Devon Fritz had his midlife crisis a little early.
He spent his 20s writing tax software, staying on track to achieve all the life goals he had set for himself: house, kids, financial security. And then one day, he did the math and projected what the next 20 years of his life would be like. But instead of relief, “I had the strange feeling that I had missed the mark,” he told me recently.
“I looked at my colleagues, who felt trapped in this place,” he said. “They had landed in this cushy job where things were good, the pay was good, the benefits were good, but no one seemed happy.”
This may sound familiar. Who among us hasn’t had some crisis of meaning, perhaps mentally attributed to Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime”? (That last part might just be me.) But most of us shake off those existential doubts and move on, for better or worse.
Devon Fritz, however, is not like you or me. Seeking 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.
Finally, 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, including largely how we give to charities. A dollar to an organization could save a life; a dollar to a dollar could buy a commemorative tote bag. EA takes that impact gap seriously and follows the calculations wherever it goes, always looking for the donation or act that can create the most measurable positive impact, especially in terms of lives saved.
The idea clicked with Fritz, and over the next few years he rebuilt his career around a single question, heavily influenced by EA: How can you build a career that really matters? The result is your book. The High Impact Professional’s Manualthe manual Fritz says he wishes he had had during his first existential crisis. The book outlines concrete paths through which a person with a regular job can truly create a huge positive impact on the world.
What follows are five of the most useful ideas that emerge from it. And while Fritz’s framework springs from effective altruism (which, for all its hyperrationality, can sometimes seem cold or strange to outsiders), he found that the lessons have value for everyone.
“Shocking, at its best, doesn’t tell you what to do,” he told me. “It just says: do things. Find out what’s good and do something that’s really good.”
The next best can be better than the best
The intellectual backbone of Fritz’s book is a concept called “counterfactuality,” which, I admit, may make you want to stop reading now. But while it’s a 22-point word in Scrabble, counterfactual is actually pretty simple. For any action intended to do good, ask yourself: What would have happened if I I hadn’t done it made? If the honest answer is “basically the same,” your actual impact is less 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 important and good, but when Kandarpa asked the counterfactual question about his own role, the answer was devastating: nothing would really change. If she weren’t doing it, someone equally competent would have taken her position and done roughly the same job. That realization led her to go to a charitable business incubator.
Lots of standard advice on how to make good mistakes when faced with the counterfactual. If 500 people apply for a job at an elite nonprofit and one gets it, the real hiring impact is the often small gap between them and second place. Fritz’s paradoxical conclusion is that greater counterfactual impact can be had in dark places that no one is looking at, like the charity that is fifth on the effectiveness list, not first. This may be difficult to hear, especially for high-performing players used to competing for all the top prizes, but the status achieved is worth it because it really makes a difference.
It’s not just about what you do, it’s about what you do with your money
Unless you are a full-time volunteer or extremely bad at salary negotiation, you will receive money for your work. And what you do with that money can have just as much impact as what you did to get it.
According to a 2024 GiveWell analysis cited in their book, you can statistically save one human life by donating just $3,000, as long as it’s to the most effective charity. Shifting just 10 percent of your charitable donations from a typical charity to one backed by evidence can help up to 100 times more people or animals, all for the same cost. That is a life-saving impact.
This is the movement 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 new skills. You continue doing what you’re doing, but write the check (or, better yet, set up a recurring transfer) to an organization on a credible reviewer’s list. (GiveWell is a great place to start.) You can start with 1 percent of your income and see how you feel.
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 company procurement, hiring, 401(k) programs, charitable giving policies, or public positions, you have access to budgets and decisions that could overshadow what you can do on your own.
A mid-level manager who convinces his company to enroll in a workplace giving program aimed at effective charities can allocate more money in a single policy change than he could personally donate over a decade.
Nonprofits Desperately Need People Who Know How Things Work
The most surprising path in Fritz’s book is that of guardianship and counseling. Charities and NGOs are often full of well-intentioned people who desperately want to do good, Fritz told me, but “they don’t have anyone even thinking” about everyday details like finances. 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 create a real budget.
If you are a competent financier, lawyer, human resources professional, or operations manager (which basically includes anyone who has worked inside a going concern), you probably have skills that even well-funded nonprofits are desperate for. Dedicating a few hours of your week to board or advisory time can unlock capabilities that an organization can’t buy and doesn’t require a career change.
Your network has more influence than you think
Fritz’s most surprising claim is that the most time-efficient path to making a difference is not your career or your donations; They are the people you already know.
If an effective but under-resourced charity is trying to fill a position, and you spend an hour emailing the five people in your network who would 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 sign a check. All you had to do was send a few emails.
It’s the path Fritz himself has taken in starting High Impact Professionals, which has placed dozens of mid-career people in higher-impact roles, while rigorously measuring his own counterfactual impact. (When a network candidate accepts 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 who raise $1,000 or more by posting on social media a few weeks before their birthday, asking their friends to donate to an effective charity instead of sending a gift. Much of the agonizing over “how can I make a difference” is actually 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 mild despair is becoming our default setting. The world’s problems seem too big, individual action seems too small, and it can seem like the honest decision is to simply tend the garden. But when I pressed Fritz on this, he gave me an answer that I keep coming back to. “There are big problems,” he acknowledged. “But that means it’s a good time to step in and try to resolve them.”
This may seem naive, but it is also correct. A world without problems would not need any of us. The world we really have needs all the help it can get, and the bar for being useful in it is lower than we think.