Lessons - How One Man's Mission Transformed Global Water Access | Scott Harrison - charity: water Founder

In this lessons episode, discover how a journey from addictive pursuits to humanitarian service can spark profound transformation. Learn why leaving self-serving habits behind paves the way for true purpose and impact, and understand how leveraging storytelling and personal skills can mobilize global change. So, I've heard you speak about how you were always trying things that would be considered addictive. So, like drugs, alcohol, gambling, women, you would always, like you try these things for a period of time, but then you'd get bored and you'd shut off and you'd go on to the next thing, and it was always about seeking purpose. And I'm curious how, after seeking purpose in all these, you know, traditional vices, how none of it paid off, and none of it really gave you what you needed, what prompted you to do that 180, where you realized, okay, outside, if somebody's from the outside looking in life looks great, life looks like I'm fun, I'm kingshit, I have a hot girl, I mean, I have influence, whatever, but what was that point that you realized that all these vices that you were trying to find purpose and were not really doing it? Yeah, well, in many ways it was a spiritual awakening, so I hit that kind of moment in South America where I just remember, it was almost like the game of musical chairs, and for the first time, the music stopped and I had nowhere to sit down. It was a jarring existential moment where I think if I put it in a sentence, I realized there will never be enough. Someone will always have more, and I was actually surrounded with people who had more, who had planes, who had, you know, yachts, and they seemed unhappy too. So this endless pursuit of more would never bring the happiness. And so what is the opposite of that? You know, the self-serving. So I look to God, and I remember reading the Bible again, and you know, rediscovering that faith as a 28-year-old without it being shoved down my throat, without being told what I must believe. I remember just thinking like, well, Jesus is kind of badass. He's not religious. In fact, he was raging against so much of the religious establishment of the day. And, you know, he was really all about service, you know, pouring your life out for others, so that others can flourish, so that others can benefit. I remember coming across this book in this verse in the book of James, where it said, you know, if you care about true religion, true religion is this. Look after what does in orphans, and just keep yourself from being polluted. I'm like, I'm frigging over too. I mean, I have done nothing to look after anyone in the widow and orphan category, and not only am I polluted, I actually pollute others for a living. And the more people I pollute in my clubs, the more money I make. So it was a lot of these things happening, you know, kind of reaching the end of rope, reeling this would, realizing this would not make me happy, kind of coming back to this lost faith and spirituality and morality. And then just needing an idea, which was actually, you know, went back to this concept of the tithe. When my parents were growing up, they would always give 10% of whatever they made to the church. And I was like, well, what if I tithe time? I just blew 10 years. What if I gave one of the 10 years in service and just saw where that would take me? And, you know, interestingly, it was almost impossible to volunteer. And so I remember applying to the first 10 humanitarian organizations from the Red Cross to World Vision to save the children and, you know, nobody wanted a nightclub promoter. These are serious doctors without borders. It turns out once doctors to join their mission, you know, not club rats. So it became incredibly frustrating because I now had the desire to try something different to serve and nobody would take me. And then I was very fortunate that, you know, I call it the 11 organization, you know, wrote me back and said, hey, if you're willing to pay us $500 a month, and if you're willing to go live in the poorest country in the world, you can join our mission. And I just remember thinking, I mean, that is really the opposite of my life, you know, going from clubs in crystal champagne to a post war country in West Africa and actually having to pay money to be of service. What was the organization? And, and is that how like outside of all the ones you apply to, is that how they operate? They actually get you to pay. They do. They do. They do. Exactly. Exactly. It's a brilliant model. They're called mercy ships. They sell a, well, now a couple of hospital ships up and down the coast of Africa. Very simple ideas. Let's recruit the best doctors and surgeons from around the world. Let's invite them, you know, on effectively a cruise liner that had been converted into state of the art floating hospital. And then let's sail up and down the coast of Africa, pull into port and offer free life changing surgeries to people who can never afford them and who don't even have the medical facilities in their country. So what I joined as was the volunteer photo journalist for this was going to say, what, what, what