Benjamin Todd

You might be able to do more good as a bureaucrat than a charity worker, and many conventional approaches to making the world a better place don't actually work.

We've also come up with more research-backed and hopefully better ways to approach age-old questions like how to figure out what you're good at and how to be more successful.

One of the most important things we've learned is that if lots of people already work on an issue, the best opportunities to help are more likely to have already been taken.

But that means the most common and popular issues to work on, like health and education in rich countries, are precisely not the ones where you can have the biggest impact.

Instead, you need to find something more unconventional.

At the same time, we found real ways to help with important neglected problems.

For instance, by focusing on the world's poorest people, it's really possible to save hundreds of lives while doing work you enjoy too.

We've even found that our generation faces issues that could affect the entire future of civilization, and that relatively few people focus on them.

This includes issues such as pandemics even worse than COVID-19, and the creation of smarter-than-human AI, which we've been recommending people work on since 2014.

As of today, thousands of people have significantly changed their career plans based on our advice.

Some of them are researching ways to prevent the next pandemic.

Some are working on neglected areas of government policy.

Some are developing groundbreaking technology.

And others have used our research to figure out their own paths.

How to use this guide Here's what we'll cover.

1.

What makes for a dream job?

2.

Can one person make a difference?

3.