It's easy to tell ahead of time that you can make an impact as a blogger or a startup founder or a non-profit leader? Hardly - those are all high-risk endeavors, especially in the digital domain: many smart bloggers with something great to say never reach a large audience; many even fail to a modest but interested audience.
I don't have subject matter knowledge (and hope to learn more) but intuitively having an outsized impact in a corporate setting seems more conjunctive, with being in the right place at the right time playing more of a role. Can you give some examples of people who have had outsized impacts in corporate settings, and how they did what they did?
Stability and consistency are the rewards of traditional, ordinary careers; and for many people those are excellent virtues. Make sure your clients understand this. Entrepreneurship, in particular, requires a certain degree of hubris. Society as a whole gains from that hubris, and in selected sectors and times and places the would-be entrepreneurs gain in expectation, but "How would I handle failure" should be a question that anyone embarking on such a path should sincerely ask themselves first".
Note that many of the people on my list have done what they've done on their spare time, while maintaining a stable job. We do raise awareness of the risks to clients who are thinking of deviating from conventional paths. See, for example, Stay mainstream until you have demonstrated success doing unusual stuff.
Non-tech entrepreneurship. And in the domain of non-profits, locally-oriented ones. They can't impact as many people, but impact is often greater and more immediate, and your impact is more immediately visible to yourself. For some people being able to closely observe their own impact is very motivating.
Yes, these are good examples. We've been thinking about non-tech entrepreneurship; have thought less about locally-oriented non-profits. Can you give an example of a locally-oriented nonprofit that's had an outsized impact? (Not a rhetorical question.)
In general, however, at a young age foundational skills and opening their minds are more important than any particular direction (though a particular cause/direction can be very motivating).
We encourage our advisees to develop broad knowledge; see for example our Core reading recommendations.
Whatever they seem to have closed their mind to without proper consideration, that's what you can target for each individual.
This is in line with what we're doing; we're working to communicate the pros and cons of embarking on different paths. For some advisees this may nudge them in less impactful directions, but we expect the overall trend to be in the direction of more impact, because of people's desire to make a difference.
Okay, good. It seemed like I was picking up a bit of silicon-valley-style-impact centrism, and I leapt on it maybe more than I should have.
Stay mainstream until you've demonstrated success in the unconventional is advice I've heard from many successful heterodox academics, so I absolutely believe it's excellent advice.
Harlem childrens' fund is a very local charity. It's promoting its ideas globally, but the actual work is going on locally. Any other sort of individual outreach/social-work-like charity tends to be local (think homeless shelter's women's she...
In How can Cognito Mentoring do the most good? I included a section on our potential social value. I want to flesh out what we hope to achieve.
Consider the following people:
Some of these accomplishments are more impressive than others, but all of them are impressive, and most of the people listed are quite young, and will plausible do more impressive things along similar lines as they get older.
Some common threads that I see in these people are:
Unconventionality isn't necessarily a path to success, and there are plenty of people who adopt unconventional paths and don't get much done at all, but when executed well, it's possible to pursue an unconventional path with relatively little risk and high potential upside.
We think that we can enable more people to engage in activities like the ones above. Many of those who are well-suited to them are already engaged in them. But there are others who have most of the relevant traits for whom there are only one or two limiting factors. Some ways in which we think that we can remove the limiting factors are as follows
According to student feedback we've had some success on the first two fronts. We're continuing such efforts, and are in the process of working on the latter two.
By moving people in the directions suggested above, we hope to tip more people into the high achieving pool that has the above as representative members. We expect that we can enable an average of one additional person per year to get into this achievement range, with the benefits accruing throughout their lives.
Concerning the feasibility of this: The number of people with the requisite traits is not very small. As above, the people on the list have in some cases achieved far out of proportion with their ability, so there are a fair number of people of the same ability level who don't. So far we've had a number of advisees who probably have similar characteristics to people on the list above at the same age. So it's not necessary to influence a huge number of people to succeed (though we're casting as wide a net as possible.)
Assuming the estimate here is correct, we get a lower bound on the social value generated by Cognito Mentoring. We have other sources of social value, which we touched on in our earlier post and might elaborate in later posts.