The Secret Formula to Finding Your Passion | Scott Harrison on Impact Theory

i have learned that you just have to ask and then you have to push through the nose and enough people have said yes now you know to to now impact eight and a half million lives but boy if i could count the no's i mean there's tens of thousands of notes that we've all heard over the last decade hey everybody welcome to impact theory our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams alright today's guest is the founder and ceo of charity water one of the most innovative and impactful charities of the 21st century but his role helping people is about as far as you could get from his beginnings as a nightclub promoter in his 20s from the outside it looked like he had it all he was living a lavish lifestyle making upwards of five grand a night jet setting with the mega wealthy and driving around in fancy cars getting paid to get drunk and spending many a night high on cocaine but after a decade of debauchery chasing money and status he realized that even too much was never quite enough feeling emotionally and spiritually bankrupt he decided to build a life that was 180 degrees in the opposite direction he sold everything and joined a mercy ship on its way to liberia as he boarded the ship he promised to give up all of his vices a promise that he kept and that trip ultimately changed the entire course of his life and the lives of millions of others seeing so many people in need he became absolutely obsessed with the notion of ending the world's water crisis now nearly 15 years later he's well on his way and since launching charity water in 2006 he has helped his community raise over 300 million dollars and build wells in roughly 30 000 villages that serve over 8.4 million people in 2017 alone his organization raised 50 million dollars bringing clean water to an average of 3 561 people a day an average of one person every 24 seconds his staggering philanthropic accomplishments have seen him named to fortune magazine's 40 under 40 list and forbes impact 30 list so please help me in welcoming the man who placed 10th on fast company's most creative people and business list the author of thirst scott harrison buddy me too thank you for having me dude thank you for being here your story is absolutely insane and what i want to start with is something that came up over and over and over which i was really captivated by it's this notion of redemption which isn't something that people really push you on a lot but i want to hear about that what what is the notion of redemption to you and why is it so important gosh i mean for me my decade of debauchery really started as an act of rebellion i was this christian kid you know brought up in a really conservative family playing by all the rules and then i just had this moment where you know i said now it's my turn you know now it's time to go and explore the other side and you know it started with smoking and then drinking and then drugs and then gambling and then pornography and you know one by one you know i just took on the vices of nightlife and 40 clubs and 10 years later you know i found that i i hated who i was i mean i was rotting inside and this selfish pursuit had left me um the most deeply unhappy person that i knew so for me that you know redemption was trying to come home it was it was a almost a nostalgia for the the virtue and the morality and the spirituality that i've been brought up with that i had rejected it really felt like it was a clean slate that allowed for me to be able to redeem the the past and you know you mentioned this but i went on a hospital ship to west africa and the cool thing was that from day one uh i was able to communicate a very different story to the 15 000 people on my list i mean i'd amassed an email list of 15 000 of some of the most influential people in new york who were going out spending 25 dollars on a cocktail 500 on a bottle of champagne so they went from getting invited to you know the prada party at the opening of a new mega store to this really life-changing redemptive humanitarian work so it wasn't lost those years weren't lost i was able to kind of use them from day one do you think anybody can start over i really do and that was that was really one of the reasons why i wanted to write the book and and why it's so personal i mean my wife was like i can't believe you tell people some of this stuff you know no one no one goes uh i think she was just expected surprised at how honest and it was about how really bad i was and i think so many people believe that their past defines them and you know i can never start over um you know the things that i've done uh are are you know are impossible to overcome and i would hope that my story i mean at 28 years old if you had run into me what 15 years ago there was this moment at 28 when i had gone out to dinner at 10 the club at 12 after hours at five i'd stumbled home coked out of my mind at noon right i'm taking ambien to come down and i remember grabbing a comforter trying to block out the windows right so that i could sleep and i look out the window on houston street in new york city and i see people on their lunch break in suits like normal people going to lunch or to you know to the gym and you know you would my life is so unrecognizable now from that um i think it took a commitment to walk away completely you know from those vices and really to give it all up but i believe anyone can change it's never too late to change and you can actually use the things in your past use the darkness to you can redeem it now it's really really an extraordinary story now the people that are listening right now that want to have a similar kind of redemptive experience walk them through that moment where because i know you had been trying to give up drugs and alcohol and the other advices to sort of mixed results but then when the mercy ship comes up you're staring at the gangway you're about to walk out you really have this moment what was that moment and how could you help other people get themselves in a place where they could have something similar yeah well the the first cathartic moment was really at the decade point and it was on a opulent vacation in south america so it was it was this moment where i had collected the the markers of success the things that i thought would make me happy right so my girlfriend at the time was on the cover of fashion magazines i drove the bmw i