Impact Academy is a non-profit organization that enables people to become world-class leaders, thinkers, and doers who are using their careers and character to solve our most pressing problems and create the best possible future.
I also work as an impact-driven and truth-seeking coach for people who are trying to do the most good.
I’m also a medical doctor, author, and former visiting researcher (biosecurity) at Stanford.
Thanks for the post! I’ve two questions:
Have you been concerned with how having one paid member of your Org could affect the volunteerism of the rest of the members? E.g. that there will arise a hierarchy which will keep “regular” members from taking on certain type of projects or feel as if they have less of a say in various decisions.
Could you elaborate on the metrics you intend to use? E.g. by “the funnel of 80k” do you then mean their significant plan changes or how many of your members receive personal coaching from them? Also, how do you track the donations made to GWWC/EA Funds?
That seems like some good takeaways. However, I’d expect that other groups (with more resources) can come up with more impactful projects than those you’ll find in the project ideas.
As for your three-dimensional tool:
How do you determine who the leader of a given activity should be? Also, I think it could be useful to include worst-case scenario/failure-mode thinking.
One shouldn’t include failure-mode thinking in the brainstorming part. However, while defining the project (prior to voting) it can be useful to talk about the failure-modes. E.g. prior to voting on our project on how to offset one’s climate impact we specified that we should be careful about letting it develop into a project which also focused on how people can offset the animal suffering they induce.
Thanks for the resources!
3. I’m aware of the cluelessness but I don’t think that we as a community act as if we’re clueless. At least, we prioritize a relatively narrow set of paths (e.g. 80K’s priority paths) compared to all of the possible paths out there.
4. Very interesting. Clearly, others have thought much more about the complexity of this issue than me. Nuno’s post was rather insightful and the examples used made Shapley Values seem more intuitive to me than counterfactual impact. However, the discussions in the comments made it less obvious that Shapley Values is what we should use going forward. Do you use Shapley values when thinking about your personal impact contribution?
Yes, that’s why I find my initial reasoning unnuanced. Upon slightly further reflection, it seems obvious that his wealth and dedication have enabled a lot of good initiatives and I frequently see initiatives crediting Gates.
However, would you break that impact further down? Some quick approaches that I can think of:
i) Simply use the heuristic of money pledged ~ impact (“wow, that’s a lot of money. That has to be super impactful”.)
ii) Look into the causes supported in order to adjust the donations to the impact of actual causes supported.
iii) Go with the heuristic of if we have repeatedly heard someone (or something) being credited for his/her impact, then he/she must be very impactful.
Thanks for writing this! I’m currently writing a similar blog post. In particular, I benefitted from your brief, yet useful overview of the academic landscape of coaching.
Hi Misha!
Thanks so much for bringing this up (also, I agree that Kuhn’s post is excellent). In particular, I appreciated his emphasis on the importance of caring a lot about the coachee and their progress.
This does indeed sound like a solid 80⁄20 option. In fact, Henning Bartsch (co-author of this post) and Paul Rohde (who is now one of the best coaches I know) started their journey by doing peer coaching after Paul had tried professional coaching and are still doing it five years later.
With that said, a trained coach can have substantial object-level expertise (e.g., how to do deliberate practice, eliciting dysfunctional beliefs, and setting good goals) and process-level expertise (e.g., asking good questions, giving the right emotional support, and motivate people to take action).
One concrete opportunity for you to level up your 80⁄20 solution might be for one or both of you to experiment with professional coaching for 2-3 months and then integrate what you learn in your one-on-ones. Alternatively, you can also consider checking out this post on an algorithm for giving advice. It was before I knew much about coaching and certainly highly imperfect but perhaps it’s useful.
Interesting. What kind of effects are people experiencing as a consequence of this? Also, what’s the typical duration?
I think this link needs to be updated now that this is a post rather than a doc?
Thanks for noticing!
That spreadsheet seems to be missing the vast majority of the info from the doc that it’s based on. Not sure why. I remember seeing a spreadsheet version that had more info.
Wow! Thanks for pointing this out. Apparently, someone recently removed 90% of all info from the spreadsheet. I just restored the newest version so now that spreadsheet is more updated than the doc. Hope that the original owner of the doc is okay with this!
Thanks for sharing Jan. I knew that coaching had an exceptional impact on you but this description puts it in a completely new light: 5x increase in your (expected) lifetime impact and 2x in productivity indicates an exceptional cost-effective intervention considering that you (as far as I know) perhaps invested around 500-1000 hours in total on this (when including personal development more broadly).
Super inspiring—thanks for sharing!
Solid. What about the duration of each session? Is it one hour?
Thanks for sharing this Max!
-I agree. We live in a time where people are seeking a lot of validation and just want to be told what to do. It’s super important to encourage them to take agency and not just defer completely to others.
-Excellent point. If people are in a challenged state, I also see the priority as changing their state. E.g., increase their hope, agency, and light-heartedness.
-Reasoning transparency is great. Especially, because people will otherwise be inclined to overanchor on the specific suggestion instead of the consideration that led to the specific consideration.
Especially with career decisions. I actually think that it can be good to start out with some noticeable gesture that makes people realize this clearly and use language like “this is my impression” or “my tentative judgment call is”.
Thank you for sharing! It seems pragmatic and I find it likely that it’ll make my reading more focused and productive—I’ll definitely try it out.