Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference by Rutger Bregman

BATB score: 9.5/10 🥹

reader discretion advised not an easy read, book is trying to make a very unpopular difficult point, not early retirement but never retire to fight for a cause for the betterment of the world 👏 💯

Best to: are you team Gandhi or team Greta Thunberg; are you pure zen 🧘‍♀️ for self or passionate activist 🏃‍♀️ for humankind?

“Moral ambition is the will to make the world a wildly better place. It’s a longing to make a difference - and to build a legacy that truly matters.”

BATB lingering thought: best elevator pitch “the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads [instead of making the world a better place]”

Best for: you. now. you.

Best as: how to start a protest and how many protest fail to make changes

Best quotes: “I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be ‘happy’. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to he honorable, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.”

“People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”

“You don’t do good things because you’re a good person. You become a good person by doing good things.”

“We are here, not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.”

“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.”

“Your legacy is never one thing. Your legacy is every life you’ve touched, every person whose life was either moved or not. It’s every person you’ve harmed or helped. That’s your legacy.”