Effective Altruists
UP QUOTES
“What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.”
We believe that using your 700,000 hours and millions of dollars in lifetime assets to do the greatest amount of good is an extraordinarily meaningful and impactful path to take in life.
Putting humans on the Moon required 2.8 billion hours of work and cost about $280 billion dollars. That’s often what it takes to achieve great things.
Effective altruism (“EA”) is a movement tackling an even bigger challenge. Whether you’re in the community or resonate with some of its principles from afar, you can do your small but meaningful part.
UP focuses on your individual EA and non-EA life goals. In our eyes, you’re a human first, then an EA. As a human, you may dream extremely big. That’s great. Just remember that to achieve your life goals, it’ll likely take decades. You’re not going to mitigate 99.99% of existential risks with one great paper. You’re not going to end factory farming with one heroic campaign. You’re not going to become the next SBF with a few smart trades. (Nor should you be that reckless.) But you can make progress, day in and day out. Ultimately that progress adds up for you and all other sentient life.
We believe that every hour of your time you save is a win. Every dollar you save is a win. It can all be reinvested into building a better life for yourself and others. Conversely, every hour of your time and dollar of your money that you misuse unnecessarily is a loss. Misusing resources is a natural part of being human, but historically so was dying of smallpox. We think we can do better. We have to try. Our collective misuse on an individual and societal level is staggering.
We’ve spent 20+ years researching and experimenting in self-development, behavior change, and goal attainment to create or augment the people we now generally call effective altruists. (We started what became UP well before EA existed and our team co-founded some of EA’s core organizations.) We’ve worked with hundreds of ambitious, altruistic people in a 1-on-1 or small group setting and impacted thousands more indirectly.
If this resonates with you–even if you don’t explicitly identify as an EA–we’d love to help you achieve your life goals. Including your goals around living an amazing life. Remember, we’re all humans first.
