Reflections on the Roots of Progress Institute Fellowship
Progress Studies is a meta-discipline for raising humanity’s ambition
Editor's note: Applications for the Roots of Progress Institute 2025 Blog Building Intensive Fellowship are open. You should apply! The deadline is June 1.
We’re Not in Kansas Anymore
I’ve had three “we’re not in Kansas anymore” moments in my life. The first is when I stepped out of Grand Central Station, on the way to an admitted students event at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in 2013. My heart still pounds when I think about staring up at Manhattan for the first time. I had never traveled so far from home in Arizona. The energy and scale of the city made me dizzy, like a cartoon character knocked in the head. I was not at all convinced I belonged at an Ivy League graduate program. Only a few months prior, I was just hoping for a job with steady hours. I had spent the summer before grad school making $9/hr managing a grocery store in rural Colorado. Undergrad had taken me six years, and my resume featured far more restaurant experience than professional experience. It felt like I had arrived in NYC by accident, by some misunderstanding.
The second moment came a year later. My graduate internship was in Peru. Now I was a continent away from home for the first time and could barely speak the language. I was down to 125 pounds, having lost more than twenty pounds in the first few weeks of the trip because I was unaccustomed to the food and water. While hiking through the jungle on the way to a remote ecotourism business I was there to consult with, I lost consciousness. I remember waking up with a stranger looking down on me, unaware of where I was or how I got there. Only a year before, I had been scraping by; now I was Who Knows Where on an adventure that made me feel like I was living out a scene from one of my favorite books about Theodore Roosevelt.
I could probably describe both instances more succinctly as some exaggerated form of cultural shock. But it wasn’t just the culture that shocked me. It was my sense of self, the limitations on the life I could imagine for myself, that were crumbling. If I was there, living that moment, moments I couldn’t have dreamed of, what else was out there?
I felt the same thing, for the third time in my life, last year at the Progress Conference. This time I felt it coming. The Conference was the culmination of the Roots of Progress Fellowship I had begun about eight weeks earlier. Throughout the program, I had felt something brewing, but I couldn’t put my finger on it through the virtual sessions and interactions.
What did I feel leading up to the event? It felt like reluctance, resistance. A recognition that I seemed to be swimming through a world that was more viscous than the one the other fellows and the advisors inhabited. It wasn’t until we were all together in Berkeley that it hit me like a hammer. These are the highest agency people I’ve ever met.1
The Fellowship was my first inside look at this kind of agency, ambition, and courage. These weren’t new ideas to me. It’s not as though I’d spent the last decade since hiking out of the Peruvian jungle twiddling my thumbs on the couch. I have invested tens of millions of dollars in climate and environmental strategies as a capital allocator and helped build pioneering partnerships to deliver conservation wins on agriculture and forest lands around the world. By most measures, I was well into a successful career.
But once I joined the Fellowship, it dawned on me that I had hit an invisible threshold, an ambition asymptote without realizing it. Watching the other fellows work, seeing how Emma ran the program, hearing the advisors who came to speak with us, that invisible threshold started to reveal itself. It was as though I saw a ripple, light catching in a way I hadn’t seen before as I watched people move through a space I couldn’t. The Progress Conference is where I realized it wasn’t a wall or solid threshold at all. It’s more like a cell membrane. Permeable. Good ideas could flow through, be absorbed, an input to something greater. The experience caused a profound shift in how I think about myself, talent in general, and progress studies overall.
That’s when my sense of what Progress Studies meant shifted from a field of study or discipline to a state of mind, “a vibe.” Progress Studies is about telling ourselves that we can do things. That we can figure it out.
Ambition
Before the Fellowship, I thought of ambition as a desire for things like money and prestige; traditional markers of success. Ambition up to that point had felt like craving, yearning, maybe even envy. As the Fellowship rolled on, I started to see ambition as something akin to vision, a vision of what the world could look like. Ambition started to feel less covetous and consumptive, it became creative and generative. Agentic rather than memetic.
I began to notice my perspective shifting as advisor after advisor spoke about the need for vision. Some spoke about vision related to progress studies writ large, some entrepreneurship, others writing. But the visions had similar shapes and characteristics.
They all had a certain boldness, often the bolder the better. As one of the advisors put it, “hard problems are easier to solve than easy problems” because hard problems attract great people. But they were bold for reasons other than difficulty. They were unbounded by prior experience or knowledge. As an advisor put it, “You have to learn 99% of what you’ll need to know on the job as an entrepreneur anyway, so why limit your ambition to the 1% you already know?” Who cares if you’ve been a writer before or not? Or an engineer. Or a researcher. Why can’t you learn?2
I’ve worked as a wildlife biologist, a conservationist at the largest environmental NGO in the world, and a capital allocator at a wealth management firm. I’m no stranger to picking up new skills or trying to conquer new frontiers. But I’ve never been part of a group that believed in doing so as fervently as the progress community.
Existing know-how is not a prerequisite. What matters is what you’d be happiest to see become reality. Because when things get hard, and they will, the purpose and joy in your vision is what gets you through.3
Courage
It’s one thing to have a vision. It’s another to chase it. To paraphrase Scott Alexander on The Dwarkesh Podcast, “most people writing on the internet are within 1% of not having the courage to do so.” I had no idea how true this is until I went through the Roots of Progress Institute Fellowship.
