Finding conviction

"Would you make this your life's work?"

If you're looking to change the world, conviction is a key ingredient for getting things done. Here, I mean conviction as a mental state: the feeling that you're on to something big and that it's worth running through walls for. In the last year, I've come to appreciate how much faster and further I can progress in the areas where I feel deep conviction in what I'm doing.

The simple reason is that you (generally) need a lot of leverage for outsized impact, and you (generally) need a lot of conviction for serious leverage.

This post is a reflection on why conviction matters, where you find it, how to know when you have it, and how not to do it. Enjoy!

You need a lot of leverage for outsized impact

'Leverage' is a tired word, but there really is something to the fact that you need to mobilize others to have any hope of changing the world.

Say that you're hoping to 100x or even 1,000x your social impact. I think the effective altruists are basically right that picking the right problem is the first and best thing to focus on, but where do you go from there?

There's just no way that classical approaches like working harder or smarter can get you very far in the grand scheme of things. I can buy that long evenings and productivity hacks get you 2-5x and being a genius gets you another 5-10x, but I think that's about it.

Instead, what you almost always need is leverage: getting hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of people to row in your direction. Most ambitious theories of change rely on unlocking thousands of person-hours at some step: Social movements mobilize people directly, policy change harnesses the mandate from millions of voters, and market shaping leverages billions of transactions.

Further upstream, leverage is also what you're pursuing when recruiting or fundraising — convincing rockstars to join your cause or funders and board members to bet on your mission is ultimately about going beyond your own resources.

You need a lot of conviction for serious leverage

If you're a thoughtful, honest person, I suspect you will struggle to find sustained leverage without deep conviction.

If the people you're recruiting are anything like those I tend to pitch, they've got a lot of options for doing good, and their time comes at a hefty opportunity cost. And if you're anything like me, you'd like to know that whatever you're asking them to do beats the alternative by a healthy margin.

When you're in the closing conversations with a superstar about how they should spend the next years of their life, and they ask 'How much does this stuff really matter, at the end of the day?', you want to answer with sincerity. And if that answer falls short of a whole-body yes – a 'Yes, oh my god, this is a five-alarm-fire and we've got the biggest water bucket but need you to operate it' – you just won't succeed often enough.

The best recruiters I personally know are effective exactly because they are convinced with an almost unreasonable intensity that they are working on the single most important thing in the entire world. Ditto for fundraising from thoughtful, high-opportunity-cost funders.

As another benefit beyond leverage, conviction also helps mobilize yourself. You are probably – and certainly should be – often asking yourself: 'Is this the best thing I could be doing with these scarce resources?' and again, a whole-body yes will drive your productivity more than any timeboxing technique or inbox manager ever will. This partly comes from sheer energy, and partly from drawing on that conviction to maintain focus when you have to ruthlessly prioritize.

Where to find conviction

One good step on the road to deep conviction is what a colleague calls 'productive paranoia.' This means frequently asking yourself questions like "Why might the thing I'm working on be insignificant?", "Is this crucial assumption true?", and "Is this doomed?"

This interrogation might seem antithetical to building conviction, but it's really a powerful way of getting there – the key is to actually run the paranoid questions to ground!

Of course, just asking the questions by itself isn't that helpful; for the paranoia to be productive, you have to invest real resources in proving your concern wrong. The only way out is through. Practicing productive paranoia gets you out of the half-hearted equivocation that comes from letting doubts linger. Pick your thorniest doubt and spend real resources proving it wrong (or find relief in proving it right!).

The second thing you want is a very good information environment. To me, this means a good mix of productively paranoid skeptics who'll call you out if you are on the wrong track, and true believers who share your conviction and will remind you why you wake up with a fire inside to pursue this mission.

Missing either of these types in your environment is a recipe for either dogmatic overconfidence or ineffectual timidity.

Putting this into practice

In my work at Sentinel, we recently practiced this by kicking the tires on the basic case for our objective of managing access to synthetic DNA. I've spent a good chunk of my waking hours since 2022 working on this problem; we launched Sentinel with this as a core priority, and yet some basic questions about our theory of change seemed unanswered earlier this year.

What does the DNA synthesis industry really look like? How much risk do we actually buy down if we achieve only partial implementation of our solutions – are the returns on investment linear, all-or-nothing, or some other shape? Are there any other chokepoints in the bio supply chain that'd work better than synthetic DNA?

Despite all the good work on DNA synthesis governance, no one seemed to have decisively answered these questions (yet another symptom of almost no one working on this full time…!), and we noticed a lingering uncertainty about doubling down on this area. We weren't just worried about our own time; our partners and funders have plenty of other ways to do good, and we feel the weight of asking for their resources, too. And the stakes of this opportunity cost will only grow: actually solving this problem will require us to deploy far more resources in the coming years.

So, we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, and close to 20% of our total team time for several months asking and answering: How much conviction do we have in this solution?

How to know when you have enough

So how do you know if you have enough?

When we started interrogating our bet on DNA security, the answer was obviously going to land somewhere between 'useless' and 'silver bullet'; we knew from the outset it'd be something like 'DNA synthesis screening reduces bioterrorism risk quite a bit, but isn't perfect.' Since that wouldn't really tell us what to do, we needed a conviction threshold for this to be a useful exercise in deciding whether to double down.

We did some quantitative modeling, but the most helpful heuristic was simply to ask myself, 'Would I dedicate my life to solving this problem?', and then sit with the answer. Assuming you're self-aware of what might cloud your judgment (fear, social status, inertia, etc.), simple introspection can reveal whether you have sufficient belief to dedicate tens of thousands of precious hours to a cause.

A related question is whether you, in good conscience, would ask someone else to dedicate their professional life (or, in the case of funders, their capital) to this mission. You might think that, by definition, you have already done this whenever you headhunt or fundraise. But I suspect that people far too often just go through the motions, without deeply reflecting on what it really means to ask someone to dedicate their most precious resources to your cause.

Asking and answering these questions can be an incredibly powerful part of setting strategy – assuming you are prepared to follow the implications wherever they lead, whether that means doubling down, investigating to build conviction, or pivoting to something new.

Conviction done wrong

A few words of caution are in order, and I particularly advise against:

Bullshit. The adolescent SaaS founder who raises ten million dollars from a16z in two weeks for an AI-enabled tax evasion app (or whatever) definitely has 'conviction.' This is not the way. Anyone without a basic conscience can resort to faking it without making it, but if you're earnestly trying to make things better, conviction should be something you feel deeply, rather than perform casually.

Zealotry. Conviction is only as good as its connection to ground truth, and some of the most convinced people out there are also the most unhinged. Don't drink the Kool-Aid, and don't blow up Chesterton's Fence in the name of conviction. You avoid this by curating a good information environment. As a funder, this may require especially deliberate effort. Ask yourself, 'Am I set up for people to call me out on bad ideas, and when was the last time someone did that?' If the answer unnerves you, fix that – whether that means adjusting your governance somehow or just seeking more advice from people who disagree with you.

Wrapping up

The core idea here is that ambitious impact requires lots of leverage, which requires deep conviction.

If you don't have it yet, do the necessary work to find it; be productively paranoid and surround yourself with a good mix of nagging skeptics and true believers.

So where did my conviction land? If you handed me a contract tying me to our current work for the next three years, I'd sign it with no hesitation. Five years, I'd do it – once we know that we have the resources to actually win.

What would you sign? If nothing comes to mind, you might just have found your next project.

Thanks to ASB and James Wagstaff for being role models for deep conviction.