Wildly Better Place
"Of all things wasted in our throwaway times, the greatest is wasted talent.”
So begins Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman. How’s that for an opening line? Yikes. Compelling, but yikes!
Spoiler alert: this book pulls no punches. It’s irritatingly wonderful. Bregman sets up his thesis from the first chapter: “Moral ambition is the will to make the world a wildly better place.” In his view, moral ambition is the antidote to our culture’s mind-numbing, pointless and even harmful jobs.
Since I love a good 2x2 matrix (hello, Eisenhower, SWOT, and BCG) I appreciate how Bregman evaluates and categorizes modern careers against two criteria: ambition and idealism. Sure, the 2x2 format generalizes and oversimplifies, but it also provokes and challenges.
Vocations in his first category are not ambitious and not idealistic. He calls them bullshit jobs (with a hat tip to the anthropologist David Graeber). This category includes influencers and marketeers (I get that), lawyers and accountants who help corporations skirt taxes and laws (I’m on board), political lobbyists (check), and most managerial positions (ouch!).
He puts consultants (like me!) in the second category: wasted talent. These people are ambitious but not idealistic (oh boy...). Here’s his point: consultants help people, which is good, but we don’t generally concern ourselves with the most pressing challenges facing humanity. We do incremental improvement, not transformation motivated by idealism.
Bregman’s view: consultants contribute to society – just far less than we could.
Let me be the first to say that I love what I do. I love teaching. I love working with groups. I love facilitating. I love designing learning experiences. But Bregman’s assessment is still sitting with me, challenging me to find a way to make the world a wildly better place – even if it means undoing my cultural programming to dream a little bigger.
Inspiration
Bregman, M. (2025). Moral Ambition. Trans. Erica Moore. New York: Little, Brown & Co. (Chapter 1)
Special shoutout to my long-time colleague Robin Bergart who suggests the best titles to read.