had the fancy watch i had the grand piano in my new york apartment i had the labrador retriever and i was vacationing on a compound in south america with servants waiting on us and horses in the background and magnus dom perignon everywhere and a thousand dollars of fireworks that we just blew up the night before so it was just this picture of okay did it and you know did enough of it and i realized on this trip that there would never be enough it was almost like the veil was lifted um i looked around and saw it for what it was there would never be enough girls there'd never be enough money uh somebody would always have a better car a better watch you know private planes there was it was this never ending insatiable pursuit of more it was a pursuit of of me really a pure and utter selfishness that would have no end and you know i realized that the just thinking about legacy um you know coming up on 30 years old at the time my tombstone was might actually read here lies a man who got 10 million people wasted over the course of his life you know i mean who wants their tombstone to read like here's the guy that got people drunk for a living and there on that on that vacation i asked myself this question what would the exact opposite of my life look like what would the 180 degree turn look like and the it was a life uh virtue you know so if mine was a life of debauchery it would be virtue and instead of vice and it would be a life of service to others and not myself so then there was there were months of floundering and trying to smoke less and trying to quit drugs and just this kind of really uneven uh six or seven months that then culminated with an incident in new york which which gave me an excuse to get out the mercy ship accepting me and then this final hurrah where i just i looked at this 522 foot hospital ship full of 350 doctors and surgeons and volunteer crew who were all there for the right reasons and there was something you know symbolic or almost prophetic about walking up a gangway you know the gangway being pulled up and then sailing away into my new life sailing onto a new continent and you know i went out with a bang i think i drank eight beers that night i smoked three packs of marble reds i remember getting on the ship with the nicotine patch and the gum you know just just realizing that i to to create a new story for my life i really had to go all in you know i had to go cold turkey and you know and i haven't looked at a pornographic image in 15 years and i haven't had a cigarette i haven't touched coke or i haven't gambled um i really walked away from that it's interesting how did you let go of all the traditional trappings of success you know you've talked about you give away like some absurd amount of your money but even compared to what you were making it's a lot less now than it was back then yeah um what is it neurochemically is sort of how i view the world but what was it in in that the way that it makes you feel or whatever that's allowed you to commit so deeply i think it was when i realized that money would not make me happy there was a freedom of just saying okay i'm going to stop pursuing that and then when i realized that giving money away or raising money to give it away really did make me happy that became the new mattress of success my greatest ambition personally around money is i want to write a million dollar check to a charity um at a certain stage because someone did that for me and they completely changed the game you know a stranger walked in at a moment when we absolutely needed the confidence and we absolutely needed the capital and they wrote they were extraordinarily generous i love that how do you so to me you're a very effective entrepreneur as well as having run just an extraordinary charity but tell us a little bit about how you started as a nightclub promoter not to glorify but the the things that you did to get into that business i think are applicable across the board um the thing i'm most interested in was when you called the guy up and said you want somebody to work for you for free yeah well i got i got my start in nightlife it was a club called nels in new york city and i i was i played piano growing up and i loved music and i kind of stumbled into eventually producing what was the biggest r b open mic night in new york city at the time and and i just had a knack for putting together the band i was working with a great partner at the time and and finding creating this environment in this culture where artists wanted to come and try out their material and just a safe space so stevie wonder would come and brian mcknight and whitney houston and prince would come and perform and and and i grew that for a while and then someone said well that's great you're doing this thing but i bet you can't do the same thing in fashion you know this is a completely different world and this new club uh opened up uh and the the owners were on the cover of new york magazine the four owners and it was a dare it really started out as a dare between someone that i that i wanted to i wanted them to respect me and i said well they say i can't do it let me see if i can let me see if these skills will port over from music into fashion yeah i just called i left 30 voicemail messages i've always been pretty tenacious um if i if i really want something you know i go after it and i can i can push through a lot of no's i i probably left 30 voicemails until finally the club owner called me back and he said okay i'll give you a shot on our deadest night it's a monday night i'll pay 150 and you know i took that start and then wound up you know working at 30 fashion type clubs over over the last year i want to go back to something you just touched on about tenacity you said when you really want something that you can be quite tenacious and 30 phone calls in the book you talk about something that i thought was really bizarre and wonderful which was that you convinced the doctor when you were a kid to let you watch an autopsy yeah tell that story and then the punch line which i loved i grew up wanting to be a doctor as a kid who would help sick kids like or help sick people like my mom get well and you know i remember that the the science class when you dissect the frog i just thought that was fascinating and you know i probably told my friends you know i think i'm going to go dissect a human so i figured out you know who was the local pathologist um and this is you