How to have a positive impact with your career (with Benjamin Hilton)

1. Choose High-Impact Problems

Focus your career on problems with the potential for orders of magnitude more impact, such as reducing existential risk, because the choice of problem significantly determines overall impact.

2. Prioritize Personal Fit

When making career decisions, prioritize roles where your skills and aptitudes are a strong match, as personal fit acts as a crucial multiplier on your potential impact.

3. Aim for High-Leverage Careers

Pursue career paths that offer significant multipliers on your impact, such as working in large institutions, developing ideas, or mobilizing others, because these roles magnify the good you can achieve.

4. Optimize Solution Effectiveness

Within any problem area, research and choose the most cost-effective interventions, as empirical data suggests the best solutions can be 50 times more effective than the median.

5. Prioritize Neglected Problems

Actively seek out problems or solutions that are highly neglected (few people or dollars working on them), as this often indicates a higher potential for marginal impact.

6. Use the SSN Framework

Evaluate potential problems or solutions using the Scale, Solvability, and Neglectedness framework to identify opportunities where your efforts can yield the greatest good.

7. Get Good at Something

Shift focus from accumulating broad “career capital” or transferable credentials to deeply mastering a specific skill, as becoming highly proficient in a relevant area is key to future success.

8. Build Skills and Explore

Improve your personal fit by actively building relevant skills and empirically exploring different roles to discover what you are genuinely good at and where you can have the most success.

9. Leverage Your Greatest Strengths

To achieve high levels of output and impact, focus on becoming exceptionally good at your greatest strengths, as this can lead to disproportionately large gains, especially in fields with uncapped potential.

10. Address Weakest Relevant Skills

Identify and improve the skills that are most relevant to your domain but are your weakest, because a low factor in a “product of factors” model can severely limit overall output.

11. Seek Deeply Meaningful Work

Choose a career that you find deeply meaningful, as psychological evidence suggests this is a key component of job satisfaction and can sustain motivation.

12. Balance Impact with Well-being

Strive to balance having a significant impact with maintaining a good personal life, as this approach prevents burnout and ensures long-term effectiveness, making it a sustainable path for more people.

13. Consider Earning to Give

If you can enter a high-earning career, consider donating a substantial portion of your income to highly effective interventions, as this can often achieve more impact than direct service.

14. Influence Large Institutions

Work within or influence large organizations (governments, NGOs, major companies) to direct their vast resources towards high-impact solutions, as this provides immense leverage.

15. Develop and Communicate Ideas

Focus on careers that involve developing and effectively communicating ideas, because a single impactful idea can be adopted and spread globally, creating massive leverage.

16. Train Others to Multiply Impact

Instead of solely performing a service yourself, train others to do it, as this multiplies your impact by enabling many more people to carry out beneficial actions.

17. Manage Mental Health Proactively

Prioritize mental health and learn techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to maintain a positive outlook, as this is a foundational skill for long-term success and happiness.

18. Develop Healthy Daily Habits

Learn to construct and maintain healthy daily habits, such as using “anchor habits” (attaching new habits to existing routines), to improve various domains of life and achieve consistent progress.

19. Cultivate Assertive Communication

Develop the ability to clearly and assertively communicate ideas, boundaries, and beliefs respectfully, as this is a fundamental life skill that aids in almost every domain.

20. Use Excitement as Startup Tiebreaker

When deciding between startup ideas, let genuine excitement be a tiebreaker, as it can provide the necessary stickiness and resilience to overcome the high likelihood of giving up.

21. Don’t Solely Follow Passion

Instead of relying on passion, empirically test what you are good at and what makes a job satisfying, as initial guesses about passion often don’t correlate with long-term satisfaction.

22. Avoid Over-Updating Beliefs

Be wary of changing your mind too much based on new evidence, especially in areas with conflicting information, to prevent beliefs from fluctuating wildly.

23. Be Skeptical of Generalizing Success

Resist the urge to over-generalize personal experiences (e.g., a diet that worked for you) as universally applicable, recognizing that what works for one person may not work for all.

24. Bound Updates from Arguments

When evaluating philosophical or first-principles arguments, bound the strength of your update by considering how much empirical evidence would be required to overturn it, preventing overconfidence in purely logical reasoning.

25. Use a ‘Halfway Update’ Heuristic

When presented with a convincing argument, initially update your beliefs only halfway, allowing time for reflection and seeking counter-arguments before fully integrating the new information.

26. Promote Cooperation for Growth

Recognize that unchecked economic growth can lead to significant negative externalities (e.g., factory farming, existential risks), and actively promote cooperation mechanisms (e.g., government regulation, altruistic career choices) to mitigate these harms.