Setting the Table

Many friends have expressed interest in learning more about the career transition I’m making and would like to follow along as I move from the for-profit to the not-for-profit world. I’m happy to have you along and I welcome your thoughts and your help as I go.

Where do things stand right now? Well, I’ve committed to leaving my current job (see my profile for details on that position) and I know that I want to work in the not-for-profit sector. Beyond that, the simplest way I can describe what is driving my decision process is to lay out my three guiding principles.

First, I want to KNOW that what I am doing is having an impact -- I need to have confidence that the work I’m doing is actually making a positive difference. That might mean that I have a significant degree of control (e.g., managing the $ allocation of a fund), but more than likely, it will mean that my efforts will have clear success metrics attached to them. If I can’t tell that I’m having a positive impact, my motivation to continue will drop like a stone.

Second, I want to work on problems where a scalable solution can be implemented. While I admire the hell out of people in the social work field, I’m not personally interested in deeply engaging and helping to solve a single person’s problems. It just doesn’t motivate me. Quite frankly, it drains me. I want to have an impact on 10,000 people, 100,000 people or a million people. I’m far more energized to think about and work on larger societal problems like hunger, health, poverty and education – these problems fascinate and motivate me.

Third, (and correlated with the scale comment above), I’m a strong believer in the principle of “the greatest good for the greatest number”. In the context of my transition to the not-for-profit world, I think about this in the following way – I value a life equally whether its here in the U.S. or somewhere in the far reaches of the globe. I don’t need to know you personally to want to help you. What’s important to me is that my efforts on your behalf will go as far as they possibly can. In other words, if a dollar would improve 1 life here or 3 lives in Africa, I would almost always opt to spend my dollar in Africa. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have some passion for local problems, I do. But I want the switch I’m trying to make here to be as tailored to my truest motivations as is possible.

So those are the principles for finding the new job. Beyond those principles, the full depth of my plan is wrapped up in one word – networking. I want to reach out to lots of people tied into the not-for-profit world and pick their brains. Future posts will likely focus on who I’ve been meeting with and what I’m learning as I go.

I want people who are already experienced in the not-for-profit world to show me how things work and I want/need their help in directing me towards the best possible position for me to chase. If you want to directly help me get there, thank you very much. If you want to just read-along that’s cool too.