it was so obvious." But it wasn't at the time. I wonder what other things now, like people are like, "Oh, I guess I have to grind myself into this square hole as a round peg or whatever because that's all that appears to be there," and some things I think are genuine, it's just like my husband loves traditional music, and is a good musician, but he does not exactly need mandolin players, that's not really going to be an EA career.
So he earns to give instead. I think there won't be a way to cram literally any interest or skill into EA, but I do think there's stuff out there that we're missing, and there are skills out there that people have that we're not thinking of how to use well.
Lynette: How important do you think this public-facing, the LessWrong posts, Giving Gladly was in bringing about this fairly serendipitous chance of encounters that led you to your job?
Julia: I think there were a lot of things like that at that time where we were just so scattered over the world that people were just groping around trying to find each other or something like that. It was not always good. Give and Giving What We Can really did not get along in the early days. Even when you knew who the other people were, I think there were these tribal differences or something, there still are to some extent between different areas of the community, but I do think it was just important because there were no conferences, there was no EA Forum, there was no name. There was no name for the thing that we were all interested in.
You would just find each other on these other places. I think I first talked to someone from Giving What We Can-- or one of the places I first encountered someone was in the comment section on Marginal Revolution, where there was some discussion of donation, and it was like, "Oh, here's this other person who donates, that takes donation seriously." That was the place where people were finding each other in the dark. I think writing a blog and posting on LessWrong, which is one of the places where people were finding each other was really important to just people realizing like, "Oh, you're really into this too."
Lynette: I'm curious to what extent this generalizes. Basically, putting yourself out there, leaving a chance for people to find you and to know about you and get involved without really knowing where that will lead. This seems to be something that a number of people have done or have leveraged something along this line.
Julia: I definitely think it doesn't catch everyone who's good. When I see a job applicant who doesn't write on the forum or isn't involved with a local group or something, I'm like, "Okay, I need to remember that they could be awesome and I just don't know." I think that if you are active on the forum or in a local group, or you're going to conferences or whatever and people get a feel for what you like and what you're good at, and just your level of common sense and stuff like that I think is so important. I do think that can be really helpful. People just getting a sense for like, "Oh, you're really thinking about this topic." If someone's starting a startup about that thing, then they're going to want to talk to you. Or, "You seem to be good at the interpersonal stuff. If we're looking for a group organizer or someone to do something like coaching or whatever," that's the kind of thing people want to know.
Lynette: It seems like a good way even outside of EA, just to start building that reputation in a world where we are so disconnected. We're not little groups of hunter people. Somewhat related, I hear the vague umbrella term, “good judgment,” or even just “thinking well” thrown around a lot in this community used to explain the kind of people who seem to be doing really well, coming up with novel ideas or finding useful things. Do you have thoughts on this either on what role it plays within the community or in your life personally?
Julia: I do think it's been really important in my job. Certainly, one thing that people would say to me is, "Oh, it's good to have someone who's like judgment we trust." I'm like, "I hope we're right about that." [laughs] Not like I have magic judgment powers, I'm doing my best, but I hope I don't screw up too bad. Then I also see examples of like, "Oh, that situation that I'm watching from afar did not go well." I'm like, "Okay, I think I wouldn't have made that mistake."
I think it can be hard to assess in yourself. I was surprised the first time someone was like, "Are you sure you should be Earning to Give in social work? Is that really the best use for you?" That was probably like four months or something before. Not even, it was a couple of months before CEA wanted to hire me. I do think sometimes other people recognize strengths or something that you're not sure about, or they might just have a better sense if they've seen more people or something about how rare your strengths are, or, I don't know. It's hard to be neutral about yourself. You can't.
I think some people overestimate their abilities and other people underestimate them. One ongoing problem in EA is like, how do you tell people about what's needed in a way that reaches humble people and doesn't over-collect overconfident people. I think we want to both warn about like, "Don't be overconfident," and then some people are like, "No, but not you. Please, come on, speak up, please. You're actually better at this than you're letting on” or something. Other people are like, "Oh, actually, you need some more practice here."
Lynette: I think in general, getting external feedback is really valuable. I noticed a particular niche problem where people very early in their first or second job of their career, actually, just usually first, mostly women have a bad or kind of harsh manager, and then just like their self-confidence is shot and they think they're terrible. I'm like, "I think, as far as I can tell, you're actually fine." It has come up maybe four or five times now, that I've seen this particular pattern.
