Link to original article

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Why and how to start a pilot project in EA, published by Ben Williamson on June 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. In October 2021, I received an initial grant of $9,640 from the EA Infrastructure Fund to launch Effective Self-Help, a project researching more effective wellbeing and productivity advice. This was, well, a little unexpected. The subsequent 7 months have been an exciting learning curve, if at times also daunting and a little overwhelming. What follows is my attempt to convince you why you should start a pilot project in EA and then offer my advice on how to do this based on my experience launching Effective Self-Help (ESH). I hope this post can inspire a few people to follow through on ideas they have for projects. Starting any kind of project on your own is scary but incredibly rewarding, and I think is the most impactful thing many students and early-career EAs could be doing. As it’s based on my experience, it’s probably a little unrepresentative in some aspects. I think the central points are pretty universal though, whether you’re wanting to launch an organisation, start a blog, or set up a new community group. I plan to publish a follow-up post in the next week or so highlighting the many lessons I’ve learnt while building ESH, attempting to shine a light on the pitfalls I’ve encountered so you can avoid making the same mistakes. Hopefully, there are a few useful lessons here for people early in their journey as an effective (altruist) entrepreneur. At the very least, writing and posting this is a valuable reflection exercise for me. Why A case for impact I’ll state this briefly as this has been discussed in-depth elsewhere. EA has an increasingly large amount of total funding available relative to the number of cost-effective projects it can spend this money on. High availability of funding isn’t universal but is probably particularly true if you’re passionate about longtermism or community-building, this is probably particularly true. Starting a pilot project that could scale to absorb some of this funding has huge potential value. Some of the world’s largest companies started in a small niche before progressively expanding. Similarly, EA itself started as a small, niche movement focused on charity evaluation before expanding to what it is today. While your chances of large-scale success may be low, I think there are few alternative career paths that can produce as large a best-case impact as effective entrepreneurship. A case for personal value That all sounds great, but what about if you fail? Isn’t that the most likely outcome? I would argue that as a student or early professional with any interest in entrepreneurship, starting a pilot project is the most valuable thing that you can do irrespective of the project’s success or failure. In other words, I think the personal value of trying to create, run, and scale your own project is large enough to justify the choice of doing this by itself. A few reasons to justify this strong claim: 1. Demonstrate soft skills in a particularly robust way As a project lead, you have to manage your time, build relationships, and stay on track with goals on your own. If you can do these things the hard way, any future employer can be confident that you can do them with the benefits of a manager and organisation structure. 2. Stress-test your approach to work. Lack an accountability system? Tend to form imprecise goals? Struggle to plan and organise your time? Running your own project will test your approach to the foundational skills of working effectively and productively. You’ll learn very quickly where you need to improve how you work. Out of this, you’ll build more robust systems that will bring you benefits for years to come. 3. Make many more, and better, contacts People tend to get excited about g...