SPENCER: Devon, welcome to the Clearer Thinking Podcast.

DEVON: Hey, Spencer. Great to be here.

SPENCER: So a lot of people have heard about how to give away their money to help the world. You could give it to effective charities that do more good for the dollar, but a much less common conversation people have is about how to do good in their career. How do they help the world? Not everyone is in a position to do this. Some people are just looking for a job. Some people in their career really have to do exactly what they're doing. They have very little flexibility. But many people have opportunities to think about how to do good in their career, and they want to do so. That's what I want to focus on today. We can really think about two things. One is, suppose you're willing to switch career paths, or at least change your role. What are your options there in terms of doing good? The other thing is, suppose you really are fixed in a particular role at a particular kind of company. How can you think about doing good from that perspective? So let's start with the first thing. Suppose that you're willing to potentially change your career or substantially change your role. How do you think about doing good?

DEVON: Yeah, sounds good. I think this is indeed a very important path because a lot of good that you can do throughout your life, if you're really trying to maximize your impact, a lot of the ultimate value you deliver to society will be with your time and with your career. For those folks who are fortunate enough to consider switching careers, I think this is a really good thing to consider. One method I like to employ to do this well is to really think about the so-called counterfactuality of your career. What does that mean? One heuristic I have is to close my eyes and pretend I never existed on the planet — it's a bit weird, I know — and then really try to think about, "What the world would look like if I didn't exist compared to what it looks like now?" To the extent you can answer that question, I think it gives a true test for the difference that you're actually making. Some people will close their eyes and do this investigation, and they'll realize that somebody would replace them if they didn't exist. Probably they're just doing a role that many other people could do. Other people will close their eyes and realize that they're very special in their role, and so maybe they should stay where they are. A lot of people, if they take this experiment seriously, will realize that they could have a lot more impact by switching careers. This kind of heuristic has motivated me to switch paths multiple times throughout my life.

SPENCER: This kind of counterfactual thinking can lead to some really counterintuitive conclusions. You could have someone who's doing a job where they're literally saving lives, maybe they're a doctor literally saving lives, but they realize they actually have low counterfactual impact. For example, maybe they're not that good at it. Even though they are literally saving lives, they're actually bringing down the quality, and there are plenty of people who could take their job.

DEVON: Yeah, that's a great example, and it can go even further if you consider that even if they're saving a bunch of lives, let's say, maybe they invented some medicine, which they're the only person able to do that or the only person willing to do that. If they forge into this new area, they might even be able to save more lives, which would be even better than the lives they're saving. It can get murky and complicated, but it is true that for a lot of jobs, the actual impact is a lot lower than it looks on the surface.

SPENCER: How do you think about replacement? Because you could imagine two different extremes. At one extreme, you can imagine a job where there literally is no one else to do it without you there. So if you don't do it, it will just go empty. At the other extreme, you can imagine an extremely liquid market where it doesn't matter who's in the job, because as soon as someone leaves, someone else really qualified for it will just take their place. Filling those jobs is instantaneous, and you can always find high quality people to do it.

DEVON: Yeah, I think that makes all the difference. And therein lies the rub, if you will. You want to seek out, if you're impact maximizing, and people have different considerations and goals they're going after, but if you want to have a lot of impact, then I think, by definition, you want to seek out those areas where you are not replaceable, so that, by definition, you're doing something that somebody else wouldn't do.

SPENCER: It seems like replaceability sort of has these two aspects. One is the market dynamics, like, are there a lot of people willing to do the job, who have the qualifications, et cetera? And then another may be considerations about how good you are at that job, or do you bring something unique to it? Are you above average or below average? Is that fair to say?

DEVON: I think that's fair, and that's a bit tough. I co-founded an organization called High Impact Professionals, and we measure our success at the organization by people switching careers, and we try to then seriously measure the difference that we've made. The difference that we've made is a function of not only how much difference did the course that we offer make in the person's switching, but also we investigate, let's say, if somebody moves from a job to a very high-impact job. We investigate that organization, and we ask them, "How much better is this candidate than your next best candidate?" If the answer there is razor slim and very marginal, then we didn't provide much value in our own lights. But if the difference between them and the next best candidate is quite large, then we think we've made quite a difference. It very much matters how good the candidate is. We wouldn't want to place somebody who is not good into a role where we're replacing somebody who might have been better. So yeah, we try to take that into account.

SPENCER: And so when someone's done this kind of counterfactual analysis, if they're really thinking about their career and maximizing the impact, what do you suggest they do next? One way it could turn out is, "Hey, you know what? I don't think I have much of a counterfactual impact."

DEVON: At High Impact Professionals, we run a program that people can go through. It's a six-week program called the Impact Accelerator Program, where people can join a cohort of others looking to switch careers, and you build a plan throughout this time to make this career switch. I've also written a book that's coming out next week called the High Impact Professionals Playbook that goes into a lot of this, so folks who are interested can pick that up. It has a lot of exercises that people can do to push things forward. But most generally, having run the program at High Impact Professionals, we see quite a few pitfalls. One thing that a lot of people need from the program, that the program offers, but not exclusively, is accountability. A lot of people say, "Oh gosh, I want to switch careers, but that's overwhelming." One barrier for them to actually take action is just having a sparring partner or somebody else who's going to hold them accountable to making this change. One thing is imposter syndrome. I know this is a thing that everybody knows about, but I was very surprised by how many people actually suffer from this. A lot of people hold the often very false belief that they're not good enough to switch careers, and they just need some motivation. Other people just need to build a plan. One strategy I like is making a weighted factor model, which is basically a glorified Excel spreadsheet with the things you care about. I care about impact, I care about job fit, I care about salary, whatever things you care about. Put them into a spreadsheet, list all your options, and then try to weigh them and see what comes up on top. Strangely enough, I've found that most people aren't surprised by the answer. They kind of already know what they want. They don't do this and then something bubbles to the top, and they go, "Oh, wow. I never really thought about that option." What more often happens is the one that they would have predicted ahead of time intuitively as their best option is already on top. I don't know if people get confident with the numbers or if they just need to take this step, but I think a lot of people already know what their next step is, in some sense, but something else is holding them back. Those are some barriers that I've seen.

