How to use your talent to make a difference

Author Rutger Bregman suggests that your natural inclinations are best used to bring joy and happiness to others, just like it did for businessperson Rob Mather

- Author Rutger Bregman

Most people who see something sad on TV go on with their lives the next day. Not so, Mather. He couldn't get Terri out of his mind and decided he had to do something.

I: Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference,Rutger Bregman explores how time andtalent are our most squandered resources.In this excerpt, Bregman tells the story ofBritish executive Rob Mather and how hewas inspired by a documentary about aseverely burned girl. After helping her, heused his business acumen to launch a globalmovement to raise funds and awareness tocombat malaria.

How to begin

I'm going to tell you the story of a British executive who suddenly got fired up for a cause. His big change is extra-interesting because you probably wouldn’t have seen it coming. He sure didn't.

This guy had an established career, a comfortable life, and was well over 30 (which, as we all know, is the official cutoff for doing anything remotely radical). Already quite successful in a traditional sense, he one day asked himself: this is it? This is my life?

It all started late in the evening on 9 June 2003. Rob Mather was sitting on his couch in London, watching the evening news. He'd wanted to turn off the television, but as he later explained: “I’m rubbish with a TV remote control, and that led to a major left turn in my life.”

The television jumped to a channel showing a documentary about a girl named Terri.

One evening in November 1998, when Terri wasn’t yet two, her mother put the little girl to bed and tucked her in. Maybe it was exhaustion, maybe it was stress, but Terri's mother had done something she normally never did. She'd lit a cigarette in the house — a cigarette she then forgot at her child's bedside. When firefighters rushed in not much later, they first thought there was a black plastic doll in the baby bed. Until they heard a soft whimper.