Benjamin Todd

It takes time and there's a lot to learn, but it's hard to imagine anything more interesting or more important.

Apply this to your own career.

You don't need to figure out which global problems you want to focus on right at the start of your career.

Early on, the top priority is to explore to figure out what you're good at and to build valuable skills.

It's common to not directly tackle the problems you think are most pressing for many years.

However, it is useful to at least have a rough idea of which problems you'd like to work on in the future, since this can greatly affect which kinds of skills seem most useful to build.

For instance, if you guess that reducing risks from AI is in your shortlist, that would suggest gaining some pretty different skills and experience to global health, though some skills are useful in both, such as management.

So even if you're right at the start of your career, we'd suggest spending at least a couple of days thinking about this question.

Here's an exercise.

1.

Using the resources above, write down the three global problems that you think are most pressing for you to work on.

Your personal list will depend on your values, empirical assumptions, and personal fit with the areas.

And two, what are you most uncertain about with respect to your list?

How might you learn more about those questions?

For example, is there something you could read?

Someone you could talk to?

You can find summaries of our evaluations of different problem areas in Appendix 9 and our complete and up-to-date evaluations at adk.link.com.

This list of problems is just a starting point.

The next step is to find concrete career options that will make a difference within the area, which we cover in the next chapter, and then to find an option with excellent personal fit, which we cover in Chapter 8.

Chapter 6.