The world Is burning. We’re optimizing spreadsheets.

Moral ambition calls us to build careers — and lives — that center our most significant challenges.

We are chasing the wrong things, and we know it.

The two most popular career paths for Ivy League grads today are consulting and finance. And sure, some folks are genuinely passionate about becoming investment bankers or McKinsey partners. But many, many others choose those paths for very real reasons: money, stability, and the narrow definitions of success our culture celebrates.

How do we think differently about this, for ourselves and our children? How do we enable moral ambition?

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This is me on the day that I graduated from Berkeley’s Journalism School. Along with my friend Nigel, I was elected class speaker, and I spoke to the power that journalism can have to enable democracy and effect social change.

These ideas still matter deeply to me. But over the years, competing desires have emerged. I settled in an expensive city. I got married, and we had children. The job opportunities that presented themselves to me were intellectually rich and held the promise of financial security. At some point, I found myself in a corporate role, working very hard and sometimes questioning the nature of the work.

I’m not alone. I know this to be true because I am employed by the single biggest platform for discussions about work, LinkedIn, and I host our flagship show. I hear from you. So many of you write to express the frustration that comes from having arrived in the middle of your careers only to discover that the paths you have pursued don’t feel the way you’d hoped. You’re burnt out. You’re grinding, and the work truly feels like a grind because you can no longer map the impact of all of the Slacks and emails and texts you send and receive at every hour. The money in your bank account doesn’t give you the security that you’d hoped, and you’re tired. Bone tired.

All the while, the biggest challenges humanity faces—climate change, preventable disease, the next pandemic—are starving for creativity, for imagination, for leadership. We’re deploying our brightest minds to optimize spreadsheets while the world is on fire.

This week on Hello Monday, we’re offering a powerful reframe. I’m talking with Rutger Bregman, the Dutch historian and author whose books Utopia for Realists and Humankind have reshaped how millions of people think about the future. His new book, Moral Ambition, challenges us to ask not what we want from our careers—but what the world needs from us.

“Moral ambition is the idealism of an activist and the ambition of an entrepreneur.” - Rutger Bregmen

This conversation isn’t about shame—it’s about agency. Whether you’re early in your career or decades into it, you matter. Your work matters. And you don’t have to figure it all out alone.

With gratitude,
Jessi

Have you worked with a career coach you loved?

Because I spend my days looking closely at what's happening with jobs in any given moment, and how we can prepare to meet the moment (while keeping our bills paid), I also become an informal source of information on careers for everyone from our listeners to the downstairs neighbors to my bff from college. One question I often get: can you recommend a career coach?

I usually keep a list of coaches that I pass along, but it's been awhile since I have refreshed this list. So will you help me make a new one? Most of the people who write in for referrals are actively in transition. They either expect a lay-off or are newly navigating unemployment. They are looking for help reviewing and repackaging the skills they have, often to search for work in new industries, and they hope to be working within six months.

If you've worked with someone you love during a job transition, please drop me a line to recommend them and include WHY you found the work helpful and WHO they work best with.

One deeply hopeful thing I’m thinking about…

I ran into a friend at the local coffee shop last week, and she shared an essay with me that she’d been thinking about since she read it years earlier. It speaks to exactly this moment that we’re in. The Times are Urgent: Let’s Slow Down, by the Nigerian-born philosopher, psychologist and poet Bayo Akomolafe.

He writes: “We must slow down: “The system is not the cause of our problems, it is a consequence of our separation from each other. It is a consequence of our complicity with our own destruction. In other words, we are the system we fight against.”

He offers up a vision for activism post-institutions: “We write because there are conversations that we are yet to have about our true power; we write because we are not as limited and constrained as we suppose. We write because we suspect that this is the finest hour for civic action today. We recognize that for many of you reading this, what we hint at – a new form of deinstitutionalized activism, if you will – represents a leap into the dark…embracing the unknown. Our people think of the dark not as a place of horror and grief, but the place where surprises are stitched, where miracles are sown, where colours are alchemically combined, and where the new tapestries of a preferred existence is buried in wait.”

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