SPENCER: I want to go back to imposter syndrome in a moment. But on the topic of weighted factor models, one thing I found when I made them, you say, "Okay, here are the criteria I care about." Let's say you're evaluating anything. Let's say you're evaluating what apartment to move into, for example, put in the things you care about, "Does it have a bathtub? Is it a walk-up? Does it have air conditioning?" Whatever the things are, you have the space, the footage, and then you rate each of them on how good it is on that attribute. Maybe one to five or one to ten, whatever your rating system is. Then you can also assign weights to the factors. Some factors you might care about more than others. You might say, "Well, the bathtub, that's not that important to me, or it's super important to me, where the square footage is really important to me." Then each score on each factor can be weighted differently into the final score. Is that how you recommend doing it?

DEVON: Yeah, for sure. I'm happy that you went into the details. I thought maybe I should skip it for fear of boring people. But yeah, that's very much it, the different weights and their scores. You want to try to really investigate in yourself what the different weights are for the different things you care about. I just said that the top thing is often the thing that people already would have predicted. But also, I think there's a good gut test you can do where you say, "Okay, if I got my number one thing now, and I picture I'm in that world, did I take everything into account?" Oftentimes you might feel that a factor is missing. You might be like, "Oh, actually, I care about this other thing. This scenario is missing that, or I weighed this one too heavily. That one actually shouldn't be on the top." I don't think it's the end-all-be-all answer to any given question. But I often find this sort of test or putting numbers to things really helps you uncover the different values that you have internally. It's a good exercise to make progress in figuring out what's the next step for you, whether it be apartment hunting or your career.

SPENCER: Yeah, some people use their intuition for this kind of decision. Some people prefer a more structured process, like a weighted factor model, and they think, whatever the model outputs, that's the thing I should do. My view is somewhere in between the two, that the weighted factor model is actually a great way to help you explore and improve on your intuitions because it forces you to think about what are the things I care about. You've got to get the different factors. It forces you to say, "How much do I care about each factor relative to the other factors?" So it's forcing you to use your intuition a lot, but sometimes it actually involves research. You have to go look into something. I don't know how good this job is on this factor, so I'm going to have to research that, which is nice. It forces data gathering in some cases. But then also, I find that when it spits out the final answer, sometimes you'll be like, "Oh yeah, that feels perfect. That's exactly what I expected." Occasionally it will be like, "Oh, wow, that's really not what I expected." Then it allows for this recursive process where now you can go and say, "Okay, what's driving this? Why is this not giving the answer that I expected?" Look at the factors that are driving the difference and say, "Did I misweigh some of these, or is this actually better reflecting my true values than my intuition?" I think rather than thinking of it as a process where you're just going to trust its output, you think of it as a dynamic process involving going back and forth between the model and your intuition.

DEVON: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. As you said, it's a good mix of a data-driven approach, but also using your intuition and checking yourself when the numbers don't look quite right.

SPENCER: It's a really cool method in general because you could do it for any decision. It's just a very general, powerful method. So, I like that about it, too. So let's go back to imposter syndrome. Can you just define it for those who haven't heard of it?

DEVON: Yeah, sure. So imposter syndrome is the feeling that, let's say you're in your job, you work with a bunch of smart people, and you think somehow you're an imposter in that space. You got in there by luck or because somebody didn't look at your resume too closely, but that you actually don't hold a candle to these other people. You're not as qualified as the other people that are around you. I think you could tell me better than I know this. I'm just surmising here, but I think smarter people tend to have this a bit more if that's true, but if not, that's fine too. Essentially, I think paradoxically, it's a problem where the less of an imposter you should feel, perhaps the more you call into question your own intelligence. At High Impact Professionals, we've seen this a lot, and there's this nice dynamic in cohorts of people that come together and talk. One of the weeks of the program, everybody has a mastermind session where they're in the hot seat and they talk about their issue. A lot of people inevitably bring up something like imposter syndrome that's holding them back from their career switch. It's not that that person necessarily gets the coaching they need to think, "Aha, within 45 minutes, I don't have this thing that I've had my whole life anymore." What I saw running this course is that other people in the group see this very qualified person with a lot of degrees, who has a very impressive resume, also has imposter syndrome as a signal to them that, "Oh, maybe if this person has it, something here is off. Maybe the fact that I have it too is weird, and I should re-question if I have it."

SPENCER: And your question, I don't think that the imposter syndrome is correlated with intelligence, but what I do think it's correlated with is how high achieving the people around you are. A lot of people tend to feel it when they, let's say, were really high achievers in high school, and then they suddenly go to an excellent college where everyone around them is a high achiever and very smart. I think that tends to be, "Oh shit, do I belong here?" It can be very shocking. For example, I've heard of many people joining the effective altruism community and beginning to feel like an imposter for the first time because they feel like there are really competent, altruistic people around them, and they're like, "Whoa. Am I really good enough to belong here?" I think people with imposter syndrome often second guess a lot of their accomplishments and think, "Well, that wasn't really a big deal." They'll look at other people's accomplishments and say, "Wow, I can't believe that person achieved that, it makes me feel like I can never achieve it." For those interested, we have an imposter syndrome test and tool for free. You can use clearerthinking.org, so I'll put that in the show notes. It can help you figure out if you have imposter syndrome. Other than learning that others around them may also have imposter syndrome, which seems valuable, do you have any other tips for people that think they might have imposter syndrome?

DEVON: Yeah, I guess one tip that I think is quite good is the old friend test. Picture that a friend is talking to you when you're talking to yourself, and then ask if you have imposter syndrome. You are trying to be as objective as possible. You're in your own head. You're very subjective with yourself. You are probably hard on yourself, but the idea is you're probably less hard on your friends and more charitable to them and the things they've done. If you looked at your friend's situation and they had the credentials you have and done the work that you have, how would you perceive them? Would you perceive them as an imposter? The answer is probably not. This is a tool that can help you try to get a bit more objective with yourself.

