The High-Impact Professional's Playbook: How to Turn Your Career, Income, and Influence into Doing Good

You spend most of your waking life at work. You give to charity when you can. You have a network of capable people. Yet your impact on the world feels smaller than it could be. This book shows you how to change that.

In The High-Impact Professional’s Playbook, Devon Fritz, co-founder of High Impact Professionals, lays out a clear and practical guide for turning a regular career into a force for outsized good. Through simple, powerful ideas such as importance, tractability, neglectedness, counterfactual impact, and diminishing marginal utility, the book shows how these concepts translate into real decisions about careers, donations, and projects. Each actionable chapter is punctuated by exercises that any reader can use immediately.

Readers learn how to think about “impact” in concrete terms: saving and improving human and animal lives, rather than vague notions of doing good. The book surveys high-leverage cause areas such as global health, global development, animal welfare, mental health, biosecurity, and AI risk, and explains how to choose promising interventions and organizations instead of defaulting to familiar but low-leverage options.

The heart of the book is a set of “paths to impact” that any busy professional can use. You get step-by-step frameworks, worksheets, and exercises for aligning your career, donations, workplace, skills, and network with the world’s most pressing problems. The IMPACT planning process walks you from values and strengths to concrete ABZ career plans and first actions. Additional chapters show how to donate far more effectively, run high-leverage workplace initiatives, serve as a trustee or advisor, and use your relationships and visibility to move resources toward the best opportunities.

"Most people who want to do good end up wasting an astonishing amount of talent, time, and money — not because they don’t care, but because they don’t know where it actually makes a difference. The High-Impact Professional’s Playbook is a bracing antidote to that waste. Clear-eyed, rigorous, and relentlessly practical, this book shows how ordinary career and giving decisions can become extraordinary moral leverage. If you’re serious about making a huge positive impact, you should read this book."
— Rutger Bregman, author of Humankind and Moral Ambition

"This is the clearest and most practical guide I’ve seen for people who want their careers and giving to genuinely matter. Devon combines rigorous thinking about impact with unusually concrete advice on what to actually do next. This is a must-have playbook for anyone serious about doing good."
— Lewis Bollard, Coefficient Giving