Julia: I had that, but I was genuinely overconfident. At first, I think just going to social work school and being the nerdiest person there or something. I was just like, "Oh, I'm just smart, I guess." Then I get to my social work job and my boss is like, "Oh my gosh, you're naive. Please fix this, this, and this." That was rough, because I didn't hear until several months in and I was like, "I've just been embarrassing myself this all time." Then I think I over-corrected. In EA, it’s fine if your credentials don't match what people expect, by the way, I never studied philosophy or math or any of that stuff. I didn't match anyone's picture of what a cool stellar EA was going to be like. I just didn't think I was one, and then I was surprised.
Lynette: I think I'm particularly interested in this niche pattern because, when they get a new job or a new manager, this often changes. Anyone in their first job is probably still quite raw and green and has lots of things to fix.
Julia: But getting calibrated on that…
Lynette: Is so hard. Do you have any tips on figuring out how to calibrate on something when we are starting out and are so green and it's so hard to tell how much reliance is put on any particular feedback.
Julia: I think if you can identify people who are both observant and reasonably kind, and try to seek out feedback. One of my coworkers in that first social work job just gave me some kind feedback about like, "Here's some things you're doing that are annoying people." She did it in this gentle way and I'm just like, "Oh my gosh, I wish you had told me that six months ago.” That was very helpful.
I think if I had said like, "Hey, you've been in this field a lot longer than I have. If you had three tips to give me, what would they be?" Or something like that, and maybe if I hadn't sought it out proactively, then I wouldn't have been so embarrassed when I realized, "Oh my gosh, I've just been screwing up these things," and not knowing it because my manager was too busy until like three months in to be like, "Here are all the things that annoy your coworkers."
Lynette: Ideally, get personalized feedback from people who are fairly kind but also know more than you. In situations where that's hard to do, for example, people don't have colleagues, or they're less comfortable with them, how much have you ever done this or how much do you see potential in just asking other people who are more experienced in the field like, "What are the top thing that are important to do here?" Even if it's not personalized feedback, just trying to figure out how to be more successful by asking people with more experience what their advice was?
Julia: I've never really done it, so I don't feel like I have anything useful to say here.
Lynette: Okay, cool. Somewhat related, do you have thoughts on what it takes to learn about yourself? Like, your strengths, preferences, values, and how to bring that into sync with EA ideas, and make that a life that you can be happy and sustainable and successful one?
Julia: I would guess that some of us like being open to a lot of different outcomes, I think like, for some people, there will this like syncing up of where their skills are and what EA needs or something, and they'll be able to find some way to contribute that is like, very easily identifiable just like, "Yes, this is a good way for me to contribute."
I feel lucky to have found that, but also, I like don't always enjoy my job. There are a lot of pretty like hard parts about it, and when I look at my husband doing Earning to Give-- Just like, he likes programming, he's just happy doing that, and like, he's happier on his job than I am in mine. But it's not like this obvious-- it's Earning to Give, it's not not-EA but it's not one these like, "Oh, yes, this is like the perfect blend of your skills and some niche in EA that needs filling.” I think just knowing that some people are going to find that and other people it's like, "Okay, well, maybe, I'm going to be a social worker and donate some percentage, and maybe I'll help organize my local group or whatever." It might not be this beautiful career story, and I think I so easily could've ended up in that. Like, if the skills I had just hadn't happened to be as useful to EA.
I think just like, this is a group project, and you can only decide for yourself as an individual what your career's going to be, but EA's made up of a bunch of different people with different careers and different projects and different skills. Yours may or may not be this great success story, but we don't all have to be.
Back in Earning to Give, I was just like, "I just can't see my way to it. I don't know what I'm good at that would earn a bunch of money, there's nothing. [laughs] I think I would hate it all, or just like suck at it." If we'd stayed in that world where we're really funding constrained, I just wouldn't have been able to contribute that much. I still would have tried, but there just would have been a pretty different niche. I think trying to make peace sometimes with like, "Okay, I'm going to have this niche, and it's not going to be like cool or famous or something, but, that's just like how it is."
Lynette: Makes sense.
Julia: Maybe one last thing that'll tack on there is, that's still really good. I think, if we had stayed in the days where I was only like only saving people's lives by like donating to like GiveWell charities, that's still really good. [chuckles] Michelle Hutchison has a good post about this, that it's just like having some absolute impacts. Like even if the comparative impact, like even if other people are having more impact than you, it doesn't reduce what you are able to accomplish. In the beginning, we were all just like, "What? I can save a life for $2,000 or whatever?" And that's still there. The numbers changed around, but like, you can still do good stuff without being a superstar, and no one can take that away from you.
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