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This month’s book for the Lemonade Stand Book Club was “Moral Ambition” by Rutger Bregman. I was pretty excited to read this book because I read “Utopia for Realists” a while back and loved it. I also have recently turned 40 and left an entrepreneurial job in tech that I had held for a decade, so I am in the middle of some mid-life introspection (crisis?) and actively searching/debating where I want to start focusing my energy.

One of my biggest problems with my career so far has been exactly what this book is focusing on, that most jobs are bullshit. I have worked at four startups since I graduated college (2010) and the most recent (and most successful) one was a software company that primarily helped aggregate massive amounts of data to “drive better personalized marketing”. It is a profitable space but it’s also billions of dollars and thousands of educated people focused on helping shitty dinosaur companies sell 5% more crap to people. One of the primary reasons I decided it was time to take a break is that it was so clear that the job was meaningless that it was becoming more and more difficult to spend 40 hours of my life each week pretending to give a shit. I became one of the world’s biggest experts on “customer data platforms for enterprise companies” and all I could think about was how I wished I had spent all the time it took to get there becoming an expert that actually mattered.

When I saw this book being covered by my favorite Hitman-speedrunner / business news streamer, I knew I had to get in on this book club. By the time I was done reading I had plenty to say, so I figured I’d write some of it down and share it.

Let’s talk about “Moral Ambition”.

Likes

• I agree that it’s a big problem that the majority of people who have means or particular talent are wasting it on nonsense while the world burns. I think he did a great job of highlighting what actually matters or not and providing a framework for how to think about your impact on the world.
• I appreciated the focus on the way people are driven to action and highlighting how many people just need to be asked, and the focus on building a coalition of like minds.
• The stories and evidence about how focused effort can lead to massive positive impact were insightful and inspiring. I hadn’t heard of the majority of them and I learned a lot and was left with a lot to think about.
• The most impactful takeaway for me was about the call to identify the biggest problem and focus on data driven ways to drive change. The stories of Rob Mather and the Charity Entrepreneurship program, as well as GiveWell were all very inspiring and definitely the most enticing takeaway. I am definitely interested in looking into that more.

Dislikes

• There was a general dismissal of people who try to help within their means while spending energy on raising awareness towards problems. He seemed to undermine the importance of awareness, but I would argue that public perception is a key driver to how people vote and spend their money and that the majority of the governments and companies that drive the world are directly responding to “the market” which is made up of individuals.
  • Take Disney for example: Why do they keep making soulless “live action” versions of their old movies? Because people keep going to them. Why did they shift the MCU to prioritize more movies made by and starring women and POC? Because the market was demanding them. Disney isn’t a person, it has no morality. It is a machine trying to get our money and attention. Affecting public perception and buying habits is provably a key way to influence those outcomes.
• A massive portion of the book was dedicated to an endless stream of examples, the majority of which come from history far enough back to be hard to relate to. If I had to guess it felt like the book was 25% or less dedicated to the author’s perspective or any coherent point, and 75% examples selected from all across time from seemingly random perspectives in an attempt to cover as much ground as possible.
• I found the book surprisingly UNambitious. It spent a lot of time calling out monumental, terrifying problems. It also shied away from focusing on any specific area to meaningful depth. Then most of the tactical “what to do about it” content was basically just encouraging people to focus on improving the world vaguely, including encouraging people to focus on tractable and tangible problems. I started the book hoping for something more ambitious that dove deeper into how we can drive higher impact on the biggest systemic problems, but I really didn’t get that. The idea that a person could find an efficient way to tweak the system that has a ripple effect that saves millions of lives is cool, but feels like an unsustainable band-aid built on the assumption of a steady supply of aspiring heroes willing to sacrifice. Meanwhile in reality, the richest man in the world yanked out the wires of USAID and killed hundreds of thousands of people last year alone.
  • Using Rutger’s Utopia for Realists for comparison, that book spent a majority of the time proposing ambitious, and SPECIFIC visions and dreams we should chase as a population. This book felt far more vague in general and more like a few blogs padded into book length with endless historical examples.

Overall Review

I think this was a good book and a call to action for affluent people trying to figure out their mission in life. Rutger Bregman is one of my favorite thinkers of our time and I think he is one of the most intelligent and eloquent people trying to drive change in the world.

I also don’t think I liked this book as much as “Utopia for Realists”. Utopia had a clear and tactical set of recommendations and was satisfying to dive into. This book ultimately felt like a chapter or two making the point that we’re wasting most of our best talent on bullshit while the world burns, padded with 8 chapters of examples almost entirely disconnected from the contemporary world.

It feels like Rutger’s goal was to inspire the world’s smartest affluent people to focus more on improving the world than bullshit jobs. To his credit, and to much of the book’s point, if he contributes to 1% more of the world’s best and brightest graduates to chasing a morally ambitious career, one could easily argue it’s one of the most important books of our time.

On the other hand, it really felt like a book for just that specific audience of his peers. The vast majority of people aren’t in a situation where they can dedicate their lives exclusively to improving the world. Presumably those people won’t buy this book though, so maybe I’m just reacting to not feeling like I got what I was hoping for.

I was hoping for more of the book to be dedicated to helping people find THEIR best way to drive impact. People have different backgrounds and skills, and the internet has made the mountain of ways the world is fucked up seem so vast and impossible to impact that it makes nihilism an appealing logical conclusion. I was craving a great thinker’s perspective on how to navigate that to help myself along the journey towards picking a new, and more personal, dream to chase. I ultimately didn’t really get that.

Thanks for reading,
-Cabe