Moral Ambition Is Not a Character Trait. It's a Mindset.

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Moral ambition is not a character trait.

[00:00:03]Moral ambition is not something you're born with. Moral ambition is a mindset.

[00:00:10]Or more importantly, it's a contagious mindset. It's an infectious mindset.

[00:00:15]Um for one of the chapters in this new book I'm writing, I I was looking into the psychology of resistance heroes during the Second World War, which is probably one of the most clear examples of people who are really more morally ambitious, right? Who had the courage during the Second World War to risk their own lives to save other people's lives, to save and and help the Jews.

[00:00:38]And I was fascinated by this question, is there such a thing as the psychology of the resistance hero? Right? Is there something that they have in common?

[00:00:47]And it turns out that there's been a lot of research in this area, hundreds of interviews with with resistance heroes, and researchers haven't been able to find anything.

[00:00:57]There's there's no such thing as the psychology of the resistance hero. It was basically a cross-section of the population. But then when they did some more research, uh they did find that they many of them did have one thing in common. There was one factor that predicted very well whether people would join the resistance yes or no. It was pretty simple.

[00:01:18]It was were you asked?

[00:01:21]So, most people who joined the resistance resistance were simply asked by some other people, like, can you help? Can you join this? Can you actually do this? And then in 96% of all cases, people said, yes. Yes, I can do this. And often they started small, you know, maybe they started with uh you know, distributing illegal newspapers, but then it grew. So, no one starts out saying like, okay, let's hide 10 persecuted people in my in my attic, but it starts growing. Once you start walking the path of moral ambition, you'll realize that um you you can become a radically different person. So, as I said, moral ambition is not a character trait. It's not something you're born with. Moral ambition is a mindset. It's an infectious mindset.