Public Sector, Private Sector, Nonprofit Sector: Where Can You Have the Biggest Impact?

People measure their lives in different ways. Some measure it by how much money they have and what they can buy with it. Some measure it by the love of their friends and family. Some measure it by what they can create. Some measure it by having time for their faith or their hobbies and passions. And some people measure their lives based on the impact they’ve had on the world.

To be clear, 95% of people in the United States and 99% of people around the world do not have the luxury of measuring their lives by anything other than getting by. So this piece is really only applicable to the privileged few who can choose a career based on their interest and needs rather than whatever it takes to put food on the table.

For those of you in that small remaining group, none of those measures are inherently better or worse than the others. If you only live once and you don’t believe in an afterlife, then the goal is to maximize happiness through whatever formula works best for you. For me, it’s always been impact (admittedly driven in large part by ego and insecurity). And because my career overall and our work at Tusk Holdings covers the public sector, private sector and nonprofit sector, I started thinking about what I’d recommend to someone first starting their career for whom impact is everything.

There’s no clear answer as to which sector is the best to work in: public, private or nonprofit. All have pros and all have cons. Over the course of my career, I’ve had a decent amount of experience with each. I’ve worked in municipal government (City Hall in NYC and Philadelphia), state government (spent four years as the Deputy Governor of Illinois) and federal government (two years in the Senate as Chuck Schumer’s communications director), in both the executive and legislative branches and run electoral campaigns (most notably Mike Bloomberg’s third mayoral campaign).

I’ve started seven different businesses from a venture capital fund to several consulting firms to gambling companies to a failed tech startup to a bookstore and podcast studio. And my foundation tries to solve really big problems with sometimes radical solutions: mobile voting to fix democracy, telemedicine to provide access to abortion medications to all women, everywhere, and the combination of philanthropy and aggressive politics to pass legislation to help end hunger (so far, we’ve passed new laws in 18 different states on programs like universal school meals).

I’ve seen the good and the bad in each — and have had plenty of success and failure in each. So based on that experience, if your underlying goal is to have the biggest impact on the world as possible, here are the pros and cons of each sector.

Working in the Public Sector (at a high level, not as a career civil servant):

Pros:

• You can help the most people. Nothing has the scale and scope of government. No other sector has the ability to take immediate action that changes the lives of millions, tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of people. If scale is your top priority, only the public sector can truly meet your needs.
• Direct decision making. You’re in the room where it happens. By definition. There’s nothing quite like it.
• Working at high levels of government can be really exciting and fast paced. It’s exhausting but it’s also really fun.
• You feel relevant all of the time.

Cons:

• Every policy output is determined by a political input. Always (this short guide may be helpful). Which means no matter how good your ideas are, if they’re not beneficial to your boss politically, they won’t happen.
• If you’re working at a high level, your boss is likely an elected official. In my experience, 99% of elected officials can’t live without the validation and attention that being in office gives them. It fills a deep, deep hole in their psyche. They will never, ever risk that to do the right thing. They also care about the press they get, their fundraising and poll numbers more than anything you might think is important. This is a major limitation and can be exceptionally frustrating.
• Our government is broken. There’s a reason why Washington still hasn’t taken meaningful action on most issues — every elected official has to play to the base to win the next primary (because of gerrymandering, only primaries matter 98% of the time and primary turnout is low and basically consists of the ideological base and no one else). Until the structural problem is fixed (see mobile voting), if you work in Congress or in almost any two party legislative body or for an executive official with limited powers, getting meaningful things done is hard (less so if you work for a strong mayor or governor).
• It’s really ugly out there. Everyone and everything is polarized to the hilt. Everyone uses the most bombastic, moralistic, demeaning language for anything and everything. Social media makes the problem 100x worse. Working at a high level of government — and doing hard, meaningful things in the job — means you will take a beating.
• The hours are very long, the pay is a lot lower than you could make in the private sector, and burnout happens really fast. There’s a reason most top officials only last two years.
• You’re part of a massive bureaucracy that intrinsically resists change. You have to be able to turn the Titanic around to get anything done and that takes endless work and even more endless internal conflict. It’s exhausting.

