Benjamin Todd

Here's how to choose an area to focus on.

If you want to make a difference with your career, one place to start is to ask which global problems most need attention.

Should you work on education, climate change, poverty or something else?

The standard advice is to do whatever most interests you, and most people seem to end up working on whichever social problem first grabs their attention.

That's exactly what I, Benjamin, did.

At age 19, I was most interested in climate change.

However, my focus on climate change wasn't the result of a careful comparison of the pros and cons of working on different problems.

Rather, I'd happened to read about it and found it engaging because it was science-y and I was geeky.

The problem with this approach is that you might happen to stumble across an area that's just not that big, important, or easy to make progress on.

You're also much more likely to stumble across the problems that already receive the most attention, which makes them lower impact.

So how can you avoid these mistakes and do more good?

We've developed three questions to ask yourself to work out which social problems are most urgent, where an extra year of work will have the greatest impact.

It's based on work by Open Philanthropy, a foundation with billions of dollars of committed funds, and the, modestly named, Global Priorities Institute, a research group at Oxford.

You can use these steps to compare areas you could enter, for example, pandemic prevention, risk from AI, or global health.

Or if you're already committed to an area, you can compare projects within that area, for example, research into malaria or HIV.

1.

Is this problem large in scale?

We tend to assess the importance of different social problems using our intuition, that is, what seems important on a gut level.

For instance, in 2005, the BBC wrote, The nuclear power stations will all be switched off in a few years.

How can we keep Britain's lights on?