Moral Ambition

A career consists of 2,000 workweeks, 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 wast 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 a 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 problems-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 show how we, too, can build a legacy that truly matters.