Benjamin Todd

That's what we'll cover in the next couple of chapters.

But first, let's clarify what we mean by making a difference.

We've been talking about lives saved so far, but that's not the only way to do good in the world.

What does it mean to make a difference?

Everyone talks about making a difference or changing the world or doing good, but few ever define what they mean.

So here's a definition.

Your social impact is given by the number of people whose lives you improve and how much you improve them over the long term.

This means you can increase your social impact in three ways.

One, by helping more people.

Two, by helping the same number of people to a greater extent.

And three, doing something which has benefits that last for a longer time.

We think the last option is especially important because many of our actions affect future generations.

For example, if you improve the quality of government decision-making, you might not see many quantifiable short-term results, but you will have solved lots of other problems over the long term.

There's a diagram here, two ways to have more social impact.

On the x-axis, we have number of people helped, and on the y-axis, we have degree of improvement.

Then we have a rectangle-shaped area between those axes, titled social impact, and we can see that we can increase the area of that rectangle by stretching it up the y-axis to increase the degree of improvement, or along the x-axis by helping more people.

There's more information about what it means to make a difference in Appendix 1.

So, how can you improve lives with your career?

In the next chapter, we'll cover how any college graduate can make a big impact in any job.

After that, we'll cover how to choose a job in which you can fulfill your potential for impact.