Counterfactual Thinking
Imagine you have two paths for your career, and you must choose only one to follow today. One path leads to a job where you might help five people directly, while the other path could help fifty people indirectly over time. How do you decide which choice creates the most good for the world in the long run? This question sits at the very heart of how we think about our impact on future generations. We must look past the obvious results to see the hidden outcomes of our personal career choices.
Understanding the Hidden Path
To make the best decision, you need to use counterfactual thinking to compare different versions of your future. This process involves asking what would happen if you did not take a specific job or career path. If you take a job, you must consider the good you do, but also the good someone else might have done in that same role. If another person would have achieved the exact same positive impact without your help, your own net contribution to the world is actually quite small. You are simply filling a space that would have been filled by someone else.
Key term: Counterfactual thinking — the mental process of imagining how the world would look if a specific event or choice had not occurred.
Think of this like a busy bridge that only allows one person to cross at a time to reach a village. If you decide to cross the bridge to deliver food, you might help the villagers, but you must ask who else would have crossed if you had stayed home. If a talented chef was waiting to cross, they might have brought better food and helped more people than you could. By taking the spot on the bridge, you might actually prevent a greater amount of good from reaching the people in need. You must account for the person you displace when you choose your own path.
Calculating Your True Impact
When you evaluate your career, you should consider the net value added by your presence in a role. This requires you to look at the total benefit created by your work and subtract the benefit that would have occurred without you. This calculation helps you find areas where your specific skills are truly needed, rather than just choosing a role that feels good in the moment. When you focus on areas where you can provide unique value, you increase the total amount of good that enters the world.
To help you organize your thoughts, consider these three factors when you evaluate potential career paths:
- The total positive impact created by the role is the sum of all benefits provided to society through your daily labor and decisions.
- The counterfactual impact is the amount of good that would have happened anyway if you chose a different path or stayed home.
- The net contribution is the difference between your total impact and the counterfactual impact, representing your unique value added to the world.
By focusing on the net contribution, you avoid the trap of thinking that any job helping people is automatically the best choice. Some roles are highly competitive, meaning that if you do not take the job, someone else will likely do the work just as well. Other roles have a shortage of talent, meaning your presence fills a vital gap that would otherwise remain empty. This distinction is the difference between having a positive impact and having the most positive impact possible for the future.
| Career Type | Talent Supply | Your Net Impact | Why it Matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Saturated | High | Low | Another person fills the role easily |
| Balanced | Medium | Moderate | Your skills are useful but common |
| Underserved | Low | High | You fill a critical, empty gap |
This table shows how the supply of talent affects your net impact in different career fields. When you choose a path with high talent supply, you might feel like you are doing good, but you are not necessarily increasing the total amount of good in the world. When you choose a path with low talent supply, your presence makes a much larger difference because you are providing something that is currently missing. Choosing to work in underserved areas is a powerful way to ensure your efforts create a lasting, positive change for all future generations.
True impact is found by subtracting the good that would have happened anyway from the total good created by your specific choices.
The next Station introduces combining scale and tractability, which determines how you can maximize the net impact of your career choices.