The necessity for courage often shows up in mundane ways. I’d written plenty and been on podcasts for work, but I’d never written anything under my own name for public consumption when I applied to the Fellowship. I was Grant Mulligan of Insert Organization Here. The ideas may have been mine, but I was speaking on behalf of an organization. I never really had to declare myself. I had no clue how difficult that transition would be.
Now before I can be legible to others, I have to be legible to myself. What do I want to declare? Which of my ideas are worth sharing? What do I really believe? Sharing my vision for environmentalism was hard enough, but through the program I was encouraged to share more personal anecdotes (like this post). Inserting myself into the story requires getting over a significant cringe factor. Hyperlegibility may be our new reality, but it requires courage.
The sheer difficulty of writing requires courage in its own right. Writing is hard.4 In weekly Draft Gyms, the fellows would edit each others’ work. We’d watch each other struggle and fumble over our pieces. We’d start in on an idea, write thousands of words, and still couldn’t get it right. But then, more often than not, something would click, the fellow would find their voice, and the piece would come together. Getting to see a brilliant article before it’s brilliant was the coolest part of being a fellow.
Before the Fellowship, I’d read an article on Substack or Works in Progress and thought it must be the product of genius or divine inspiration. Far more common is smart people with the courage to keep grinding. They believe they’ll figure it out. Again, this is not a novel idea. I was no stranger to hard work before the Fellowship. But there’s something uncommonly relentless about the Progress community.
Talent
Each time my ambition and courage have taken a major leap, it's been in response to a catalyst. I needed a professor to believe in me and bring me to Yale. I needed my girlfriend, now wife, to tell me I should apply for an internship in Peru, that traveling there didn’t need to be relegated to fantasy; it’s a place I could really go. I needed the Roots of Progress Fellowship to reveal the invisible and arbitrary thresholds holding me back.
I’m sure not all talent requires a catalyst, that’s probably part of what makes the most talented people special. But there’s bound to be others like me who need a little push, a little encouragement to have a bigger vision for themselves and the world. Many people don’t realize how talented they are, or at the very least, could be. That there is vast, latent talent waiting for a catalyst has become one of my most fundamental and strongly held beliefs.5
That belief is at the core of my fascination with progress studies. My hope is that Progress Studies is the catalyst, a meta-discipline for raising human ambition and unlocking untapped talent. What vision could activate all that talent? What would happen if we activated all that talent? How much better could the world be?
Let’s find out.
The Fellows
For all I learned from the Fellowship, like most things in life, it all comes back to the relationships and people you meet along the way. The advisors were great; I got to meet many of my personal heroes.6 But the real magic of the program was without a doubt the other fellows. Thank you to each fellow for, well, the fellowship.
The fellows in my cohort are brilliant thinkers and writers. You should subscribe to their blogs (mine too, button below)! To learn more about each fellow and subscribe to their blog, go here. See my thread on X or Substack Notes for my favorite articles from each fellow.
Thank you to Brendan Mulligan, , , , Simonelli, and Kaylee Mulligan for their comments on earlier drafts.
I sat next to Cate Hall during Gena Gorlin’s session at the Progress Conference. Her article on agency explains exactly what I mean by high agency people. You could feel her sense of agency, like an extreme form of charisma, when she spoke. That brief session is when I felt the hammer fall.
Out of respect for the advisors who shared openly in a private setting, all quotes are unattributed. I’ve used quotation marks to indicate when an idea is more or less a direct quote from an advisor.
Vision doesn’t always need to be original. Focusing people’s attention matters. Maybe it’s attention to the right problem, maybe it’s a potential solution. For example, single-stair buildings have become a rallying policy among the YIMBY crowd. It is a movement founded on a broader vision of abundant, less expensive housing. The grand vision bred specific policy proposals. There’s huge value in helping spread the vision, even if you aren’t sitting on the city council or the originator of the proposal.
Thank you to Rob Tracinski for being a great coach during the Fellowship.
Tyler Cowen’s ideas unsurprisingly infuse Progress Studies, but I wonder if his thinking on talent won’t end up being one of his most important contributions. Progress Studies seems almost purpose built to culturally scale what he seems to be doing with Emergent Ventures. The other candidate for his most important idea might be what I’ll call “what it means to be human.” AI discussions dominated the Progress Conference. If you wanted to prepare people for the coming change, I think you’d want to teach them how to adapt and be more empathetic to the human experience. Well, he funded the book on late bloomers and got everyone reading Middlemarch.
Thank you to all the incredible advisors who came to speak with us:
, Max Roser, , , , , , Blake Scholl, Bob McGrew, , Delian Asparouhov, Holden Karnofsky, Kanjun Qiu, , , and Chandler Tuttle.
Grant, this is awesome, thanks so much for sharing! Your reflections resonated with me on a few levels and I'll note our somewhat similar paths from the rural West through FES and beyond. About a month ago, a friend pointed me toward Jason Crawford/Roots of Progress and I have been diving into the field (podcasts, articles, etc.), so to see this post feels serendipitous. It is inspiring to read your thoughts, and it feels like a nudge for me, too, so thank you for that again. Looking forward to more, keep going!