Benjamin Todd

In your first couple of jobs, it's rare to have a big impact, and typically gaining career capital should be a greater priority.

Here are some common routes to gaining career capital, which can help you get ideas for next steps.

Working with organisations or people that have a reputation for high performance in your field.

We often highlight jobs in technology start-ups or top AI labs, but you can find good teams and organisations in any sector.

Undertaking certain graduate studies, especially subjects relevant to our priority paths like economics, machine learning or synthetic biology, that provide good backup options outside of academia.

taking entry routes into policy careers, such as certain congressional staffer positions, joining a congressional campaign, or working in certain executive branch positions.

Doing jobs that build useful skills for working on a pressing problem and also provide good backup options, such as management, software engineering, data science, information security, knowledge of China or other emerging economies, or marketing.

Taking opportunities that allow you to achieve anything impressive, for example, founding an organization, anything where you might excel or reach the top of a field.

And if you're fortunate enough to do something with significant positive impact in the next five years, that can often be a great choice.

Not only is it impressive, but it also gives you connections and skills that are highly relevant to solving the problem you're working on.

While career capital is usually the top priority in your first couple of jobs, after that it becomes difficult to know how much to prioritise career capital versus impact.

It depends on the specific opportunities in question.

Likewise, the question of how much to prioritise specialist versus transferable career capital depends on the circumstances.

There are also lots of ways to gain career capital within your existing job, which we cover in Appendix 2.

Everyone says it's important to find a job you're good at, but no one tells you how.

The standard advice is to think about it for weeks and weeks until you discover your talent.

To help, career advisors give you quizzes about your interests and preferences.

Others recommend you go on a gap year, reflect deeply, imagine different options, and try to figure out what truly motivates you.

But as we saw in the last chapter, becoming really good at most things takes decades of practice.

So to a large degree, your abilities are built rather than discovered.