774 Change the World for Good

REJECT APATHY. There is suffering happening all over the world. We all can do something. Children can be a great example. When you see a kid give up what little allowance they have to help someone else or set up a lemonade stand, you realize that what you’re able to give is enough. We can’t just turn a blind eye. For this Five Minute Friday, I revisited a conversation I had with Scott Harrison where he talked about living a life of giving. Scott Harrison was working as a nightclub promoter in New York when he became “morally bankrupt.” He sold all of his belongings and set sail to Africa in an effort to redeem himself. He returned to New York with one goal: to provide clean water to everyone on earth. Twelve years later, he’s raised over 320 million dollars and provided water to people in 26 countries with his nonprofit charity: water. He may not be driving a fancy car or going on huge vacations, but he is ending suffering for hundreds of people a day. For him, that means so much more. Learn what it takes to change the world for good in Episode 774. In This Episode You Will Learn: The biggest lesson Scott Harrison has learned (1:30) About the children who have gotten involved in solving the water crisis (3:00) About the donor who saved charity: water (5:00) Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is Five Minute Friday.

• 0:09Lewis Howes?

  Scott Harrison, after a decade of indulging his darkest vices as a nightclub promoter, he declared spiritual, moral, and emotional bankruptcy. He spent two years on a hospital ship off the coast of Liberia, saw the effects of dirty water firsthand, and came back to New York City on a mission to change the world. Upon returning to New York in 2006, having seen the effects of dirty water firsthand, he turned his full attention to the global water crisis and the then 1.1 billion people living without access to clean water.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  What's the biggest lesson you've learned in the last 12 years, giving your life to service and being on this mission to end suffering with the water crisis?

• 1:01Speaker 02

  It's been, a lot of people feel like it's a big sacrifice. Bro, I know you got offered that big job at Facebook, like, you know, do you ever think you should have taken it? Like, you know, bro, you're driving a Kia Sorento, you know, like, you can't pay for piano lessons for your kid, you know, like, there's this, there's this empathy that a lot of people will have, because I haven't tried to get rich, right? I haven't gone after the money. And they feel like, you know, sometimes like I've made this great sacrifice. And I'm like, I haven't made the sacrifice at all, like, think about it. Today, we will raise enough money to get 3,800 humans clean water for the first time.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Just in one day?

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Today. And then we'll do it again tomorrow, and we'll do it again the next day. So we're filling, you know, stadiums about every four to five days. So from Monday to Friday, you know, Madison Square Garden, we've just filled with people that are getting clean water for the first time and then emptied it out. And Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, we just did it again. That's an amazing thing to be able to do. Yeah. One person every fifteen seconds, you know, as we sit here because, not because of me, because of the community, because of a million people around the world that have joined Charity Water, that have rejected the apathy that would be so easy to embrace with a paralyzing global issue like this, and said, "I can do something. I can donate my birthday. I can give thirty bucks a month. I can build one well. You know, our family can give up holiday

• 2:26Speaker 02

  gifts." I mean, we have kids doing lemonade stands like all over the country. I love the lemonade stands. There was a little girl in Vancouver, Louis, who did twelve, she came across one of our videos online, was so offended by the fact that people are drinking dirty water, that kids don't have clean water to drink. So she does twelve lemonade stands, one of them in the rain, just undeterred. At her last lemonade stand, she convinces a local band to perform on the sidewalk next to the lemonade stand. To attract an audience. To attract an audience. She sells fifty-six hundred dollars of lemonade. Wow. Builds half a well. So these stories keep us going. There was a little girl named Nora who was six, again, saw one of our videos, and goes up to her room that night and she's,

• 3:09Speaker 02

  she, she says, you know, "Should I give or should I not give? Should I keep my allowance? Should I give my allowance?" Right? And it's like this internal bait. She comes down in the morning and she drops eight dollars and fifteen cents on the kitchen counter and draws a picture of herself next to a well in Africa with clean water coming out. Wow. And writes us a note and says, "Dear Charity Water, here's, my name is Nora, here's my eight dollars and fifteen cents, and I don't want kids to die of dirty water." So, you know, this arrives in the mail and we were so inspired. We actually sent a camera crew down, interviewed this astonishing little girl, and on World Water Day, we asked everyone we knew to give eight dollars and fifteen cents and raise like eighty grand. Wow. You know, in her honor, to build eight wells. So these, you know, it's an amazing thing to be able to do.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Did she go to Africa? And she hasn't yet, but, but we should totally take her when she gets a little older. To see where that goes and you know I guess the way that I would love for billions and millions of dollars to flow through you know my hands, our hands, I mean the the way of keeping score is money for others, not money for ourself. My greatest ambition really about money is to actually write a million dollar check personally to a charity someday. Cause someone did it for me at a really, really important time and it changed the game for us. It was way too much money, right? Normally what happens with charities is there's an amount that people are giving, right? Like this is a charity that people give 10 grand to.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Or this is a charity that people give a hundred dollars to. Well, this person came in when we were a charity that gave, people gave 10 grand to and they gave us a million dollars.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  What was the biggest donation before that?

• 4:43Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Fifty maybe or something.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, something like that.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  They gave a million?

• 4:47Speaker 02

  A million.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  It's almost too overwhelming.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  It was a year. It was a year of capital. I tell the story in the books, I won't ruin the drama, but it was at a moment of desperation and this was, this saved the organization from insolvency.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  You needed, you needed the payment in the next couple of weeks probably.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  We were running, we were not, we weren't unable to pay our staff. But we had 881,000 dollars in the bank we couldn't touch.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  And we were unwilling to compromise by either borrowing against it or borrowing one penny. So I was gonna shut the organization down and say Charity Water didn't work.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Oh man.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  This is 320 million dollars ago, but this is 318 million dollars ago. I mean this is.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  This is year one, year two?

• 5:29Speaker 02

  This is a year and a half in. We had raised a couple million dollars for water projects, couldn't keep the lights on, on the overhead account, just couldn't tell our story. And I, I'd been, I'd been praying, if I'm honest, with very little faith, with no faith, that anything would happen for a miracle. I'd been like, God, I need a miracle, like, you know, would the sky part? Something needs to happen here. And a complete stranger walked in off the street, sat with me for two hours and said, "Cool, I'll give a million dollars into the overhead account."

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Crazy. Like, there's the miracle.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  So, so I wanna do that for somebody at some point. So that, you know, the ambition is not a house in the Hamptons or, you know, to drive a Mercedes or anything like that, but I'd love to be able to actually give more generously. I.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  You're not making a big enough salary to do that yet. Because you make a charity salary, right?

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we're benchmarked.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  I mean, for years, the board has always tried to pay me more because the benchmark in New York is higher than I've taken. And I'm like, "Yeah, but I'm just gonna give more away." So, anyway, at some point, it'd be fun to... Maybe it's a side hustle.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.