was that? What's the most for motor going to do on these boats? And it's kind of funny because I was not technically a photo journalist, but I was a pretty good writer and I was a pretty good photographer. So I put up a blog with some of the stuff I'd written and I put up some of my hobby photographs, you know, in fashion and, you know, beautiful buildings in Prague and Paris. And, and I don't even think I realized it at the time, but I was in so many ways uniquely qualified for this job because I brought with me a guest list of 15,000 people who I had emails of because I got them drunk over the last 10 years. So here I land as kind of the storyteller through pictures and and words in West Africa for this medical ship. And I get to work you know, bombarding the 15,000 people that a few weeks earlier I had been inviting to come get drunk and I start sharing photos of cleft lip surgeries and cleft palettes and tumors being removed and cataracts being removed and people getting their sight for the first time. And I was so in awe of the work of these compassionate doctors who like me had flown into West Africa to pay, which which all that money, like you said, helped the organization run. And I'm just blitzing my list and, you know, of course there were some unsubscribes at first to help people didn't sign up for, you know, facial tumors in Africa being removed. But after that first wave, the list actually began to grow as people would forward these stories to their friends and then they began to send money. And I started to realize maybe the same skills that I had developed, you know, filling up 40 different nightclubs over 10 years, you know, throwing the party. These skills could be used in a compassionate, redemptive way to actually save people's lives. And I wound up raising a lot of money for mercy ships that first year, raising a lot of awareness. And then when that year ended, I just didn't know what was next. So I just went back to Liberia for a second year. And that is really when I discovered why so many people were sick. And just to give you an example, you know, our third day on this mission, I remember waking up in five in the morning, putting them in hospital scrubs and jumping in this convoy of land robbers with doctors and surgeons and nurses. And I had two Nikon D1X cameras around my neck. And I learned that we're going to the patient screening. And this is where we receive all of the people who have heard about the coming of our doctors. And it's kind of like a cattle call. It's like a big casting. It's an audition for surgery. And I knew we had 1500 available surgery slots to fill. We could hit out 1500 surgery cards. And I remember just thinking, you know, is it possible that there's 1500 people who need facial surgery or cleft lips or eye surgery? And it turns out the government had given us the soccer stadium, the football stadium in the center of the city to triage these patients. And as we approached the stadium, I'll never forget, there were more than 5,000 people standing in the parking lot waiting for our doctors to arrive, open the doors and begin screening. And that hit me really hard, you know, realizing, oh my gosh, we're going to send 3,500 sick people home. 3,500 people with deformities because we just don't have enough doctors. We don't have enough time here in this country. And, you know, it was a really, really hard thing. I learned later that many of these people had walked for more than a month. Some of them had come from neighboring countries with their children walking for a month just in the hope of getting their child to see a surgeon. And we didn't have enough of them. So the first year was a lot of both sadness around the people we couldn't help, but then also learning the skill of focusing on the hope and focusing on the people who we could help and telling their stories. And hoping that by telling their stories, more people would want to contribute, more people would want to send money for surgeries. We could expand the capacity of the work and hopefully one day reach all 5,000 people. The second year was going into the villages and seeing how people were living in one of the poorest countries in the world. And I learned something very, very simple. Half of the people were drinking dirty water. Half of the people in the country were drinking from open swamps and ponds and muddy rivers. And I learned that half of the disease in the country, according to the World Health Organization, was waterborne. And in the second year, you know, so now I'm 29 years old, I'm back in Liberia. I just kind of feel like I have found the thing that I want to work on. You know, why not jump to the root cause of so much of this sickness? And for me, that was dirty water. But I finished that tour and I came back to New York City at 30 years old, completely broke, found myself actually $30,000 in debt because my club partner had not dissolved the business. Like he said, he was going to do no already paid taxes. So I had a big tax bill. But I knew exactly what I wanted to achieve in life. And that would be to try to bring clean water to every human being on planet earth before I died. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.