Moral Ambition: Redefining what success looks like

Daily Maverick

22-07-2025

What if we stopped measuring success by what we gain, and started measuring it by what we give? In Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference, bestselling author Rutger Bregman challenges the self-help era's obsession with personal optimisation and argues for a shift toward more meaningful impact.
Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference, by Rutger Bregman, the bestselling author of Humankind and Utopia, explores the way life hacks and coaching sessions promise to make us mindful and prosperous. No matter how many self-help books we read, time and talent remain some of our most squandered resources.
In this excerpt, Bregman tells the story of British executive Rob Mather and how he was inspired by a documentary about a severely burned girl. He used this as a business acumen to launch a global movement to raise funds and awareness to combat malaria.
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' Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.' — Helen Keller, disability rights advocate (1880 to 1968)
And now for a concrete case from our own times.
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.
For days, Terri was near death. She twice stopped breathing and was twice resuscitated. She lost fingers, toes, her ears, her nose, and a foot. Only the skin under her wet diaper remained intact. But miraculously, she survived. After many weeks, she stirred and spoke her first word since the accident: 'Mama.'
It was all too much for Terri's mother, who was eaten up by guilt. She broke with the family, and Terri's father was left to cope alone. He quit his job so he could care for his daughter. Every morning, he washed her and applied her ointment. He took her to endless hospital appointments, and he slept in her room on the floor next to her bed. When Terri was scared, he held her close; when things looked bleak, he encouraged her.
All the while, there was one thing that kept him going: his daughter's incredible spirit. Terri was upbeat and mischievous, curious and determined. She seemed the only person in the world who could manage to forget her injuries, if only for a little while.
'I'm not an emotional person,' the executive Rob Mather would later say about the night he watched that documentary on Terri. 'But my wife and I had two children, and I'm not ashamed to say that I was streaming.'
Most people who see something sad on TV go on with their lives the next day. Not so, Rob Mather. He couldn't get Terri out of his mind and decided he had to do something.
Awareness
We live in a time where the happy few are increasingly made aware of their many privileges — and rightly so. But awareness alone isn't enough. What can you do with the realisation that you're blessed? I don't think I know anyone with a better answer to that question than Rob Mather.
The first thing you notice when you contact Rob is how swiftly he answers his email. This is a man with lots of energy. When, at my request, Rob tells me about his childhood, it's almost cringey how successful he was — at everything.
At age 11, he was awarded a scholarship to Hampton, a prestigious boys' school in South West London. He soon rose to the top of his class. And as if that wasn't enough, Rob also turned out to be ridiculously good at sports. Athletics, football, the high jump — he did it all. After Hampton, he went on to study at Cambridge University because they had the best football team.
It's true that Rob occasionally didn't finish first. There was the time he applied for a scholarship, came in second, and said to a friend: 'Bloody hell, just wait till I get my hands on the bastard who won.' Turns out the winner was that same friend.
But Rob was used to winning. He'd run the 100m and noticed as he crossed the finish line that the rest of the field was a good 10m behind. That 10m lead was a metaphor for his life.
What followed was an equally successful career. First, four years in Italy as a consultant for a big US company — and skiing every weekend — then two years of Harvard Business School, which Rob says was a wonderful experience. Next, he got the chance to be co-owner of a company that organised conventions, but decided after three years that growth wasn't fast enough and took an executive position at an international media conglomerate.
That's where Rob learned how to make some serious money. The corporation had 46 divisions and 1,400 employees around the world. Some divisions had profit margins of 5%, others 20%. Rob's job was to figure out what the 5% divisions had to do to become 20% divisions, and he was good at it. Each quarter, the company's revenue went up — as did Rob's, who'd negotiated a solid share of the profits in his contract.
So, here's what we've got so far: a schoolkid who excelled at everything, a university student who thrived at Cambridge and Harvard, a man who had it made as an executive and a consultant. That's certainly impressive, but here's the thing: Rob Mather wasn't doing anything particularly unique. He was successful in the same ways many others are successful. He was a cliché of privilege, with his carefree youth, his glorious career, his comfortable life.
And yet I was fascinated to hear Rob recount the first half of his career. Because I knew what was coming next.
Charity swim
When Rob Mather woke up on June 10, 2003, he didn't yet know that his life was about to change dramatically. He'd been looking for a new job for a while now, but he couldn't stop thinking about Terri, the little girl who'd been so severely burned. And so he started a thread on the peerless UK parenting site Mumsnet. I could still find it 20 years later, under the title 'Little girl suffered 90% burns. Charity swim? Email help?'
