Whether you’ve got your whole career ahead of you or are looking to make a change, it seems to me you’ve got roughly four options:
Category I jobs: not that ambitious, not that idealistic
Category II jobs: ambitious, but not all that idealistic
Category III jobs: idealistic, but not all that ambitious
Category IV: idealistic and ambitious
Category I jobs: not that ambitious, not that idealistic
A class of influencers and marketeers, of lobbyists and managers, of consultants and corporate lawyers—all people who could go on strike and the world would be just fine. Remarkably enough, this group includes many men and women with impressive credentials and equally impressive salaries.
It was a Facebook employee who said,
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
There’s a striking correlation between the level of pay in a given industry and how moral or immoral we think it is.
Nothing wrong with having some savings and investments, of course. But at its core, this kind of thinking always seems a little sad to me. It means you’re chasing a form of freedom where you won’t have to lift a finger. The dream is to make the transition from office serf to person of independent means, so you can delegate all the annoying work and no longer have to contribute to society.
Category II jobs: ambitious, but not all that idealistic
These people want to reach the top, but use soulless indicators for success: a fancy title, fat salary, corner office, or other perks.
Category III jobs: idealistic, but not all that ambitious
... made up of people who’re idealistic, but not that ambitious. It’s a combination often seen in Gen Z—people born since 1996.
Awareness is at best a starting point, while for many activists, it seems to have become the end goal.
Category IV: idealistic and ambitious
My personal hero—someone I’ll come back to often in this book—the author and activist Thomas Clarkson.
Picture a window, said Overton, framing all the ideas taken seriously at a given point in time. These are the opinions you can voice at dinner parties without people giving you the side-eye. If you hold dear a conviction that lies outside this frame, you’ll promptly be dismissed as a nut or a fool. Politicians in particular have to stay inside the frame if they want to get reelected.
But then how do you change the world? If you have to stay inside the frame, how do you change the view? Overton wrote that the key is to shift the whole window.
To put it bluntly: awareness is overrated. The fact that people are aware of various injustices doesn’t mean they’ll act on that knowledge—on the contrary. We hold all kinds of opinions on all kinds of matters, but we generally do little with our viewpoints.
Learn to weep over spreadsheets
He applied the twenty-minute rule. “I often challenge myself in thinking: If I want to do this thing that I’m trying to do, how would I do it in twenty minutes?”
The philosopher Bertrand Russell once said.
“The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep.”
In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.
Coco Chanel, fashion designer
Charity Entrepreneurship is a program for entrepreneurs—entrepreneurs with moral ambition.
What do all these problems have in common? They’re sizable, they’re often super-solvable, and they’re sorely overlooked—the three S’s,
At Charity Entrepreneurship, you’re trained to score your highest possible VORP. To go where no one else is going. Every year, there’s a small army of idealists who can’t wait to start the new Tesla of charities. As soon as the school announces the year’s new causes on its website, thousands of prospective students from all over the world apply to attend. Following an extensive application process, a select group is invited to come to London. They’re given a two-month crash course, matched with a cofounder and a cause, and provided with modest seed capital.
You’ve got to be prepared to work incredibly hard. “You can set your own hours,” Joey says with a smile. “As long as it’s all of them.”
To this day, smallpox is the only human disease we’ve completely eradicated.
“Whenever I’m asked to name my feminist heroine,” writes the British feminist Helen Lewis, “I’m tempted to answer: the washing machine.”
“The rapid progress true science now makes,” wrote Benjamin Franklin back in 1780, “occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon.”
You know how we see people in the Dark Ages? That may well be how our great-grandchildren will look back on us.
Don’t start out by asking, “What’s my passion?” Ask instead, “How can I contribute most?” And then choose the role that suits you best.
The students at Oxford? They’d had enough of stodgy professors. There were demonstrations against something or other every week. A few years earlier, Malcolm X had paid a visit to the university. He’d made clear to students that they lived in “a time of extremism, a time of revolution.”
The best charities are fifty times (!) more effective than the median charity and a whopping 10,000 times more effective than the worst ones. Seems the economics of altruism is also subject to a power law, with at least 80 percent of results attained by just 20 percent of what we do.
Remember sitting in history, thinking: if I was alive then, I would’ve… You’re alive now. Whatever you’re doing is what you would’ve done.
~ David Slack, television writer and producer (b. 1972)
Your legacy is never one thing. Your legacy is every life you’ve touched, every person whose life was either moved or not. It’s every person you’ve harmed or helped. That’s your legacy.
~ Maya Angelou, author (1928–2014)
I’m a historian by training, and historians speak disdainfully of chronocentrism, the naive idea that the times you happen to live in also happen to be especially important. But I’m now convinced that our times are indeed unique and critically important, perhaps determining everything to come. Of the 117 billion people who’ve ever lived, we’re part of the 1 percent who can make a difference this century. We did nothing to deserve that role and we didn’t choose to be here, but let’s face it. We’re at a historic crossroads. The future hinges on what we do next.
