Benjamin Todd

It's easy to focus on hard aspects of career capital, like having a well-known employer, because they're concrete.

But the soft aspects of career capital, your skills, achievements, connections, and reputation, are equally important, if not more so.

The very best career capital comes from impressive achievements.

You can build these soft aspects of career capital in almost any job if you perform well.

Doing great work builds your reputation, and that allows you to make connections with other high achievers.

If you push yourself to do great work, then you'll probably learn more too.

This is why doing something less conventional like starting a new organization can sometimes be the best path for career capital.

If you succeed, it'll be impressive.

But even if you don't succeed, you'll learn a lot and meet interesting people.

Doing anything that will give you a concretely visible project that seems impressive can also be helpful, such as writing a successful blog or doing a project that appears in the media.

For someone who wants to make a difference, it can even be worth doing something that seems a bit random, if you're going to be great at it.

Earlier in the guide, we talked about how it's possible to have a big impact through communication, community building and donations.

This means that excelling at almost any path can set you up to have a big impact, since it'll give you connections, influence, money and credibility, which can be used to support pressing problems.

So if you want to build career capital, it's worth considering any area where you have a good fit, even if it doesn't seem like a good option in general.

Bodybuilding isn't usually how to advance your career, but Arnie made it work.

6.

Do what contributes.

When I, Benjamin, founded 80,000 Hours, we hadn't yet come up with the concept of career capital.

But if we had, it's likely I would have concluded working in finance would have been better career capital than starting a non-profit.

But I think that would have been a mistake.