1. Don’t stop at “a little bit better.”
“Often, when people talk about their ideals, they say something like, ‘Let’s make the world a little bit better,’” Rutger says. “I’ve always disliked that phrase. Why ‘a little bit’? When I hear entrepreneurs talk about their company, they don’t say, ‘Let’s make a little bit of money.’ They’re ambitious. That’s the attitude we should have right now.”
Entrepreneurs understand what changemakers need to know: there is no point in stopping at the bare minimum. Moderate ambition needs to moderate results—and revolutionary change requires revolutionary thinking.
“We face enormous challenges as a species,” Rutger says. “So we have to look for our moral maximum. How far can we push ourselves? Life is short. It lasts for around 4000 weeks, and then we die. So we might as well do something really interesting, meaningful, and worthwhile with our lives.”
2. Ditch the urge to be “right.”
In 1783, a group of a few dozen businesspeople in Britain decided to take on one of the world’s oldest and most entrenched institutions: the slave trade. And they succeeded—not by fighting moral wars, but by understanding the power of pragmatism over purity.
“They asked themselves if they should take down the whole system of slavery, or first focus on the transatlantic slave trade,” Rutger says. “They had one very powerful argument against the slave trade: their discovery, through dogged investigative journalism, that 20% of white British sailors died during voyages across the Atlantic.”
It may seem strange to us that the activists put that argument forward instead of mobilizing around the needs of enslaved people. But while British politicians didn’t care about the latter, they certainly cared about the former. “The abolitionists were smart enough to leverage that to push forward the law that eventually banned the slave trade in 1807,” Rutger says. “I deeply admire that pragmatism, because people who currently suffer under oppression, inequality, and poverty don’t care about the fact that people like us are ‘right.’ They care that we achieve results, and that we get things done.”
3. Think bigger. Then think bigger than that.
We’re facing down an innovation crisis. Not a crisis of ideas, or talent, but a crisis of ambition strangled by bureaucracy.
The symptoms are everywhere, but Rutger points to the UK, where reopening a 3.3-mile train line took 79,187 pages of paperwork: 14.6 miles printed out, or 4.5 times the length of the actual railway. Meanwhile, during the time the US produced practically no high-speed rail lines, China built almost 30,000 kilometers of it.
And this isn’t just about trains. Europe has massive institutes for regulating AI—complete with armies of regulators—despite having barely any AI companies to regulate.
The solution isn’t to abandon all regulation. “But for me, social democracy has always been about building first and regulating after that,” Rutger says.
The entrepreneurial instinct—the drive to build, scale, and create—is what separates societies that shape the future from those that merely manage decline. If we want to change the world, we’ll need to dream bigger, and get rid of the red tape stopping others from doing the same.
Your 4000-Week Business Plan
“No one wants to lie on their deathbed thinking, ‘I wish I saw more boring PowerPoints,’” Rutger says. If we really want to change the world—in a big way, not simply by shipping our minimum viable product—we have to combine the idealism of an activist with the ambition of an entrepreneur.
And the business leaders who already know how to execute have a massive advantage in creating change. So when it’s time for your next project, consider choosing something that isn’t a new app or platform. Choose something that historians will look back on in 200 years. “There’s so much more out there,” Rutger says. “You can build a legacy that actually matters.”
To hear more from Rutger…
Learn more about him here, and get in touch with us to book him to speak at your event! And watch his episode of Lavin Voices here:
