Lesson 6: Wrapping up

This week you did something harder than analysis: you made commitments. Analysis is comfortable — you can always refine the model, read another paper, adjust your priors. Commitment is uncomfortable because it means accepting that your plan is imperfect and acting anyway.

That’s the right thing to do. Every hour you spend optimising your plan is an hour you’re not spending executing it. The explore/build/deploy framework applies here too: at some point, you’ve explored enough and built enough, and it’s time to deploy. This week was that point.

Your plan will change. Your cause prioritisation might shift. You might discover that your career theory of change was wrong, or that you can give more (or less) than you expected. That’s fine — in fact, it’s expected. The plan isn’t a contract. It’s a starting point that you can hold yourself accountable to and update as you learn.

Over these five weeks, you’ve learned to make your reasoning transparent, evaluate evidence, reason under uncertainty, prioritise between causes, and translate all of that into concrete action. These skills compound. The person who can do all five — who can look at a problem clearly, reason about it honestly, and then actually do something about it — is rare, and is exactly the kind of person who can do a great deal of good.

Summary

This week you learned to:

• Write a theory of change for your own impact

• Use the explore/build/deploy framework to find your current career stage

• Make a specific giving plan, and use the Dutch resources to act on it

• Choose concrete advocacy and multiplier actions that suit your situation

• Turn your thinking into specific commitments with deadlines, and present them for feedback