5 Ways to Build High Impact in Your Career (As Featured in Vox)

Action Steps to Build High Impact in Your Career

If you’ve ever sat down and contemplated your career and felt a quiet dread rather than excitement, you’re not alone. That feeling is often the first honest signal that a successful-looking career is missing something essential: measurable impact on the world.

Recently, our co-founder Devon Fritz was featured in Vox's Future Perfect section in a piece by Bryan Walsh titled "The simple question that could change your career.” 

The article draws on Devon's recently published book, The High-Impact Professional's Playbook, and lays out practical ideas that we talk about with the HIP community regularly. Walsh's reporting is worth reading in full, so we recommend reading his full Vox article. Below, we’ve added our complementary take on the ideas he surfaced, plus concrete steps you can take to build high impact in your career (if you haven’t noticed, we’re big on action over here).

1. Ask the counterfactual question early

At the core of Devon's book is a concept called counterfactuality. It sounds intimidating, but the question itself is simple: if I had not taken this action, what would have happened instead?

If the truth is that there would be minimal meaningful change, your real contribution is likely much less than you might originally think.

The Vox piece highlights Haindavi Kandarpa, a former management consultant at Boston Consulting Group, whose international development portfolio looked enviable on paper. But when she ran the counterfactual question on her own role, she realized the firm would have produced largely the same output without her. She ended up going through a charity startup incubator, Ambitious Impact’s Charity Entrepreneurship, where she brought significant marginal value.

Actionable ideas you can do today:

1. Write down your current role (or your top-choice role) and think of 2-3 people likely to have been hired if you weren’t.

2. Honestly estimate the gap between what you will produce and what they would have produced.

3. If the gap is small, consider less-crowded but similarly important paths. An under-resourced, evidence-backed org may need you far more than a brand-name nonprofit that has hundreds or even thousands of applicants per opening.

4. Pick up a copy of The High-Impact Professional's Playbook or check out the HIP workbook and read through the multiple pathways to creating counterfactual impact.

2. Your donations matter more than you think

If your job earns you a salary, you have more impact levers than you think. What you do with the money you bring home can rival or even outweigh the impact you can achieve with your work.

Vox cited a 2024 GiveWell analysis from Devon's book that puts the cost of saving a life at as little as $3,000 USD, provided the donation goes to a top-rated charity. The implication is striking: redirecting even 10 percent of your annual giving from an average charity to an evidence-backed one can multiply the impact of those same dollars by up to 100x for people and animals.

This is the lowest-friction lever in the whole list. You don’t have to quit, relocate, or retrain.

Actionable ideas you can do today:

1. Go to GiveWell or Giving What We Can to find a top-rated charity.

2. Pick a percentage of your income to give. Even 1 percent is a real starting point. We’ve set up a HIP Pledge Club to make it easier and give you the chance to be part of a community of pledgers.

3. Revisit the percentage once a year and decide whether to increase it.

3. Your workplace is an underused impact lever

Most professionals treat their employer as a fixed backdrop. But if you sit anywhere near procurement, hiring decisions, benefits design, or company giving policy, you are within reach of budgets orders of magnitude larger than your personal one.

One professional who nudges their employer to move their workplace giving toward evidence-backed charities can far outpace what that person could give from their own paycheck across an entire career.

Actionable ideas you can do today:

1. Identify one decision your employer makes that touches money or people (benefits, vendor choice, donation match, volunteer day policy).

2. Find the internal owner of that decision.

3. Bring them a specific, low-risk proposal (for example, adding three evidence-backed charities to the workplace giving portal).

4. Offer to do the administrative legwork. "Yes" is much easier when it costs them nothing.

4. Nonprofits desperately need people who know how things work

A commonly overlooked path towards high impact  is board and advisory work. Charities often have mission expertise but are short on the basics: finance, operations, HR, legal, procurement, etc.

Devon's book profiles Luciana Vilar, an alumni of HIP’s Impact Accelerator Program. Luciana was a longtime corporate finance professional who was regularly the only individual with the practical know-how to put together a working budget. She now serves on two nonprofit boards, where her expertise is highly valuable.

If you’ve spent any meaningful time inside a working business, you almost certainly have a skill some effective nonprofit is hungry for.

Actionable ideas you can do today:

1. List three skills you would be comfortable teaching a new hire (budgeting, hiring, contract review, project management, whatever fits).

2. Identify two or three effective organizations whose work you respect.

3. Email a short note offering those specific skills for pro bono advisory, board, or trustee work.

4. Consider applying to our Impact Accelerator Program, which helps experienced professionals transition into high-impact careers.

5. Your network is a high-leverage asset

This is the idea we find ourselves repeating often at HIP, and Vox captured it well. A powerful path to impact can often be the people you already know.

Picture an evidence-backed nonprofit struggling to fill an important role. You take a few minutes, scroll your contacts, and send a thoughtful introduction to a contact you know would be fantastic in the role. If that person gets the job, the counterfactual impact on those few minutes is enormous, and you didn’t have to change your life, career, or finances at all.

In another example, you could run a “birthday fundraiser” for an effective charity on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook. One short, personal post can raise meaningful money in just a few weeks.

In fact, this is one of the core reasons why High Impact Professionals was co-founded by Devon: helping people transform their careers into a force for good. To date, we’ve helped over 100 experienced professionals move into higher-impact roles, and we hold ourselves to the same counterfactual impact standards we ask of others.

Actionable ideas you can do today:

Option one: Refer someone great to a high-impact role

1. Pick one effective organization you admire that’s hiring. 

2. Scan your LinkedIn connections for three to five people whose skills match.

3. Send them a short, personalized note with a link to the role and/or introduce them to the organization.

Option two: Share about effective giving

1. Post about effective giving on social media: sharing your own perspective can inspire others.

2. Consider running a "birthday charity fundraiser" on your preferred social media platform. Your network increases the amount donated and you’ve introduced them to a great effective organization.

Small moves can help big problems

One thing we loved about Bryan Walsh's Vox piece was that he pushed Devon on a common objection: the problems feel huge, individual action feels tiny, and a quiet hopelessness creeps in.

Devon's response, which we'll be quoting for a while, was this: 

You don’t necessarily need to quit your job. You don’t need to become a different person. You just need a handful of small, well-chosen moves that compound. If you chose one recurring donation, one workplace policy, one advisory role, and one well-placed email, your impact could significantly rise.

Get involved to build high-impact into your career

If this article sparked something in you, here are a few things you can do right now to get involved and build high impact into your career.

1. Read the full Vox article by Bryan Walsh: "The simple question that could change your career" on Future Perfect.

2. Pick up the book The High-Impact Professional's Playbook, which goes deeper on every idea in this post.

3. Join our (free!) Impact Accelerator Program if you want structured help translating your current career into higher-impact work. 

4. Explore the HIP Pledge Club if you’re interested in joining a community of effective givers.

5. Refer a friend. 

Did this article make you think of someone? Please forward it. Spread the word on social, email, text, in conversation, or on whichever platform feels best for you - this is a great way to multiply your impact.