know maybe three blocks from our big four thousand person high school and call him write him you know figure out uh hey sir i really want to be a pathologist right you know i give him a whole kind of story of you know your profession is the most interesting to me and you know next thing i know i'm cutting i got a scalpel in my hand and a saw and i'm cutting through a human you know down in the basement of the medical ward as his assistant i thought i thought it was just absolutely fascinating but it was just simple i just asked you know there's so many there are so many things that that over the last years i've been surprised that people have just said yes the things that you might you might not even have the courage to ask for um it was interesting we a couple years ago we did a gala we had shot it's actually three years ago so virtual reality first hit the scene and i saw one of the earliest vr films and said this is something charity water has to embrace as a technology and the the idea of being able to intravenously deliver empathy you know empathetic content into someone and get their full attention for a few minutes while their phone is off and they're in your world so interesting to me so we wound up shooting our first film with eight gopros you know on a stick i mean this is before the cameras that you have now and um we shot a really moving eight-minute piece of a 13-year-old girl who gets clean water for the first time in her life so we have this film and i have this vision of serving the film up at our gala in synchronous viewing to 400 people at the same time and our gallow was in the metropolitan museum of art in the temple of danger right like the amazing egyptian wing of the met with the pool and the glass looking out on central park and 400 people would be coming in black tie and i just had the vision i could see it so clearly they walk in they have their dinner and then after dinner hundreds of volunteers walk out strap headsets on everyone and then at the same time press play and take them all to ethiopia bring them back i hope genuinely moved right i imagine this in my mind tears screaming you know streaming down people's faces mascara running and then i would ask them to give what was in their hearts to clean water so you know i tell my team the idea like cool idea right but we couldn't get the vr devices no one would give them to us so i just wouldn't take no for an answer i was trying to figure out could we go buy it was about 800 for the package it was a it was an expensive phone and then this is this is pre-oculus and all the stuff that we had now it was gear vr and i just it was no after no after no it was too expensive to buy i was looking into could we buy 400 and list them on ebay the next day and take the hit and and everyone's just saying no no no we can't do it it's too expensive i just i wouldn't let go i found my way to the verizon cmo eventually convinced him to loan us 400 of the new phones and then leverage that to then work my way all the way up the samsung chain and finally got a vp who because verizon did the phone said okay i'll send over pallets of the things and we got him and we wound up getting it all for free i think we raised 2.7 million dollars after people came back to give 270 villages clean water so there's i think a lot of these things start with me me seeing it um at the end you know it's almost like seeing the press release i mean i i can see the day on earth when everybody has clean water you know i can see that drop the mic moment where no human being simply because of where they're born is going to die of bad water is walking five hours to a swamp or a you know a pond or a dirty river and you know there may be a long way between now and that moment but we're you know we're working a little closer to it this year i think it's almost 4 000 people getting clean water every day and hopefully next year it's 5 000 people a day or 7 000 people a day so i typically see these things and then because i could see it almost like it happened the nose just feel like you need you know there are these roadblocks that you need to push through you need to find a way do you talk to your staff about that i find that's really hard to inspire on other people to get them to push past all the no's to maybe not even create the vision because it sounds like you can do that really effectively and give that to them but to get them to really believe that it's possible i teach them how to ask and that they need to ask you know every once in a while someone will email me back and they're like oh my gosh i just pitched some software company for 10 000 of licenses and they just said yes and they were fans of charity water so this we do have a culture of asking and again it's not for us and having a business model where a hundred percent of the money is going directly to provide clean water it makes it easier to ask when i'm asking verizon or samsung for you know half a million dollars of vr gear i'm like it's not for me i'm going to use that gift and i'm going to give you know a hundred thousand people clean water don't you want to be a part of that so i think it's excitement it's asking it's invitation so i have learned that you just have to ask and then you have to push through the nose and enough people have said yes now you know to to now impact eight and a half million lives but boy if i could count the no's i mean there's tens of thousands of notes that we've all heard over the last decade and is there anything specific that you teach your staff about how to ask um you don't want to be entitled ever so it's it's a really grateful ask you're telling the story of what you're asking for why you're asking for it um if you're asking for a gift in kind which we do a lot i mean you know uh for the free web services or free software or you know samsung gave us fifty thousand dollars of tvs for our new office um this is a funny story we we built out our our headquarters in new york and amazing i mean we have these amazing stories of people encountering charity water and being radically generous and we had a landlord who had given us headquarters in new york for eight dollars a square foot in soho you know market was like 60 a foot or something and this landlord then moved us into a new office uh in tribeca as we grew it was 23 25 000 square feet or so and we didn't really have the money to build it out so he says tell you what i'll bring the contractors and the