Rob Mather had an idea. He wanted to raise money for little Terri and had already convinced two friends to join him for a sponsored 22-mile swim, the distance across the English Channel. When his friends were game right away, Rob thought: 'Why not ask more people?'
A few months later, 10,000 people from 73 countries took part in more than 150 swim-a-thons. They raised money in Fiji and Canada, Spain and Vietnam, Tonga and China. Oh, and also on an island in the Atlantic Ocean, where eight Royal Air Force cadets took part in the Swim for Terri.
'What are we doing next year?' one participant asked.
'I wonder if we could get a million people to swim,' Rob blurted out.
But for what goal? Terri now had enough in savings to last the rest of her life, and this time Rob wanted to set the bar higher. Far higher. With the second edition of the swim-a-thon, he wanted to do as much good as possible for as many people as possible.
And so he started to brainstorm his next good cause. Heart disease? Nah, that's largely a first-world problem. Cancer research, then? Lots of money already goes to that. Landmines? Too political. Clean drinking water? You need at least a trillion for that. Diarrhoea? Much too complicated. Tuberculosis? Also difficult. What about malaria? Let's see: malaria is a leading cause of death in pregnant women. One of the most common causes of death in children under five. About 500 million cases a year, and 3,000 dead children every day.
Wait. Three thousand dead children every day? That's the equivalent of seven full jumbo jets going down. Is there a solution? Yes, malaria pills. But then you're raising money for the pharmaceutical industry. Is there another solution? A mosquito net. Treat it with insecticide and you're good to go. What does something like that cost? A few bucks. That sounds simple. Great, I love simple. Does it work? Bloody hell, thought Rob, why isn't more money being put towards this?
Rob made a few calls to malaria experts and soon understood he'd stumbled upon a no-brainer. The world wasn't doing nearly enough to fight malaria. In 2004, only five million mosquito nets treated with long-lasting insecticide were distributed worldwide. That may sound like a lot, but not when about 3.2 billion people live in places where they're at risk of getting malaria. At the same time, scientific studies indicated that just a few hundred mosquito nets could — statistically speaking — save a child's life.
World Swim Against Malaria
And that's how World Swim Against Malaria was born. Now, Rob just needed to convince a million people to take part, so he applied the 20-minute rule.
'I often challenge myself in thinking: If I want to do this thing that I'm trying to do, how would I do it in 20 minutes?' In this case, the answer seemed simple. He started with 20 phone calls to 20 well-connected strangers, asking each of them to find 5,000 swimmers. If that worked, he'd have 100,000 people — a great start towards that one million. 'It's simple,' said Rob. 'If we swim, we save lives. If we don't swim, we don't save lives. So let's swim.'
Once Rob and his team hit the milestone of 100,000 swimmers, they paid a visit to a billion-dollar fund in Geneva, Switzerland.
'Do you realise you are the largest malaria advocacy group in the world?' they said there.
Rob was surprised.
'Are you telling me that 20 phone calls out of the back room of my home in London have created the world's single largest advocacy group for the world's single largest killer of children?'
The answer was yes. In 2005, more than 250,000 people from 160 countries took part in the World Swim Against Malaria. The Times spoke of the 'greatest charity splash in history'.
And that was just the beginning.
Rob initially intended to go back to his work in management. He'd had a lucrative offer to take over as director of a major chicken corporation. But the idea of selling dead birds suddenly seemed a tad depressing. And he'd only recently set up the Against Malaria Foundation, or AMF, to distribute all the money raised from swim sponsors. Could he maybe do something more there?
In the business world, Rob had seen that sweeping change often works like toppling dominoes. You just need to find out where the dominoes are set up and then give the first ones a push. Rob was brilliant at locating those first dominoes, and so his anti-malaria movement kept growing and growing. Time and again, he'd apply his 20-minute rule, which meant making the most phone calls he could in the least amount of time.
Key ingredient
In fact, it's those phone calls that are the key ingredient to Rob Mather's success. Rob doesn't shy away from asking other people to help, even if he's never met them. The result? The Against Malaria Foundation doesn't have to spend its funds on bookkeeping, the website, or legal advice, because that's all provided pro bono. Everything can go to those in need.
At the same time, Rob is also critical of the nonprofit world — the lack of transparency, the lack of accountability, and the lack of in-depth evaluations. That's why he wants everyone who donates to be able to see exactly what's done with their money. Every donation is logged on the foundation's website, and you can follow each delivery. The mosquito nets are distributed by local partners, and an independent third party checks to make sure the nets reach their destination.
All this time, Rob hasn't spent a cent on marketing, focusing instead on building as efficient an operation as possible. He's also never sought the limelight for himself. This is the first time he's talked extensively — at my request — about his incredible career. DM