Benjamin Todd

Which Jobs Help People the Most?

Many people think of Superman as a hero, but he may be the greatest example of underutilized talent in all of fiction.

It was a blunder to spend his life fighting crime one case at a time.

If he'd thought a little more creatively, he could have done far more good.

How about delivering vaccines to everyone in the world at super speed?

That would have eradicated most infectious disease, saving hundreds of millions of lives.

Here we'll argue that a lot of people who want to make a difference with their career fall into the same trap as Superman.

College graduates imagine becoming doctors or teachers, but these may not be the best fit for their particular skills.

And like Superman fighting crime, these paths are often limited in the amount they could potentially contribute to solving a problem.

In contrast, Nobel Prize winner Karl Landsteiner discovered blood groups enabling hundreds of millions of life-saving operations.

He would have never been able to carry out that many surgeries himself.

Below, we'll introduce five ways you could use your career to help tackle the social problems you want to help work on, which we identified in the previous chapter.

The five ways are Earning to Give, Communication, Research, Government and Policy, and Organisation Building.

We'll make concrete recommendations on how to pursue each approach.

To get even more ideas, take a look at the summaries of our career reviews in Appendix 8.

1.

Earning to Give

Would Elton John have done more good if he'd worked at a small non-profit?

We don't normally think of becoming a rock star as a path to doing good.

Quite apart from the value of his music, Elton John has saved the lives of thousands of people by reducing the spread of HIV AIDS.