Ambition: Redefining Success for a Restless Age cover

Book

Ambition: Redefining Success for a Restless Age

By Hugo Brooks

Published 2026

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About this book

Ambition is not the problem. Our failure to understand it is. It is the most fundamental human force there is. The desire to make tomorrow better than today. The energy that builds things, changes things, and creates the future. The problem is that most of us never examine it. We let it run, driving us forward toward destinations we chose without thinking, at a speed that leaves no room for questions. Life Force, the first part of Ambition, begins that examination. A serious attempt to understand one of the least examined forces in human life. By really understanding it, everything changes. What comes next will take that understanding into the society we're collectively building, and into your own life and the choices you make within it. The series will conclude with a set of tools to help you use this force deliberately — to recreate the life you genuinely want. But it starts here. With the question most driven people never stop long enough to ask. What is this force that's been running your life?

PoliticsPhilosophy & Social SciencesSocial SciencesSociologySociology of Work

About Hugo Brooks

Hugo Brooks, podcast guest

Ambition Strategist & Author

35+ years Building, growing and selling businesses4 global brands Advised Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nestlé and VirginPublished author Ambition: Redefining Success for a Restless AgeMagnetic North Coaching practice

Hugo Brooks is an Ambition Strategist, speaker and author who helps founders, business leaders and ambitious creatives rethink one of the most powerful forces shaping their lives: ambition.

After more than 35 years building, growing and selling brand, innovation and communications businesses, Hugo reached a turning point. Having advised global organisations including Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nestlé and Virgin while navigating the highs and lows of entrepreneurship himself, a single question from his wife changed everything: "Are you sure you want to do this again?" That moment led him to step off the entrepreneurial treadmill and dedicate his second career to helping others build success that is consciously chosen rather than unconsciously inherited.

Today, through coaching, speaking and his book, Ambition: Redefining Success for a Restless Age, Hugo challenges the conventional belief that ambition is simply about achieving bigger goals. Instead, he argues that ambition is a powerful human force that drives almost every decision we make -and that the real question is not how ambitious we are, but whether our ambition is taking us where we truly want to go. Drawing on evolutionary biology, neuroscience, social history and his own entrepreneurial journey, he helps leaders understand the hidden patterns that shape their choices and shows how to align ambition with the life they genuinely want to build.

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