SPENCER: Yeah, because a lot of people hold themselves to a higher standard than the people around them. I think that's great. Asking, what if my friend had the achievements I did? Would I think of them as sort of a fraud, or would I undermine those accomplishments? Or would I say, "No, that's really cool that you did that." I think that's really great. Okay, any advice in terms of thinking about what sort of career to go into if you decide you're going to switch? You're like, "Okay, I think I could have more impact in a different career." You can have weighted factor models, but are there certain types of careers that you generally recommend?

DEVON: I like a lot of careers in the NGO space for the reason that I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit in the NGO space. In the private sector, money is a very strong incentive for people to work there. I think a lot of the most productive, I'm a very big fan of capitalism in the private sector. I love that there are a lot of great products and a lot of new things coming out. I think they really help society. But if there were a billion-dollar organization out there that you could find that would really help a lot of people, I think there are a lot of people looking for those sorts of solutions. In the NGO space, this isn't the case. One strong hypothesis I have is that the incentives are, in my view, very often misaligned in the NGO space. In the private sector, if you make a product and you think it's great and nobody buys it, you go out of business pretty quickly. There's a type of feedback loop, and money's the feedback. In the NGO space, unfortunately, many organizations provide some benefit. They have some theory of change about how they're going to help the world. They're going to distribute books to schools in Nigeria, something like this. They don't have to find out whether education rates went up or outcomes got better. In fact, those are very hard things to measure with long timelines. All they have to do is convince funders that their project is going well, and the funders are not the beneficiaries of the organization. They're the people funding it. You can get the funder to fund you irrespective of how much impact you have. This is because a lot of funders aren't impact maximizing; they're looking for other things as well. These feedback loops are genuinely hard to get. For this reason, there's a lot of low hanging fruit in the NGO space. Going back to the counterfactual statement I made up top, I think there's a lot of room for you to switch careers into an NGO, start a new organization, or join a small, impact-oriented NGO and have a lot of impact because nobody else is really looking there. That's one option.

SPENCER: It seems NGOs tend to pay a lot less as well, which may mean if you're more altruistically motivated, you might be more willing to take a pay cut than people who are less altruistically motivated. So that could be another reason for inefficiency that you could take advantage of.

DEVON: Yeah, that's true. That's another reason, and that obviously trades off with if you're donating, you might have less to donate, but I think on the margin, it's much better to have your talent in the space and your money, unless you're donating millions a year or something like that, which I imagine most people aren't doing. I think there's also a status thing. People who are status-seeking, for some weird reason, would think that if you made an awesome video game, it would be perceived as higher status than making an awesome charity. At least in my view, most people would find that more impressive. So I think for altruistic people who aren't necessarily maxing out on status, this can be a good move, too, because you can do a lot of great work, even if it's not recognized as such by the broader public.

SPENCER: Speaking about incentives, it seems to me that both for-profit companies and nonprofits have a bit of wacky incentives, but they're different incentives. So on the for-profit side, one thing you point out is that the person using the product is typically the person driving benefits, at least in theory. So that's nice. It seems to align incentives. At the same time, we see that there are plenty of companies that have figured out ways to make money that don't seem to be benefiting people. So if they can make money without benefiting people, they could do that because the only incentive, the only feedback loop, really, is making money. And so, an example of this could be making a product that's actually fake. So a supplement company that's saying, "Hey, this will give you good brain health," but it actually doesn't work. So essentially, they're scamming their customers, or sometimes this is done by benefiting the customer but costing other people more than the customer. So an example would be a company that makes a great product that benefits the customer, but they dump sludge in the river and make people sick. So that's a weird incentive. And then on the flip side, you've got NGOs or nonprofits, where you have this funny incentive, where it's like, "Well, to keep going, you've got to raise money, but raising money from donors, or whoever is giving you money, the government, whoever, is different than doing good." And so that's where the incentive misalignment lies. So it seems to me they both have incentive misalignments, or just different sorts.

DEVON: Yeah, I think that's right. I certainly don't endorse every private sector product. I think there are many, as you say, that are not good for people, because they are attacking our lizard brain, or something like this, where our reflected self probably wouldn't use that product. And there are other products that have negative externalities, like dumping sludge in the river. So I think there are a lot of issues. And even if you're staying in the private sector, you can make better or worse choices. But I guess on average, I think a lot of for-profit products that people find problematic, or I don't know, I think a lot of people are anti-for-profit. And I guess I just want to be clear to the audience, I don't think you have to go to an NGO to do good work. And if you work in the private sector, that's not bad, per se. I think there are a lot of great opportunities out there.

SPENCER: Yeah, I find it more useful to think of for-profit versus nonprofit as a funding model, rather than a determinant of what you're doing. Because it's really about where does the money come from? Does the money come from people paying you for it because they want it, for example, or does the money come from people donating it to you or grants?And in theory, for-profits and nonprofits could do the same things. But because the funding model is different, they often do different things.

DEVON: Yeah, that sounds right. That's a good way to think about it.

SPENCER: And there's actually an interesting movement to try to create for-profit style companies that are nonprofits. So that's a funny example where the idea is, if you can do that, if you can make a nonprofit, imagine you can make a nonprofit, Starbucks. Maybe that would be really good for the world. So, yeah, it just kind of mixes those two models.

DEVON: There's also an interesting profit-for-good movement growing where for-profit businesses write into their charter, into their governance structure, we're going to give away whatever, upwards of 100% of all the profits of the organization. So they run a for-profit model. People have a stake around the cap table, have a stake in the company. But nonetheless, they're not profit-oriented, and their profits go to their nonprofit branch of their organization, like OpenAI originally, I guess to some degree.

SPENCER: Yeah, we'll see what happens to that in the long run. Let's suppose they're interested in working at an NGO or for a profit company that they think could be, they could have a high-impact role. Do you have advice in terms of how they think about the role itself, or what they'll be doing there, or any kind of way to consider the details of that?

