Realize Your Impact: Stop Stalling, Start Swinging

“What are your plans for after graduation?”

It’s a question most of us have heard many times as we approach the end of our college years. At this point, you may even have your answer rehearsed.

In the first installment of this column, we wrote about the fallacy of preserving optionality and how Harvard students fall into this trap of making the non-decision that will push the true decision-making into the post-college timeline. Today, in the last piece of our column, we’ll return back to this theme, and answer: What should today’s graduates strive for, if not optionality?

We hope to end our column on an optimistic note. When taking the long view — what one can do over a decades-long career, not just the oft-discussed two years out of school — the impact a single individual (read: “you”) can have is tremendous. And that’s something that’s easy to forget.

The 3.5 Percent Rule

Erica Chenoweth, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School, makes the claim that “no government has withstood a challenge of 3.5% of their population mobilized

against it during a peak event,” which has been used to demonstrate the power of effective organizing.

Others cast this number in a less positive light, harkening back to fears of a tyranny of the minority. Author Nassim N. Taleb observes that it “suffices for an intransigent minority [...] to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences.” He sees this dynamic at play with peanut-free areas, lingua franca languages, and automatic cars.

There’s nuance at play with both of these comments, but the central point rings true: The bar for creating lasting change might be lower than you think.

Whatever it might be that you care deeply about — whether that be climate change activism, gun reform, or global health — doesn’t require the whole world on your side to tackle. You might only need 3.5 percent. That objective, while still no easy undertaking, might be worth spending a career on.

Bending Exponentials

The 3.5 percent approach is somewhat linear: Persuade someone, then persuade someone else, and each day you’re one step closer to your ultimate objective. If you want to make an impact — and you want to make it now — it’s a solid strategy.

But for many of the most world-bending transformations, there’s hardly a one-to-one relationship between your work and your impact. In fact, you probably want the opposite: You want to attach yourself to an exponentially-growing phenomenon and bend it in the direction you’d like.

Some of the most powerful exponentials we imagine are related to technology. If you’re early to a technological wave — internet, mobile, or artificial intelligence, to take a few examples — you have the ability to make decisions on the design and implementation of these systems that could have real global consequences.

Max R. Levchin, a co-founder of PayPal, built one of the first commercial CAPTCHAs to combat the platform’s early fraudulent transactions. Today, nearly 20 years later, we’re still selecting images with bicycles to prove our humanity.

But there are exponentials to be found in many places. Joining a presidential campaign early, for example, could lead to having a lasting impact down the line if you define a key policy or formulate an argument that makes it to the White House.

Exponentials act as a lever that compounds the impact of your decisions: By subtly bending the trajectory of the world closer to the future you want to live in, your impact can be huge. If you see an exponential opening up in front of you, consider taking the leap.

Not Everything Is Slow

Starting your career can make you feel like you can’t have an impact, at least not quickly. But that’s not true.

Patrick J. Collison, the co-founder of Stripe alongside his brother John B. Collison (a Harvard dropout!), keeps a list of ambitious projects in history that were accomplished in shockingly short amounts of time.

The Eiffel Tower was constructed in two years and two months. Disneyland took around a year to build. The Boeing 747 program took around two and a half years to complete. The first version of JavaScript was created within 10 days. The iPod was invented, developed, and shipped to the first customer in under 10 months.

This is even true while you’re a student! Kenneth C. Griffin ’89 traded bonds out of his Cabot House dorm room. Matt P. Damon ’92 wrote the first act of “Good Will Hunting” in a semester. It took Mark E. Zuckerberg only two weeks to build the first version of Facebook.

Big projects don’t have to take decades. In fact, many of the most important ones were completed in a matter of months.

A Closing Note

We increasingly talk about the world through a collectivist lens. We speak in terms of groups, philosophies, countries, and other labels, instead of individuals.

This is largely okay. The world is complex, and it’d be a mistake to personalize it to a handful of individuals.

When you think of society as some type of swarm consciousness — a group of billions of individual actors motivated by their own incentives — it’s easy to take a fatalistic view.

Whether it’s in scope, size, or speed of impact, we tend to underestimate the role an individual (again, read: “you”) can play. We shouldn’t.

Roman C. Ugarte ’24 is an Applied Math in Economics concentrator in Eliot House. K. Oskar Schulz ’22 is currently on leave founding a startup in New York City. Their column, “Under-indexed,” runs on alternate Wednesdays.