When thinking about what I should do in my life, I gravitate towards the idea of finding something that I would be uniquely good at doing. There are some problems with this form of thinking, but I’ve found it compelling enough to be an undercurrent to a lot of my considerations in life.

This is essentially a peak impact optimization for one’s life. I began thinking this way about my own life before I found Open Philanthropy’s criteria for choosing important problems, but I have re-contextualized my thinking in relation to those criteria. I believe they are thorough and are a useful framework for thinking about any type of optimization:

Below, I would like to translate these criteria to the perspective of an individual’s work.