DEVON: It's tough because there are a lot of different types of organizations. But I'd say in the organizations I know, at least there are some areas where there seems to be quite a large gap. One is communication. A lot of organizations I know that I consider to be quite high impact need comms and marketing people. So I guess for some specializations, I'd say that there's an outsized opportunity. For others, I think it really just depends on the organization. I really think about this replacement angle. So if an organization is struggling to fill a particular type of role, knowing that seems quite important, so that you can fill in that gap. If somebody is going to replace you anyway, then it doesn't matter. But, yeah, I don't have particular advice about particular roles. I think a good way to get involved is to, let's say you're switching from the private sector to an NGO, trying to figure out what you think are the biggest problems that exist right now that aren't sufficiently being tackled. A lot in the EA community would say there are a lot of global health opportunities, there are a lot of animal welfare opportunities. There's a lot in this burgeoning AI scene, which maybe isn't about burgeoning anymore, but there's still a lot of opportunities to make sure that things go right. For so-called "bigger" existential risks, there's a growing community of people working on these problems. But I don't feel limited by any of those problems. I think it's up to the listener to decide what they think is important and try to figure out the scope of the problem. Then look at how many people are looking at it, and something will be more appealing if it's a big problem that's being neglected by society at large.

SPENCER: It seems like a consideration of their skills is going to have to be a big part of this. Because it's not enough to take on a high-impact role; you have to do a good job at it. At least if there's someone else that might be doing that role, which in most cases, there would be. So, yeah, how do you think about that? Do you have people think about what they're good at in some way?

DEVON: They should, for sure. I think actually effective altruists underplay their personal fit in an organization, whether that be due to their particular skill set or due to the things they like doing, which aren't always one and the same. I'm not sure how it is with your listeners, but I would advise people to make sure that they take that seriously. That's something I've seen effective altruists not do enough of, essentially, so they kind of downplay their own personal fit for the impact. They'll see a juicy impact opportunity, and they'll chase it irrespective of how much of the fit that is for them. So taking your personal fit into account is very important.

SPENCER: I've said this on a previous podcast episode, but I have a funny thing that happens where, when I'm talking to effective altruists, and they're asking me about career advice or whatever, I'm often trying to nudge them to think more about what they are really excited about and what they are really good at. So more personal fit factors, because obviously the impact really matters to them, but they tend to have already thought about that a ton, but less about the personal fit factors. So I'm nudging them in that direction. Whereas when I meet non-effective altruists who care about doing good in the world, I'm often trying to nudge them in the opposite direction: have you thought about what matters? Have you thought about what is going to make your work meaningful? Because they've often already thought a lot about the personal fit factors and less about what's the impact on the world. So it's kind of funny.

DEVON: Yeah, I think that's fair. It really depends on where you're coming from, and that's been my experience as well.

SPENCER: Nice. As an aside, this first branch we're going down is about, okay, you're thinking of switching careers. Any other things you want to get to before we switch to the other branch, which is, okay, let's say you're staying in the same role?

DEVON: Yeah, maybe a couple of things you asked about. You asked for things up top that one could do that would be particularly impactful if they want to switch careers. How could they think about it? And I named NGOs as one example. I think I'm pretty bullish on anything that's starting something new.

SPENCER: What are your thoughts about starting your own organization if you're thinking about switching careers?

DEVON: So I think this is also a really impactful path, whether that be a for-profit or a nonprofit, or whatever the funding structure is. By definition, if something wouldn't have existed otherwise, and you start it, that can be really impactful. A lot of people who have an entrepreneurial bone in their body might want to test out this opportunity. Honestly, in starting High Impact Professionals, I found it to be the most illuminating job I've had over the maybe 10 jobs I've had in my career. I've learned the most, by far. I used to be a lot more bookish and would read a book about business to understand business, but I learned way more running an organization than I had elsewhere. From a personal fit standpoint or a learning standpoint, it's quite strong. If you're quite confident that what you create wouldn't have existed otherwise, I think that's a really compelling case for having counterfactual impact as well.

SPENCER: Yeah, it seems it's sort of easier, in a certain sense, to get a counterfactual impact because you can do something that nobody's doing, as opposed to fitting into a standard job role that's already there. That being said, of course, there are a lot of other complications here, and it's hard in a lot of other ways. What do you think are some of the considerations someone should be thinking about? Do I start my own org? Do I not?

DEVON: One consideration, for sure, is personal fit. You have to be entrepreneurial. You have to deal with a really blank slate, starting something new and creating something from nothing, and that will appeal to some people and not to others. You have to have a big appetite for risk, in my view, because a lot of startups, even in the NGO world, fail. I think they fail less in the NGO world because of this incentive problem. If you're good at fundraising, you could have your org stick around forever. In fact, there's this fun fact about how the five biggest NGOs are 100 years old, some of them 130 years old, and the five biggest for-profit organizations are, like, the oldest one is Microsoft. The LLM labs are nipping at their heels — OpenAI and Anthropic — I wouldn't be surprised if they overtake them in the next few years. But this points out the incentive problems: you can stick around if you're an NGO forever, as long as you get a good funding mechanism. But if you're impact-oriented, you want to shut down if it's not working quickly. You have to have a certain appetite for risk for that. So people who have that appetite should start a nonprofit or start an organization. Working in small teams, you have to do a lot of stuff yourself. If it's you and your co-founder, and you're a mid-career professional managing a big team and you're not used to tinkering with the lowest level of detail, you'll probably have to do that. Depending on how you think about that, that could be a plus or a minus.

SPENCER: Yeah, that's a good list. Another thing I would add to that list is extreme persistence. I think that most new entities, in order to survive, require someone grinding away and overcoming obstacle after obstacle after obstacle, with lots of times when it seems like it's going to fail, and then they go through one more obstacle, and then there's another. I think that actually, most people would eventually crack. It's sort of like the world's going to keep punching you in the face; if you ever give up, you lose, and some people are just willing to not give up.

DEVON: Yeah, that sounds right. That sounds right. And that's tough, and that combined with the uncertainty of, I remember starting High Impact Professionals. When we started, we were looking at people to donate money. We had a totally different business model, if you will. Product-market fit took about two years. We tried many different models of getting an audience, testing something with them, and seeing if the product works. It's disheartening to see when it doesn't, and you have to scrap everything and start over. I found this quite difficult, for sure, also fun in a way. But you have to really be open to it not working out, to the risk of it all, to uncertainty again, to trying something new. But that's also fun for creative people who want to do something new.