plumbers in and you know you just give them the speech see if you can inspire them so you know he brings them in and i you know i've got some some maybe mob looking guys you know with hands that feel like they're three times bigger than mine crying in the conference room as they are moved by our work and the need and um the impact that we're making and you know this this office this what 1.8 million office build out um i think we got 1.3 million donated because everybody wanted to be a part of it so samsung said we can give you fifty thousand dollars of tvs for kpis and dashboards all around the office and the architect wound up donating all of their fees back and wework said well we'll give you furniture that we have in warehouses because we'd rather your staff be sitting in it to change the world than sitting in a wework warehouse somewhere that's the culture that we're trying to instill and you get enough yeses and then you grab onto that yes and it it powers you through a lot of no's it powers you through the discouragement you've got people working for a lot less than they could be making somewhere else so obviously that's on the side but how do you take somebody that is really pouring their heart and soul into this and still hold them to an exceedingly high standard yeah i'll use my wife as an example so she was the second employee of the organization we worked together for nine years she was the creative director and really built the charity water brand and i remember that people would write her looking for a job and the the incoming would be something like this i love charity water so much i'll do anything you know i'll clean the toilets we've seen this we had i think we had 1500 people apply to be the receptionist um last year at charity water you know 1500 applicants to answer the phones and greet people as they walk into charity water so this this is common and vic would be so she would actually get angry about that she's like i don't want someone who just wants to work here because they like the mission i want someone who wants to be at best at their craft so she said do you want to be the very best graphic designer or the best ui ux designer or the best animator those are the people that i want we want the people that are leaving you know zynga or google or adobe or apple or tesla saying oh my gosh this thing that i do that i've gotten really good at i didn't know that it was applicable to end suffering of others i didn't know that it could be used in a charitable context so we always focus on craft and excellence first in the hiring process and not mission um not kind of the you know the the heartful people now it's our job then to get them really excited about the mission once they come in um we do that you know one of the unique things in our culture is every year we take our whole staff to the field this cost us like a hundred thousand dollars to take them to ethiopia or cambodia or nepal and say even if you are not in any way directly related to the water programs if you're opening up checks if you're um you know if you're working on email marketing if you are the receptionist we want you to meet the people that you're indirectly serving and you know that's that's a really important thing in our culture where you know and the feedback is unbelievable people come back and they meet our local partners and they see wells or rainwater harvesting systems or big you know solar gravity fed systems built and and they realize that that's what their work adds up to it really adds up to humans on the end of you know human lives that are extraordinarily benefiting because of the thing that they do tell me more about innovation so i know that you have a donor who said i'll give you a million dollars a year as long as you keep innovating and you said long ago it stopped really being about the the money but you've continued to push yourself to innovate every year um what does that process look like how how do you innovate a lot of it's had to do with technology so it how can the advance of technology be used for good be used in our context so you know vr when it first came out everybody was talking about porn gaming right there was almost the malevolent uses of vr and people are going to be locked away in these other worlds and not talking to each other we immediately just went to the to optimism how could we take someone across the world deliver a meaningful experience to them deliver a higher sense of connection to the work to the impact that they could make when gps came out and we just realized that you know gps was now something you'd pretty much mount on anything and it could talk to satellites we said well let's put our drilling rigs up for the world to see so we mounted gps units to our drilling rigs and we built web platforms where people could track them driving around ethiopia in real time and then we gave our drilling rigs twitter accounts so they tweet their actual location so it's it's you know if there's a new platform how can we use this platform to tell stories if it's a new technology how do we use this technology to further our values of hyper transparency or our values of connection so any given time there's just a culture where someone can bring a new idea in and then a small group will go and work on it we do hackathons we shut down the office for two days every single year we've been doing that for five years and things get built in the hackathons that you could see online they're real products that come out of those those days when we stop and just think outside the box i love how much you think outside the box and how much you've been able to accomplish and hearing you talk and sitting next to you optimism just like pours out of you what is the importance in what you're doing or anybody for that matter of optimism oh man it's i mean it's essential i think if you are in in any sort of business of of trying to change the world trying to involve people trying to build a movement um i actually heard a pastor say once that those with the greatest hope have the greatest influence and i love that like there are two kinds of people in the world there are people in the world that think the world is getting better and there are people that are i think the world is getting worse who do you want to hang out with and i think bill gates has done such a great job in this with his notes at the end of the year he's like poverty is on like this is the best time to ever