Moral Ambition
Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference
A career consists of 2,000 work-weeks, and how you spend that time is one of the most important decisions of your life. Still, millions of people are stuck in mind-numbing, pointless, or just plain harmful jobs. There’s an antidote to this waste of talent, and it’s called moral ambition.
Moral ambition is the will to be among the best, but with different measures of success. Not a fancy title, fat salary, or corner office, but a career dedicated to the best solutions to the world’s biggest problems— whether that means tackling climate change, making pandemics history or fighting Big Tobacco.
In Moral Ambition, internationally bestselling author Rutger Bregman reveals how our conventional definitions of success are harming us and the planet, and shows how we can shift the focus from personal gain to societal benefit. In the process, he explains, we will join a growing movement of pioneers who are already living out this ethos. They’re the builders, the problem-solvers, the doers who have chosen a path less traveled. A guidebook to finding that path for ourselves, Moral Ambition reminds us that the real measure of success lies not in what we accumulate, but in what we contribute, and shows how we, too, can build a legacy that truly matters.
The book’s publication coincides with the global launch of The School for Moral Ambition — “and 100% of the royalties go to the movement”.
About Rutger Bregman
Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian and author. His books Humankind: A Hopeful History (2020) and Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There (2017) were both Sunday Times and New York Times Best Sellers and have been translated in 46 languages. He is the founder of the School for Moral Ambition.
More about Rutger Bregman at rutgerbregman.com.
Reviews
“Every now and then something tumbles from a brave mind and clangs at your feet like a full metal gauntlet. Moral Ambition is a book of weight, wit and incitement. His works set off a mechanism that expands the reader’s ability to deal with and accept the vast and beautiful potential of humanity. I believe he calls himself a historian, he ’s not. He’s a revolutionary in a sensible coat.”
Russell Crowe
“Gives us hope, humor and guidance at a time when all are in short supply”
Timothy Snyder
“Rutger Bregman has become the voice in my head. A disruptive revolutionary armed with an actual, tangible plan. At last.”
Jameela Jamil
“What an inspiring book!”
Stephen Fry
“Moral Ambition is a call to action for humanity.”
Trevor Noah
“Another barnstorming, transformative book by one of the greatest thinkers of the twenty-first century. I defy you to read it and not be motivated to act.”
George Monbiot
“A bracingly hopeful call for high-flyers to ditch corporate drudgery in favour of something far more ambitious”
Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury
WATCH: Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman – What Now? with Trevor Noah