SPENCER: That also gets at the stress of it. It tends to be very stressful. Obviously, there's occasionally a company where everything goes well immediately, and it's kind of blessed. But usually, that's not the case. Usually, there are a lot of stressful things; you're putting out fires all the time. It doesn't mean that someone who's an anxious person can't start their own organization, but it's going to be particularly draining if you're someone who doesn't take stress very well.

DEVON: Yeah, very much so. But the upside, I think, with any sort of stress — I'm not sure I would endorse it across the board — but I think I found, at least in my own life, with a lot of stress and a lot of hardship, there's usually the most learning out of that. As I said, I think running an organization from scratch, I learned way more than in my other jobs because you have to do everything. You have to react to a situation. You have to try new things. If finance isn't your thing, you might be the finance person because there's nobody else. You just have to learn things. I think that kind of not even just learning by doing, but being forced to learn because you have to act is kind of the upside of that stress. But yes, very, very stressful for sure.

SPENCER: And the upsides are significant. The ones you mentioned. Another one is for people high in autonomy. You get to do whatever you choose. For some people, that's a nightmare. But for some people, that's amazing. Nobody is telling you what to do. You decide what to do, and as you point out, it can be creative and very fulfilling. I would also say that, besides science, which has had incredible impact in the world, a lot of the biggest impacts have come from organizations. So I would say that the upside, the possibility tends to be much, much bigger than working in most roles. Okay, maybe there are some exceptional roles in existing organizations that are as high impact. But if you think about organization founders, some have had some of the largest impacts in history on the world.

DEVON: I think that's right. Yeah.

SPENCER: You also mentioned to me previously this idea of making yourself replaceable. What does that mean? Making yourself replaceable?

DEVON: Yeah, it's something I've been trying to do at my last few jobs. So I think one version of work is you get into a role, you're pretty good at it, and then you stick around there for a long time. I think this can work in a lot of places, so long as you're delivering value. If you're the CEO of a new organization and it's growing, there are always new challenges and fires to fight, and I think that can be good, but in other roles, your role becomes repetitive, or you do the same thing over and over. For roles like this, I think something that's been quite good for me is to think about my counterfactuality every six months or every year. I don't do any formal process, but I guess I just sort of think somehow, maybe in the shower, about how much of a difference I am making here, and is it still the case that this is the best option for me? I just left my organization, Ambitious Impact, which is a great organization, a couple of weeks ago, at the end of the year. I think I was there for two years as a COO. I think I did a lot of the work I needed to do. I started new initiatives that I thought were the most important ones missing, so those were sort of on the books, and made new processes where I thought they were missing. I skilled up my direct reports to be able to do some of the things that only I could do when I joined. The difference between my value when I joined and my value after two years was getting smaller and smaller to the point where I thought, "Okay, if I disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn't be that bad. People could handle it. The staff is skilled-up." I think that's good for the staff now. They can do more things. That's good for me because I don't want to be anywhere where I don't need to be. As I said, I want to hunt out where the most counterfactual impact is. I think this is a nice model of thinking about yourself. I brought it up with people. I don't know about you, Spencer, but sometimes you say things to people, and they feel obvious. I say this to some people, and they're like, "Oh, but that's scary and weird, isn't it, to want to switch jobs or make yourself replaceable?" I don't know what's driving it, but that always makes me feel like it's a superpower or something. In this case, I felt like it's actually a nice model that I think more people could inhabit, and it seems like a lot of people don't. For those lucky enough to be able to switch jobs and move around, I think this can be a good model: make yourself replaceable and then go and do the next thing where you're not replaceable, so that you're making a difference again.

SPENCER: It's such a funny attitude compared to the way that many people think about work, where being replaceable is the last thing they would want. They want total job security; they can never be replaced. But obviously thinking about it from an impact perspective really changes things. If you could find a way to replace yourself, and then that impact is now happening, you've kind of perpetuated it. Now you can go do a different thing and have even more impact. That's really cool. It's like you're creating impact on top of impact.

DEVON: Yeah, that's right, yep.

SPENCER: All right. So we've discussed career changes and how you can have an impact that way. Let's go to the other branch, which is, let's say you're going to be staying at your job. Fundamentally, what can you do to have an impact that way?

DEVON: Yeah, so I mentioned that High Impact Professionals did some other programs in the past, and we tested other things out. One thing we tested that was pretty promising were workplace initiatives. We talked to professionals that worked at big tech companies, like Alphabet or Meta, and we got them to run initiatives inside the company. One good example is a fundraising initiative. At the end of the year, during the giving season, when people are getting their bonuses or just thinking about giving back, or trying to get in that donation before the end of the fiscal year, organize an event inside your organization that talks about, "Hey, here is effective giving and great opportunities for you to donate." This is actually how I found my co-founder of High Impact Professionals, Federico. He ran initiatives at his startup and raised something like 25,000 Swiss francs in the first year just through this initiative alone. One number that goes around in the effective altruism space is around $3,000 for a life saved. So this may be, and of course, you don't take these numbers literally, but something like eight lives saved just from this initiative. In one sense, you could say, "Ah, 25k is pretty good, but not amazing." If you think about it in terms of lives, if you jumped into a burning building and saved eight people, you'd be like, "Holy shit. This was one of the best things I could have ever done." He didn't fight against the grain or fight the powers that be; he just brought it up to the CTO, and the CTO was like, "Cool, awesome idea." And then it happened, and he raised all this money. Depending on the organization and where they're at, there are opportunities like this to take advantage of, and it just requires a bit of agency and productivity, and sometimes a little putting skin in the game. You're taking a stand. It's not the standard thing that the organization does, so, you have to advocate for it. In a world where, at least my impression, having worked for 20 years, there's been a real shift towards power, if you will, towards the employee compared to the organization. The organization has a harder time finding great people, so they have to give you more benefits. The amount of benefits that employees have gotten over the years has risen, in my view, because employers have a hard time finding great people.

SPENCER: Why has it gotten harder over the years?

