The simple question that could change your career

Devon Fritz had his midlife crisis a little early. 

He spent his 20s writing tax software, staying on track to hit all the life targets he’d set for himself: house, kids, financial security. And then, one day, he did the math and projected forward what the next 20 years of his life would look like. But instead of relief, “I had this weird feeling that I’d totally missed the target,” he told me recently. 

“I looked around at my colleagues, who kind of felt stuck in this place,” he said. “They had gotten to this cushy job where things were good, pay was good, benefits were good, but nobody seemed happy.”

This might sound familiar. Who among us hasn’t had the occasional crisis of meaning, perhaps mentally scored to the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime”? (The last part might just be me.) But most of us shake off those existential doubts and press on, for better or for worse. 

Devon Fritz, however, is not like you or me. Searching for a more meaningful life and career, he tried volunteering with refugee-aid groups in Germany during the 2015 migrant crisis — only to be discouraged by how slow, unresponsive, and ineffective he found the nonprofit world. 

Eventually, at a conference in Oxford, England, he discovered effective altruism, or EA. EA is built on the idea that we should use rigorous evidence and cost-benefit analysis to do the most good possible, very much including how we donate to charity. A dollar to one organization might save a life; a dollar to another might buy a commemorative tote bag. EA takes that gap in impact seriously and follows the math wherever it leads, always searching for the donation or the act that can create the most measurable positive impact, especially in terms of lives saved. 

The idea clicked with Fritz, and over the next several years, he rebuilt his career around a single, very EA-inflected question: How can you build a career that really matters? The result is his book The High-Impact Professional’s Playbook, the manual Fritz says he wished he’d had during his early existential crisis. The book lays out concrete paths through which a person with a regular job can actually create outsized positive impact on the world. 

What follows are five of the most useful ideas from it. And while Fritz’s framework comes out of effective altruism — which, with all its hyper-rationality, can sometimes seem cold or weird to outsiders — he argues that the lessons have value for everyone.

“Being impactful — in its best form — doesn’t tell you what to do,” he told me. “It just says do stuff. Figure out what’s good, and do something that’s really good.” 

Next best may be better than best

The intellectual spine of Fritz’s book is a concept called “counterfactuality,” which, I’ll admit, may make you want to stop reading now. But while it’s a 22-point word in Scrabble, counterfactuality is actually pretty simple. For any action meant to do good, ask yourself: What would have happened if I hadn’t done it? If the honest answer is “basically the same thing,” your actual impact is smaller than you think.

Haindavi Kandarpa, one of the case studies in Fritz’s book, was at Boston Consulting Group working on public health and education projects in India and Bangladesh. That sounds both important and good, but when Kandarpa asked the counterfactual question about her own role, the answer was devastating: Nothing would really change. If she wasn’t doing it, someone equally competent would have taken her slot and done roughly the same work. That realization led her to leave for a charity startup incubator.

A lot of the standard advice about doing good falters when faced with the counterfactual. If 500 people apply for a job at an elite nonprofit and one gets it, the actual impact of the hire is the often-small gap between them and the closet runner-up. Fritz’s paradoxical conclusion is that you can have more counterfactual impact in obscure places nobody is looking — like the charity ranked fifth on the effectiveness list, not first. That can be hard to hear, especially for high performers used to competing for every top prize, but the status hit is worth it for the sake of actually making a difference.

It’s not just what you do — it’s what you do with your money

Unless you’re a full-time volunteer or are extremely bad at salary negotiation, you get money for your work. And what you do with that money can be just as impactful as what you did to get it.

According to a 2024 GiveWell analysis cited in his book, you can statistically save one human life if you give just $3,000 — provided it’s to the most effective charity. Switching just 10 percent of your charitable giving from a typical charity to an evidence-backed one can help up to 100 times more people or animals, all for the same cost. That is a life-saving impact.

This is the move with the lowest barrier to entry in the entire book, and the one most influenced by effective altruism. You don’t have to quit your job, move countries, or learn a new skillset. You keep doing what you’re doing but write the check — or, better, set up a recurring transfer — to an organization on a credible evaluator’s list. (GiveWell is a great place to begin.) You can start at 1 percent of income and see how it feels.

Your workplace is a lever

Most people don’t think of their workplace as something they can change. But if you have any influence over procurement, hiring, 401(k) match programs, charitable giving policies, or the company’s public positions, you have access to budgets and decisions that could dwarf what you can do on your own. 

A mid-level manager who convinces their company to enroll in a workplace-giving program that defaults to effective charities can route more money in a single policy change than they could personally donate over a decade.

Nonprofits desperately need people who know how things work

The most consistently surprising path in Fritz’s book is trusteeship and advisory work. Charities and NGOs are often filled with well-meaning people who desperately want to do good, Fritz told me, but “they don’t have anybody even thinking” about quotidian details like finance. Luciana Vilar, another case study in the book, spent years in corporate finance before joining two nonprofit boards and was routinely the only person in the room who knew how to build a real budget.

If you are a competent finance person, lawyer, HR professional, or operations manager — which includes basically anyone who has worked inside a functioning company — you probably have skills that even well-funded nonprofits are desperate for. Giving few hours of your week to board or advisory time can unlock capacity an organization can’t buy, and it doesn’t require a career switch.

Your network has more leverage than you think

Fritz’s most striking claim is that the most time-efficient path to making a difference isn’t your career or your donations; it’s the people you already know. 

If an effective but under-resourced charity is trying to fill a role, and you spend an hour emailing the five people in your network who’d be a good fit, and one gets hired, the counterfactual math of what you’ve done is absurdly high. And it didn’t require you to change jobs or write a check. All you had to do was send some emails. 

It’s the path Fritz himself has taken, starting High Impact Professionals, which has placed dozens of mid-career people into higher-impact roles, all while rigorously measuring its own counterfactual impact. (When a candidate in the network takes a job, they ask the employer how good the next-best candidate was. When it’s very close, they count less impact.)

The same network effects can work with donations. Fritz describes people raising $1,000 or more by posting on social media a few weeks before their birthday, asking friends to donate to an effective charity instead of sending a gift. A lot of “how can I make a difference” agonizing is really about not wanting to look at the lever that’s already in your hand.

I’ve talked to enough people lately, including myself in the mirror, to know that low-grade despair is becoming our default setting. The problems of the world feel too large, individual action feels too small, and it can feel like the honest move is to just tend your garden. But when I pushed Fritz on this, he gave me an answer I keep coming back to. “There are big problems,” he acknowledged. “But that means it’s a great time to jump in and try to solve them.” 

That can sound naive — but it’s also right. A world without problems wouldn’t need any of us. The world we actually have needs all the help it can get, and the bar for being useful in it is lower than we think.