Benjamin Todd

You can see our list of the world's most pressing problems in Appendix 9.

But that's just our list.

What matters for your career is your personal list.

The assessment of problems greatly depends on value judgments and debatable empirical questions, and you might not share our answers.

There are a number of key ways in which we might be wrong.

Personal fit is also vital, and so are the particular opportunities you can find.

We don't think everyone should work on the number one problem.

If you're a great fit for an area, you might have over ten times as much impact working there as you would in one that doesn't motivate you, so this could easily change your personal ranking.

Just remember, there are many ways to help solve each problem, so it's often easier than it first seems to find work you enjoy that helps with problems you might not have yet considered working on.

Moreover, it's easier to develop new passions than most people expect.

Despite all the uncertainties, your choice of problem might be the single biggest factor determining your impact.

If we rated global problems in terms of how pressing they are, we might intuitively expect them to look like this.

Here's a graph with problems in order of impact arranged on the x-axis and expected impact on the y-axis, and they increase smoothly and gradually.

Some problems are more pressing than others, but most are pretty good.

But instead, we've found that it looks more like this.

Here's the same graph, but now the problems are so low in impact for most of the x-axis that you can hardly see them, and then suddenly they shoot up at the end.

Some problems are far higher impact than others, because they can differ by 10 or 100 times in terms of how big, neglected and solvable they are, as well as your degree of personal fit.

So getting this decision right could mean you achieve over 100 times as much with your career.

If there's one lesson we draw from all we've covered, it's this.

If you want to do good in the world, it's worth at some point really taking the time to learn about different global problems and how you might contribute to them.