DEVON: I think talent has been quite constrained, like low unemployment rates, perhaps. I don't really know. This could just be an end of one from me, but I remember it seemed much more like I was a cog in the machine when I started my career, and now it feels more like organizations have to fight tooth and nail to keep good people, because they will jump elsewhere. Maybe it's just a function of people switching every couple of years, and you want to keep the good people, and that's hard. In a case like this, whether or not you buy this thesis, I think it's not the heaviest lift to advocate for impactful initiatives inside your organization.

SPENCER: So suppose someone wants to do that. They work at a large company. Where do they start? Who do they go to? What are the first steps to get an initiative going?

DEVON: Yeah, one thing we advise people is to find a co-founder, if you will. If there's somebody else on board in your organization who likes these ideas, do not go it alone; try to find somebody to help you out. Then look for allies. Look for the most powerful ally you can get. You don't need to draw a power map of your organization, but just figure out who's on your team and who you think would be amenable to these ideas. Reach out to them. I don't think there's a standard go-to HR answer for something like this. It's much more about building strength in numbers and then going to the decision maker with significant backing, essentially strength in numbers.

SPENCER: And what exactly would you recommend pitching them? Maybe it depends too much on the individual cases, but what's an example that you would pitch them on specifically?

DEVON: So going back to the fundraising event, I would say something like, always frame things in a way that resonates. A lot of people get this wrong, particularly in effective altruism, by not framing it in terms of, "Hey, actually, we can save a bunch of lives." There are these big problems, and a very rational, analytic approach is to put it in terms of the organization's interest. For example, "I know you're interested in retention at the organization. I think a lot of people are motivated to do this cool thing, and they'll think we are a better organization if we do this." I don't know what the answer is for your organization, but try to think about what the organization cares about and what they're going for, and then make your pitch. Whether it's a fundraising event or getting payroll giving so that people can donate pre-tax through their employer, whatever you're advocating for, frame it in terms of the interests of the organization, and you'll see a lot more uplift that way.

SPENCER: My experience when you're trying to get an organization to do something, you have to think about it on multiple levels simultaneously. There's the decision maker: what does the decision maker care about? Are they sympathetic to this? Would they be against this? What are their motivations? Then you've got the organization level; everything has to be framed to serve something that ultimately is good for the organization. You might have other people involved who have stakes in it, even if they're not the main decision maker. You have to think about these multiple levels: what's the pitch for the organization? What's the pitch for the decision maker? What's the pitch for this person who has authority and would be really helpful to have on board? There might be three somewhat different pitches. Even though you're talking about the same idea, you're going to talk about that idea in somewhat different ways or use different language around it.

DEVON: Yeah, that sounds right. I think it's a matter of building buy-in by going to the first person and getting them on board in the terms that they care about, and then building from there. You can say, "Hey, all these people are on board. We've talked about it, and I think the argument is a bit harder to knock down when you have so many people on board." This can also be different if you're at a small organization versus a large organization. Large organizations have the upside that they have a lot of finances, they often have a CSR department, and maybe they donate a lot of money or grant a lot of money each year, but they're much harder to move, more rigid, and have processes in place. Smaller organizations are easier to move. My co-founder just talked to the CTO because there were about 15 people, so he could just go to him, tap him on the shoulder, and say, "What do you think of this idea?" The guy said, "Great, let's do it." But obviously, the amount of funds is smaller. So there are trade-offs there, also in terms of how you want to strategize about that.

SPENCER: Is it usually only successful with a new program, or have you seen this work where it kind of bootstraps on an existing giving program or some kind of fundraising system that the company has in place?

DEVON: I think it's been harder. I haven't seen it work in large-scale organizations where a system is already in place, except for something like matching. A lot of organizations, at least in the US, have donation-matching that people don't take advantage of. It's kind of like taking advantage of your 401(k), which everybody should do if they can. Taking advantage of those programs or telling other employees that those programs exist can be effective. Sometimes, the employer doesn't shout it from the rooftops because that costs them money. But you can latch on to an existing program and make it more effective just by getting more people involved.

SPENCER: There's already a matching program and people aren't using it, it could be as simple as alerting everyone, "Hey, by the way, there's this matching program. Here's what I give to and why I think it's really exciting. You might consider using the matching for this too," where you don't even have to change your organization's behavior at all. You just have to make people aware.

DEVON: You just have to put yourself out there a little bit. It's such a light lift that if you get one person to donate a few thousand, that's already amazing in some sense. There are a lot of opportunities out there for people looking for them and willing to take that little bit of a risk. This is kind of taking a stand on what you care about, and it's not related to work. I see how people could say, "it's a little bit weird," but it's only a little bit weird. Posting something in Slack and saying, "Here's an organization I care about," it is not that weird in the grand scheme of things.

SPENCER: It might be a little bit weird to some people, but it could also make a positive impression too. People say, "Oh yeah, you really care about this. You've thought about this a lot." It doesn't have to make your reputation worse.

DEVON: That's true.

SPENCER: Yeah, you could also run it by others and see, you know, run it by friends. How would you react if someone posted this on Slack? Is this appropriate?

DEVON: It does not matter. Yeah, I guess I'm reacting because I remember talking to people about it, and they expressed this to me. I found it a little bit confusing because I wouldn't have found it weird, but anecdotally or empirically, I've heard people express this sentiment, so I wanted to speak to it a little bit.

SPENCER: Yeah, totally. And there also might be different organizations that have different cultures, and that might affect how people perceive it. But even if it's a bit weird, it doesn't necessarily mean it's not worth doing.

DEVON: So, yeah, that's right.

SPENCER: What other advice would you give to someone who's going to stay in that company? What else should they be thinking about in terms of impact?

DEVON: Yeah, one example of another type of initiative, not necessarily at your organization, is one person I talked to in the book has different case studies of different people who I think have been impactful on what I call the different pillars of impact. One of them is a person who worked as an Agile coach in their career, went to an agile conference, and then said, "What if we create an Agile for Good Impactful Initiative?" They pulled together something like 30 different people in the space, and now they provide free agile coaching to high-impact organizations that need it. They give pro bono advice about how to upskill them in this methodology. I think people can band together in that way. You can get creative, but it doesn't have to be at your organization.

SPENCER: What's the generalization of that? Is the idea that maybe you're going to do a side project? You're still keeping your main job, but you're doing a side project where you bring some of your work to help NGOs that you care about, that kind of thing?

