The Story of High Impact Athletes
My name is Marcus Daniell and I’m the founder of High Impact Athletes.
On a tennis court I have represented New Zealand at the professional level for over a decade, competed in the Olympics, have made Wimbledon and Australian Open quarterfinals and hold numerous ATP Tour titles.
Tennis was and is my life, but now I live for something larger.
In 2015 I reached a point where I had amassed some small savings and was no longer terrified that I was going to end each year in the red. With this sense of increased security came an existential questioning of my career path and the balance of what I was giving to and taking from the world.
From this place of questioning I did some online research into giving back. I discovered the Effective Altruism movement and an organisation called 80,000 Hours, and became fascinated by the ideas involved and the practical advice for any given career.
The EA principles of earning to give and building a platform for advocacy gave me a grander purpose in pursuing the heights of tennis.
Living by the principle of earning to give means that if I do well in tennis, not only do I feel great personal satisfaction, but by earning more prizemoney I have the capacity to give more to those who need it the most. Furthermore, along with success in sport comes an advocacy platform from which to more widely spread the idea of giving effectively. It’s a beautiful fact of charity that every extra person brought on board with effective donations is a multiplier of one’s own impact.
These realisations were a true breakthrough for me.
Since discovering Effective Altruism I have donated between 5-10% of my own annual winnings to effective charities, all of which are represented by High Impact Athletes.
In 2020 this didn’t feel like enough.
During the first stages of the Covid pandemic I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could have a greater positive impact on the world. I didn’t feel like I could donate any more of my own earnings, particularly considering I had essentially just lost my job with the pausing of the ATP Tour.
In search of ideas I enrolled in Peter Singer’s free Princeton Effective Altruism course and started learning and thinking. After many weeks of brainstorming and conversations with folk in the EA field I landed on the idea of using my position as an athlete to bring the ideas of Effective Altruism into the sporting world, and from there to athletes’ followers.
High Impact Athletes was born.