A good test might be: is it easier for you to double your own effectiveness on expectation or create 1 more EA just as thoughtful as effective as yourself on expectation? In both cases, you are increasing the total capacity of the EA movement by the same amount. In both cases, this capacity can be reinvested in recruiting further EAs, self-improvement of individual EAs, object-level EA projects, etc.
By this test, your TED talk looks very attractive compared to almost any self-improvement effort you could do, since it created hundreds or thousands of EA equivalents to you on expectation. The equivalent achievement of improving yourself by a factor of 100 or 1000 seems quite difficult… if you are spending 1⁄4 of your time and energy working towards your EA goals, for instance, you can only improve by a factor of 4 at most by getting yourself to work harder. (Working smarter is another story. In fact, this post you wrote just now could be considered advice on how to work smarter. In general I’m more optimistic about opportunities to work smarter than work harder, because working harder is unlikely to get you more than a 4x multiplier in most cases.)
A good test might be: is it easier for you to double your own effectiveness on expectation or create 1 more EA just as thoughtful as effective as yourself on expectation? In both cases, you are increasing the total capacity of the EA movement by the same amount. In both cases, this capacity can be reinvested in recruiting further EAs, self-improvement of individual EAs, object-level EA projects, etc.
By this test, your TED talk looks very attractive compared to almost any self-improvement effort you could do, since it created hundreds or thousands of EA equivalents to you on expectation. The equivalent achievement of improving yourself by a factor of 100 or 1000 seems quite difficult… if you are spending 1⁄4 of your time and energy working towards your EA goals, for instance, you can only improve by a factor of 4 at most by getting yourself to work harder. (Working smarter is another story. In fact, this post you wrote just now could be considered advice on how to work smarter. In general I’m more optimistic about opportunities to work smarter than work harder, because working harder is unlikely to get you more than a 4x multiplier in most cases.)