DEVON: Yeah, it could be that you make it a side project. You can create a side organization. You could do one-on-one mentoring with people, either as a mentor to a person at an organization or as a board member. Another great impactful path is being a board member, which requires varying amounts of time depending on the organization, but it can be just a couple of hours every quarter. I'm a big fan of mentoring, and I've seen in my own experience that the first few marginal hours are just so important because the mentor has so much unique insight. They share things first that they are confident about, not the things they're unsure about. I think even mentoring people for a few hours can have a really high impact and a good use of your time compared to what else you would be doing. There are a lot of opportunities outside of a job switch that take some of your time, but not a lot of your time, to really help skill people up from zero to 50, where you're at 80, let's say, out of 100.

SPENCER: So taking those in turn. How would you think about who to mentor? How to approach that? I think mentorship is kind of a weird thing because it often occurs very informally. It's not like, "I choose you as my mentee and now," it's sort of more organic most of the time. So how have you seen that play out in a positive way?

DEVON: I would lump together mentoring, advising, and consulting. They're all a little bit different, but I'll lump them in one bucket for the purposes of this conversation. I think finding organizations you care about that you think are doing good, impactful work, and reaching out to them proactively and saying, "I'm interested in helping people at your organization, here's my skill set." Do that to five organizations, and one of them will probably take you up on the offer of mentoring somebody. I think it's a little bit less organic than it can be with mentoring, where you just meet each other and you feel the vibe. It feels good. But I think this can lead to a lot of good, productive conversations, especially on the advising side. At high-impact organizations, there are often repeatable gaps. If you start a new high-impact organization and there are two of you, probably neither of you is a lawyer who's an expert at nonprofit law, or you're not a financial whiz. You might be, but you're probably not. For smaller organizations that are new and quite impactful, there are obvious gaps that a lot of professionals with specialized skills can fill. They might be shocked to see the level that the organization is operating at. Even though they're very impactful and very smart, they just don't have the skills to cover some of the areas that a typical business needs because they can't hire for them. They're funding constrained. So, identifying areas that you think are impactful, particularly those with outsized impact, then identifying organizations within those areas that you think are really nailing the problem, and reaching out and saying, "Hey, I'm willing to do X hours a week or month of advising or mentoring with your organization. Do you have any opportunities for me?"

SPENCER: At our organization, Clearer Thinking, I found that sometimes people reach out and say, "I'd love to help." It's way more likely to be a fit if they can propose something specific that they're good at that could be useful to us. If it's just, "Hey, I'd like to help," that's very difficult to work with. But if they say, "Hey, I'm an expert in this aspect of website development, I noticed that your website could be improved in this way. I could walk your team through how to do this." Boom. That's helpful. It's a clear way to slot the person in for a particular task. As you point out, the younger and smaller the organization, the more of these gaps there tend to be. If you could get plugged in with a group that incubates new charities, for example, they might be able to point you to charities that have these needs where your skill could slot in and you could help them solve problems that you're really good at.

DEVON: I think that's right. That's something I'd advise people. It's good that you say that. For the mentoring case, I advise people to do that when trying to volunteer at high-impact organizations. Another way I've seen a lot of people get into a high-impact organization is through the volunteer path, as opposed to cold applying, hoping they get a callback among 200 applicants. It's a numbers game, and it's really hard to get through. I've seen a lot of success cases of people emailing an organization saying something's off on the website. "I'm a designer; I would have done it this way," providing value upfront, showing that they've taken the time to look at your organization and they're not just blasting to a hundred, and that leading to employment with the organization. Funnily enough, I didn't consider that with mentorship, but the same sort of logic applies. It's a much more compelling pitch the more specific you are and the more you show that you're invested in that particular organization.

SPENCER: Let's talk about being on boards of nonprofits, something that I've done before as well. How would you think about that? Would you be reaching out to nonprofits and saying, "Hey, I'd love to be on your board. Here's what I think I could offer you?" Or, what's your advice there?

DEVON: Yeah, I think this one can be organic, but it doesn't need to be. I would reach out to organizations that I think are a good match for you and try to do that. I think it's similar advice: reach out, say what you're good at, why you think you can provide value, and do that to maybe five or ten organizations. At least in the effective altruism space, I think there's a lot of need for great board members, especially board members who are a bit more outside of the EA ecosystem and have a standard skill set that isn't super widely prevalent inside the ecosystem. For EA organizations, there's the Good Governance Project, which I think is eagoodgovernance.com or something like that. There's someone who matches potential board members with organizations that want them.

SPENCER: For those who have never been on a board before, what should they expect out of that? So say they do end up on a board.

DEVON: Yeah, it depends on the board very much. Usually, you should make the contract, even if it's a spoken contract upfront. It can be anything from being an active member who works on strategy with the organization. You might donate to them on the heavier side, and on the lighter side, it could be every six months you get called into a couple-hour meeting to go through some things — that's the most formal version. A good board member really holds the CEO to account and tries to ensure they have a fiduciary responsibility to make sure the organization does well. I think that's where the buck stops: making sure, to the extent you can from the outside, that the CEO is doing good work, especially in your area of expertise. If that's finance, for example, you might say, "Oh, with this number, the budget looks a lot higher this year. Why are you making this purchase? Why is this happening?" You're checking the area you're good at and making sure the organization is moving forward in a solid way. A few hours every quarter to half a year for some meetings, and then spending any time you can to look at different documents and ensure the organization is going in the right direction.

SPENCER: In my experience being on boards, talking to board members, etc., I've kind of seen four different types of board members. The way I'd break it down is there's the Big Shot board members that tend to be famous people. They're there really for name recognition, and they usually don't do anything, or maybe they'll come to a few meetings a year. So that's one type. Then there's the funding board members. Their job is to bring in money for the organization. They might be networking, calling rich people they know, or what have you, schmoozing. That's a second type. Obviously, that's a very specific skill set that often involves a strong network, knowing a lot of wealthy people, that kind of thing. Then there's the expert board member who's bringing a particular skill. It could be an expertise in decision making, but it could be more specific expertise related to the organization's ultimate mission. Maybe they're an expert in a certain type of science that's relevant to the mission of the organization. The last type, which tends to be more junior board members with less experience, would be board members willing to put in a lot of time. They become helpers to the organization with whatever it needs help with. They might be working a lot more hours, and that's part of the pitch. They're not bringing deep expertise on a particular topic, funding, or brand name, but they're going to put in real effort and help the CEO, help the head of the board with whatever challenges the organization has. I would just say, even if you're not one of the first three types, you could still potentially add a lot of value. Oftentimes, there's work to be done, and the board needs it. One person willing to put in a lot of hours.