Working in the Non-Profit/ Philanthropic World

Pros:

• Because you’re not really running anything (unless you’re a direct service organization, in which case, god bless you), you have the freedom to come up with big ideas, challenge norms, and try to upend the status quo. Many people in the sector may not take advantage of the opportunity to be truly creative and disruptive, but the opportunity is there nonetheless.
• If you’re well resourced, you have the money and influence to effect change. You have to do the work indirectly since you need government to agree with your ideas, but money speaks loudly in politics, so if you’re willing to aggressively combine the resources of philanthropy and the tactics of politics, you can be very effective (Mike Bloomberg’s work as mayor to ban smoking indoors in New York City and then his foundation’s incredible work to pass the same laws all across the world is a good example).
• It’s a more balanced life. Most people at nonprofits and foundations don’t have to work 70 hours a week. With a few notable exceptions, they’re not being attacked on Twitter all day. The pay (at the higher levels) can be much better than you’d make in government. It works well for many people.
• It feels respectable and it feels like you’re doing good. One of the biggest drivers of happiness is meaning and fulfillment. The nonprofit world offers a lot of opportunity to derive meaning from your work.

Cons:

• It can be really slow and extremely boring. Most nonprofits and foundations operate at a snail’s pace. If that’s your speed, great. But if not, you’ll lose your mind quickly.
• The nonprofit sector can be just as bureaucratic as the government. In fact, the nonprofit sector may even be more obsessed with process than anyone else.
• You’re often not that effective. Some foundations are good at producing real societal change, but the vast majority settle for playing on the outside margins. Combine that with a general lack of understanding of how politics and government actually work (and even worse, many nonprofit leaders think they’re politically savvy and don’t know what they don’t know) and you’ll just be spinning your wheels for no purpose other than collecting a paycheck.
• You may be constantly fundraising. Foundations don’t have this problem but they are also often created solely for tax reasons rather than actual beliefs. Most nonprofits do not have enough money so they’re always stressed and always singing for their supper.
• You’re almost never in the room where it happens. At best, someone texts you from the room.

Working in the Private Sector

Pros:

• Consumers typically care more about products than they do about politics so if you can create the right product that creates the right disruption, your impact can be vast and rapid.
• It’s often more logical. Pretty much anything is more logical than politics, but market forces are better understood, which makes planning easier.
• You usually make a lot more money than you would in government or nonprofits. That makes life easier. And despite what most people think, a high level corporate job is still usually less insane than a high level government job (this does not apply to tech startups).
• You have the resources to really drive a concept/ product and its adoption. Marketing, advertising, earned media, social media are all tools you can use liberally to promote and effect change.

Cons:

• The real point of what you’re doing is to make money, not create societal change. The definition of a corporation is starting to veer away from the Milton Friedman definition of producing profits for shareholders and nothing else, but the number of times you’re going to focus on change is far fewer than in government or nonprofits. The solution here is to work for a company or startup whose underlying financial success automatically results in societal change like telemedicine or clean energy (you could also work in ESG at a big company but you’d better be sure it’s more than just optical money laundering).
• Unless you’re a CEO or a prominent investor, you don’t have that much influence over the rest of the world. Most high level corporate workers are still nameless and faceless. So if you want some public attention, the corporate world may not be for you.
• With the higher pay comes more work, more accountability and it’s a lot easier to get fired.
• The business world can still have all of the downsides of government or nonprofits. Corporations can be slow, bureaucratic, obstinate and afraid of change. The bigger they are, the more likely that’s the case. If you’re in the middle, it means you may find yourself stuck, even if you want to do more. If you’re on the top, you have to doggedly steer the ship, just like you would in government.

Like everything, context matters a lot. You can work for a great mayor, a great foundation leader, a great CEO and your experience is impactful and meaningful regardless of the sector. And obviously, the opposite also holds too.

There is no right answer (though one piece of advice: if you’re going to work in government or politics at a really high level, either do it early in your career when you have limitless energy and don’t need much money or towards the end where you have real wisdom and judgment and already have money). But if you take the time to really know yourself, if you’re willing to be truly, brutally honest with yourself, and if you’re willing to take the time to analyze a lot of different industries, sectors and opportunities, you can have an outsized impact on the world no matter where you sit.