When I moved to Kenya, I boasted to have two core ideals. Now that I’m moving back to the US, I’ve revisited them.

Core Ideal 1: I ought to push myself to help people as much as I can.

I’ve moderated on this.

Fine fine fine! Older, wiser people were right. I’m not as radical as I thought I was. I no longer foresee a life of living in tiny rooms, on beans, trying to engineer my personality around having as much positive impact as I can.

I still won’t be complacent with a career that does only an ok amount of good. I’m still strongly opposed to [hedonism](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hedonism?). I have ambition to do great things in my career.

Concretely helping others is still one of my priorities. But it is no longer my only priority.

And to be frank, it’s not clear that obsessing over my impact has even done me much good. At both BCG Nairobi and Kapu I had less impact than I thought I would at the outset. There was definitely impact-motivated wishful thinking on my part in both these career decisions.

I can’t know the counterfactual, and I deliberately did things that were higher risk But there’s a decent case to be made (my wife has made it) that I have overthought things and would have had more impact by just working in the US at a job that made a lot of money, and donating a lot.

So gone are the days of looking at my calendar and pretending that all my time is exclusively optimized for having as much impact as I can.

Core Ideal 2: I ought to look for opportunities where I will be doing work that would otherwise not be done.

I 100% still agree.

Over the course of 3 years helping to build a company, it's become clear to me how many problems exist only because nobody has built solutions to them.

More generally: Much of our world was built by people. Companies. Relationships. Social norms. Works of art.

It's up to us to continue the work of those who went before. To build on what has already been built. And - when needed - to tear down and build anew.

So I plan to build things. Create some products. Start a company or two. Write music. Create community. Start my own family.

So: Luke’s New and Improved Ideals as I move back to the US:

My top priority is my wife (and future children).
I build things.
I ought to push myself to help others a lot.

Let’s see how they stand up in 4 years time.