DEVON: Yeah, that sounds right. I think some of those are more advisors. The board members hold votes for the organization, so they can change course. They could fire the CEO if they get a majority. There is a trade-off; getting deep expertise is really good, but if they're not value aligned for whatever reason, let's say they're really good at science, but you need science for a particular purpose, and they don't hold that purpose, it can be costly. Sometimes you want people to be advisors; they're essentially board members, but they don't hold the official voting rights. It's hard to hit some weird balance; you want people to understand the mission, but you don't want them to be sycophantic. You don't want just people who say yes to whatever you say is right. You do generally want them to challenge you if you're going in the wrong direction. It's almost like not being a good friend, but somebody who really understands what you're trying to do and has the courage and understanding to tell you when you're off. As you said, there are these different archetypes, but you also want to have some level of alignment there; otherwise, things can go haywire.

SPENCER: So you've given a lot of useful tips in terms of thinking about how to have more impact in your career or by switching careers. How have these ideas affected you in your own career?

DEVON: Yeah, sure. So I think in some sense, the ideas that we've talked about and that are in the book are born out of my experience. I switched from the private sector myself when I was younger. I worked about a decade in software engineering and had very narrow financial goals to make a bunch of money. I thought once I do that, it'll be the holy land forever. I can go to the beach, retire, have drinks, and I'll be happy or something. Actually, when I hit those goals, I was very surprised to find a big hole inside of me open up and be like, "Holy shit. This isn't what I was aiming for at all. What I care about is something very different." So I started a very introspective period of my life, and through that, I started looking at NGOs as a possible source of changing this. I found that a few I looked for here in Germany were slow and not as quick as the private sector. My bias was that the cliché seemed to be a bit true. I was a bit lost for a while. But then I found the effective altruism movement, and there it was really the Goldilocks of impactful work. People were doing really impactful work, but they were doing it like the private sector — really fast, engaged, and making things happen. Over the course of the past eight years or so, in different organizations in the high-impact space, I've gathered these tools, and I try to bring them to bear in my work. As I said, I try to make myself replaceable and think about my counterfactuality in whatever role I'm in. We didn't talk much about donating today, but I donate a portion of my salary to highly effective charities. I'm on a couple of boards, so I try to use the different pillars to impact my own life and make sure that I have a good balance so that I'm having as much impact as I can have.

SPENCER: You mentioned that you kind of had this idea that when you make enough money, things will be grand, life is going to be excellent. But then you found that when you made that money, it wasn't like you expected. What was that gap between expectations and reality? What was your experience? Now you had the money that you wanted, what was lacking?

DEVON: Yeah, I think it has a real sense of meaning. I played a game with people recently where you have to say what you would do if you had a million dollars or something. People were like, "Oh, I would take off for five years, and I would do this and do that." I felt like this was my perception too, that if I had a bunch of money, everything would be good. Somehow I neglected all the other aspects of life. What was really missing was a sense of meaning. I guess in some sense, money isn't meaningful, but it had meaning in so far as it was a goal I was aiming at and it wasn't achieved. Anytime you have a goal and you haven't achieved it, you can derive meaning from that. For me, that was really a lost cause after this because I didn't know what to aim at anymore, and I felt like I was floating in the universe without a purpose. It took a real discovery process for me to be like, "Okay, here are things that I care about. What philosophical commitments am I bound to? What do I think is true? What are my values?" I hadn't really called that into question before that. I had read a lot of philosophy, but it was always kind of high level and curious, not really touching my inner values, in a sense, it was just a fun puzzle to solve, and then I really connected to what I cared about during this time. I've been on this trajectory of working for high-impact organizations ever since.

SPENCER: Yeah, maybe one way to think about it is that having money removes a lot of constraints, and those constraints are important. They get removed, but it doesn't tell you what to do.

DEVON: Yeah, it's a very privileged position to be in, for sure, but it definitely wasn't easy for me. It wasn't like, "Woohoo, I made it," or something like this; that's quite the opposite. It creates a whole new set of problems.

SPENCER: Yeah, it also reminds us that to derive meaning is about moving towards something. It's not the end state. It's not, "Oh, I did this. I achieved this. Therefore I have meaning for the rest of my life." Usually, you have to be doing something, moving towards something. It's the process that generally gives meaning rather than the destination.

DEVON: I think that's right. So that process, combined with me understanding my values a lot more, has been really fruitful for me. I should say, not even just in terms of impact, but working with really value-aligned people. When I worked in the private sector, the programmer next to me had a totally different set of values and a really different set of things they care about. I had colleagues who were my friends, but I didn't have this deep resonance with a lot of them. With people in the high-impact space, wow, everybody is working towards the same goal. They care about the things you care about with a high degree of overlap. That's really satisfying for you, too, irrespective of the meaning. That's another sense of meaning, the friendships and people that you meet who care about the same things you do, which is hard to find in general outside of that, at least for me.

SPENCER: Yeah, people are so much of what brings meaning to life.

DEVON: Yeah.

So for those who want to go deeper, where can they find more of your work?

DEVON: As I said, I'm releasing a book next week. It's called The High Impact Professionals Playbook. You can find it at highimpactprofessionals.org/book. It'll be on Amazon as well. Also, the organization I co-founded, High Impact Professionals, has a couple of great programs that you can look into if you're wanting to make this switch. Otherwise, you can email me at devon@highimpactprofessionals.org. I'd be happy to chat with you if you have any questions about making the career switch or any of the other things we talked about today.

SPENCER: Devon, thanks so much for coming on the Clearer Thinking Podcast.

DEVON: Thanks for having me, Spencer. It was great.