I Told Harvard Students They're Wasting Their Lives

Every year, the smartest students graduate from the world's best universities. They're talented, driven, and full of potential. They've spent two decades being told they're going to change the world. And then many of them go to work for McKinsey. Or Goldman Sachs. Or a corporate law firm where they'll spend their twenties writing memos for clients they'll never meet, making rich people even richer. Meanwhile, the biggest problems of our time — climate change, pandemics, factory farming, extreme poverty — go unsolved. Year after year, class after class. The talent flows in one direction, and the world's hardest problems wait for someone else to show up. For a long time, I thought the answer was 'more awareness'. If people just understood how broken things were, surely they'd act differently. Then, in 2019, I gave a speech at Davos about tax avoidance, and the video went viral. I waited for the world to change and it didn't, really. So I went looking for something better. I started reading about the great moral pioneers of the past, the people throughout history who actually managed to bend the world toward something better. People like Thomas Clarkson, a young Englishman who in 1785 decided to dedicate his life to abolishing the slave trade, at a moment when almost no one in Britain believed it could be done. He spent decades at it: traveling the country on horseback, gathering evidence, organizing what was effectively the world's first modern advocacy campaign. And, eventually, he and his fellow abolitionists won. What struck me about Clarkson and the people around him wasn't that they were saints. It was that they were ambitious. Wildly, almost arrogantly ambitious. Not about climbing the corporate ladder. Not about making partner. Not about building the next app. About doing actual good, on the largest possible scale. So what would it look like to build a movement like that today? A movement of people willing to take their talent – the talent currently being absorbed by consulting firms and hedge funds – and aim it instead at the problems that actually matter? That's why I co-founded The School for Moral Ambition. We think the most talented people should work on the biggest challenges of our time. It's as simple as that. WHAT WE ARE BUILDING AT HARVARD: → Our first University Fellowship: https://www.moralambition.org/fellows... MY BOOK → Moral Ambition: https://rutgerbregman.com/books/moral... LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR MOVEMENT → The School for Moral Ambition: https://moralambition.org