live in the world on all of these metrics right from malaria from child mortality even water when i started 12 years ago there were a billion people without water it's 663 million 400 people got access to clean water over the last 10 years now there's so much work to be done it's still 1 in 10 people alive drinking bad water but we are making progress and uh you know i talk about like even those metrics right 3 500 people a day getting clean water that's the positive metric not the 4 000 kids dying today of bad water so i think people are drawn to optimism i think they're drawn to people with hope and you need it for fuel you know if i really thought that we were trying to achieve an impossible task it'd be hard to get up in the morning if i really didn't think that we were going to make any headway or it was a losing battle it would be hard to stay motivated yeah i could literally talk to you all day before i ask my last question tell these guys where they can find you online yeah um charitywater.org the book we have a pretty cool story around the book um i gave away the whole advance and all the proceeds so thirst goes straight to help more people get clean water so the book is actually just turned into now this hopefully this thing where you know maybe it'll help millions of people get clean water and maybe it'll even help some people just encourage them that no matter what their past is like chances are they weren't as bad as i was i believe no one's beyond um redemption so that's just thirstbook.com my last question what's the impact that you want to have on the world i'd like to directly impact at least a hundred million people's lives so i would love a hundred million people to move from dirty water to clean water and we're at 8.4 so 8.4 of the way there and then i would just hope that um that other charities might be birthed through our story um that other you know i i would love to do so many things i mean i lose sleep over the fact that people are going to bed hungry that people are going to bed without shelter you know people are going to bed without access to health care all of these things i would hope that the people would take the charity water playbook they would take some inspiration in you know what a drugged out nightclub promoter was able to you know to do for one issue and maybe even go and start that on a bunch of other verticals and that you know i know it's happened a couple times a couple people have said you came and spoke it my middle school i mean gosh i feel really old now um but there there are people that have said you came and spoke in my middle school my life changed and now i've started a charity and i'm doing it full-time so i would hope that you know i just look at it as sowing seeds you know you're constantly out there telling stories i'm probably making 150 speeches a year and i'm just putting the stories out there and you never know what ground it kind of falls on you know i mean some some is no ground right and some is later grounds you know some takes a really really really long time to germinate and some is wow that impacted me and i am making a change now um one of one of my favorite stories from a speech i was speaking in uh in a in miami um a pastor friend and said hey will you come and speak in my church there's four services right and i'm like sure that's easy speaking four times in a row for an hour it was exhausted i got to the end of this and said you know i'm wiped out it was it was not in a wealthy community so nobody gave money so i just felt like i poured my guts out for no good reason on a sunday except a favor you know for someone i'd met once and nothing happened nothing happened a year later nothing happened a year later nothing happening a year later a few years later i think it was four years later hundred thousand dollar check arrives in the office and it turns out that someone heard me speak that night went home and changed his will he died of cancer four years later and he had written us that night into his well for a hundred thousand dollars ten communities gets even better the family turns up and like we don't really know anything about this organization so they come up to new york they get so involved they've now given hundreds of thousands of dollars so that one of those four speeches that had no impact at the time four years later you know is going to impact tens of thousands of lives maybe hundreds of thousands of lives this family now wants to host us and bring us into their community so you have these moments that you just really you hold on to and say i don't need to measure the impact from a speech in the moment or even in a half decade anymore because you never know how long it might take for that seed to grow um so i would hope sorry that's a really long answer so it was probably a short question not at all that was amazing thank you so much for coming on the show that was really incredible all right guys i love his answer about optimism and that is something that i hope all of you will take away from this interview is that would you rather be with people that think that the world is going to hell in a hand basket or would you rather be around people that really believe that something is going right and that knows how to execute that knows how to do something with that that knows how to think big and then go through all of the no's to finally get to the yes that's the kind of person you want to spend your time with and that is exactly this man he has been out there doing those 150 speeches a year for years and years and years planting all of those seeds so that something really extraordinary could blossom out of that it doesn't matter what your thing is but find your thing find your purpose and go and plant as many seeds as this man has and have the kind of impact that he's having that is something that i wish for all of you guys alright if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care [Applause] hey everybody thank you so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 201,948

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, scott harrison, scott, harrison, charity water, scott harrison impact theory, scott harrison tom bilyeu, How to Lead With Passion, the secret formula to finding your passion, scott harrison charity water

Id: D3E9wPFYOS8

Length: 32min 54sec (1974 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 09 2018

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