In this chapter, we’ll dive into how to choose a cause area to focus on. Taking some time to explore different cause areas and think about where you could make a real impact is a great starting point. It not only helps narrow down your options to those that can truly make a difference, but it can also be really inspiring and motivating. In the next chapter, we’ll dig into some of the most promising and popular cause areas out there.
What is a cause area?
Cause: When we use the term cause, we usually refer to a specific altruistic goal that you can contribute to (with money, work, etc.) For example, this can be helping build an orphanage in a particular location or eradicating a disease.
Cause Area: Cause areas are relatively informal and wide classifications of causes. It can be useful to talk about cause areas because the large amount of specific causes within a cause area can have some similarities. Common examples of cause areas are: Climate change, global health and development, animal suffering, prevention of catastrophic risk, etc.
Thinking about cause areas
Usually, when people think about their career, they start by thinking about very specific jobs or roles: “Should I be a doctor? Or a lawyer? Or maybe work in an NGO in Africa?” Effectively, this means thinking first about the tools or skills in your career and only later figuring out where they can be applied to a potential impact. This approach is so common we sometimes don’t even notice that it’s only one specific way of thinking. It’s definitely a valid approach and can be useful in some cases, but there are many times when we suggest looking at things from a different perspective.
If our goal is to have a career with a big positive impact, it often makes more sense to start by figuring out where that impact could be and then working backward to find which skills or roles could best help in that area.
Once we identify causes that feel especially important, we can start asking more targeted questions to find specific roles: Are organizations in this space funding-constrained? Is there a need for better advocacy? Or maybe there aren’t many organizations tackling this issue yet, so the cause needs more people to step in as entrepreneurs.
Moreover, when starting to think about career options, the sheer number of possible directions is overwhelming. The breadth, complexity and importance of the decision can make it difficult to think about, and can cause some people to have trouble coming to any decision – which doesn’t help anyone move forward.
In these cases, it helps to have some way of ruling out many options, or being able to clearly say that some options are (probably) worse than others. Cause areas are great way to start this process. Examples of cause areas can include alleviating global poverty, improving pandemic preparedness, mitigating climate change, fighting factory farming, and many more. They’re general enough and few enough that they’re manageable and they’re an important aspect of career decision-making.
The most important decision (sometimes)
Depending on your morals and values (as we discussed in the last chapter) it’s very possible that deciding which cause area to work on is the single most important decision affecting the impact your career will have.
While we generally don’t have a precise way of measuring the exact impact of our careers, it’s still clear that the differences between cause areas can be enormous. In these cases, looking into cause areas that you don’t believe in may be a waste of your time.
It may also be relevant to think about the effects it would have on your life: How do you feel about dedicating the next few (or many) years of your life to alleviating poverty? Or to helping prepare for global catastrophic risks? Or to democratizing access to mental health? Is this something you would be proud and motivated to work on, even when it becomes hard? Reading more about this cause area, are there opportunities for you to use your skills to make a difference?
As we discussed previously, our initial reaction and intuition can be misleading so we need to be cautious. But meaningful impact usually requires hard work over a long period of time, which is very difficult to do without being excited about the goals and the overall cause.
Imperfect categories
As you consider different cause areas, remember that you’re ultimately deciding on a specific path or opportunity within a cause area. Depending on your skills, interests, location, and other factors, the best opportunity for you may not be within the “most promising” cause area overall.
Think of it like shopping for a house: you might start with a few neighborhoods you like, and some you can rule out quickly if they’re out of budget or don’t fit your lifestyle. But it would be a mistake to pick a neighborhood and ignore all others completely. There’s a good chance the perfect house for you could be in a slightly less ideal area, especially if you’re still figuring out which neighborhoods fit you best.
When it comes to cause areas, ask yourself if each cause area seems:
- Highly promising: I want to dive into the opportunities here.
- Potentially promising: Other cause areas might be more impactful, but I could still find a great opportunity here.
- Probably not relevant: I don’t see a realistic chance of finding something here as impactful as in other areas, so I can skip it.
As an example, let’s take a look at the prevention of global catastrophic risks as a cause area. This cause area includes a wide variety risks we can help prevent, such as nuclear, biological, artificial intelligence, and others. It has many different roles and skill sets that are needed (research, advocacy, grantmaking, etc.) and an impressive number of organizations, each with their own methodology and outlook on how to best prevent these risks.
It’s clear that within a big cause area, you’ll find opportunities that are both very exciting and others that might not resonate as strongly.
There’s no right number of cause areas to include in each category. You might find one cause area that stands out as incredibly promising while others feel less relevant – or you might have a few that you want to explore more closely.
Cause neutral careers
Some careers can benefit many cause areas. If you’re a lawyer, fundraiser, or journalist, you can use your skill to help most cause areas. Other careers or roles, for example many quantitative roles, consulting roles, or roles in research, can provide you with career capital that is then useful for getting impactful roles in a wide range of industries. If you end up on this sort of path, thinking about the different cause areas will be most relevant when you do start to specialize in some area.
This is also an important point to consider when thinking about the different opportunities to make an impact within each cause area. In many cases, they’re more diverse than you might initially realize. Often people will automatically equate a cause area with one profession that is relevant to it. For example, “If I want to help lift people out of poverty I should become a development economist” or “If I want to fight climate change I should become a climate scientist.”
Though these intuitive roles are often good candidates to look into, they’re far from the only way to help. Depending on the field and your strengths, the obvious roles may be far less promising than other roles. When thinking through specific cause areas, we recommend looking at our career profiles page for more ideas about what career paths might be relevant for this cause. There will be more on this in the next chapter as well.
The ITN Framework
One common tool to compare cause areas is the ITN Framework, which stands for Importance, Tractability, and Neglectedness. ITN is a simple yet useful framework that aims to estimate the potential impactfulness of working in a cause area by assessing three factors:
- Importance: How much better would the world be if we made progress in this area? Does it address a big, pressing problem?
- Tractability: How solvable is this issue? Are there clear, effective ways to make progress?
- Neglectedness: How many people are already working on it? Is it very crowded or could it use more resources (e.g. time and money)?
The ITN framework isn’t perfect, but it’s a helpful way to start comparing different cause areas. And remember, your personal fit, skills, and enthusiasm are just as important when it comes to choosing a cause.
Next up, we’ll explore several promising cause areas where you can make a difference.
