Of all the things wasted in our throwaway times, the greatest is wasted talent. There are millions of people around the world who could help make the world a better place, but don’t. I’m talking about the ones who have got the power to shape their own careers, though you would never know it from their utterly unsurprising résumés. About the talented folks with the world at their feet who nonetheless get stuck in mind-numbing, pointless or just plain harmful jobs.

There’s an antidote to that kind of waste, and it’s called moral ambition. Moral ambition is the will to make the world a wildly better place. To devote your working life to the great challenges of our time, whether that’s the climate crisis or corruption, gross inequality or the next pandemic. It’s a longing to make a difference – and to build a legacy that truly matters.

Moral ambition begins with a simple realisation: you’ve only got one life. The time you have left on this Earth is your most precious possession. You can’t buy yourself more time, and every hour you’ve spent is gone for ever. A full-time career consists of 80,000 hours, or 10,000 workdays, or 2,000 workweeks. How you spend that time is one of the most important moral decisions of your life.

So what do you want on your résumé? Do you go for a respectable, if bland, list? Or do you set the bar higher? Morally ambitious individuals don’t move with the herd, but believe in a deeper form of freedom. It’s the freedom to push aside conventional standards of success, to make your own way along life’s path, knowing that it’s a journey you can only make once.