most of the impact is achieved by a few, very impactful people could also make the people who perceive themselves as having potential for high impact particularly vulnerable, since the gap between their intrinsic value or self-worth and their instrumental value would seem even wider.
Suppose that all people in the world are allocated only two characteristics over which they have (almost) no control: country of residence and income distribution within that country. Assume further that there is no migration. We show that more than one-half of variability in income of world population classified according to their household per capita in 1% income groups (by country) is accounted for by these two characteristics. The role of effort or luck cannot play a large role in explaining the global distribution of income.
This has obvious implications how much people can realistically earn to give, but also suggests that other forms of impact, like social impact, might be mostly outside people’s control. This is good reason to not be too hard on oneself for not achieving more, and not compare yourself to people like Bill Gates.
Not sure if relevant to what you’re saying, but there’s this very interesting paper that shows:
This has obvious implications how much people can realistically earn to give, but also suggests that other forms of impact, like social impact, might be mostly outside people’s control. This is good reason to not be too hard on oneself for not achieving more, and not compare yourself to people like Bill Gates.
This blog post “Why not give 90%?” also seems relevant.