Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference

by William MacAskill

This has three implications. First, it means you should think of your career as a work in progress. Rather than having a fixed career plan, try to have a career ‘model’ – a set of provisional goals and hypotheses that you’re constantly revising as you acquire new evidence or opportunities. It’s better to have a bad plan than no plan, but only if you’re open to changing it. Second, find out where you’re uncertain, then reduce that uncertainty. Before making a decision, don’t merely try to weigh up all the pros and cons as you currently see them (though that is a good thing to do). Ask yourself: ‘What is the single most important piece of information that would be most useful for my career decision? Now, what can I do in order to gain that information?’ Third, test yourself in different paths. In science you try to test hypotheses. Similarly, if you can, you should try to run ‘tests’ of different career plans; this is important because it’s often very difficult to predict which careers will work out and which won’t. For example one person we coached started an internship at an asset-management firm. Having no experience in the field, she didn’t know whether she’d like it, but she guessed she wouldn’t. It turned out she hated the job. In a sense, she ‘failed’. But that failure meant she could be much more confident in pursuing a different (academic) path, instead. Her bad experience was very valuable.