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Travis Makes Money
SOLO | Make Money by Building a Life That Matters - Lessons from my Scott Harrison interview
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Spanish Advertiser
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Travis
Foreign.
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Podcast Host
You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by GoHighLevel.com for a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet, just go to gohighlevel.com travis.
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Travis
What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the show. On this episode, it's just me, you, and the mic and my Coke Zero. Oh, man. I don't know what it is, but I just started drinking these recently and I'm a fan. I have to say. I'm a fan. I know I'm late to the party. This has been someone that's been around for quite some time, but, you know, better late than never, I suppose. Anyway, today I am going to be breaking down some of my key takeaways from a conversation that I had. This one is actually pretty recent, so if you've been listening to the show, you know that we've been going through some of my previous guests and giving some of the takeaways from the breakdown of what we talked about. Because it's a question that I get a lot. And so it was actually sort of like a personal thing that I was doing and then sort of thought like, well, if I'm doing this, then might be helpful for other people since it's a question that I get a lot. The question that people ask me is like, you've interviewed all these people. What have you learned from interviewing these people? And so it's sometimes difficult to remember everything because it's been almost nine years and almost 2,000 episodes. So what I was doing recently was just like trying to go through and find some of the gold in some of the episodes that I was doing. And I was like, oh, let's turn this into a series. So on this one, I'll be recapping some lessons and takeaways from an interview that I did with Scott Harrison. Scott is the founder of Charity Water. Charity Water is the America's largest water charity. So in the last 20 years, they have raised over a billion dollars and have brought clean water to over 20 million people around the globe, which I think is awesome. It's a really unique thing. So when we were in Franklin, Tennessee, for a wedding, and that's where Scott's based, and in Franklin, they have this, like, this Exhibit for charity water and we took our kids there and walked through and sat down, watched the video and learned a bunch of stuff about the water crisis. And what was really interesting to me about this charity in particular is that sometimes when you give money to charity, I mean, first of all, my biggest complaint is that you never know where the money's going. But they did something to take care of that problem, which is that they engineered this new way to operate their charity where they have two completely separ bank accounts. One of them is for donor funds. And so 100% of the money that's given to that fund go directly. Those funds go directly to building water projects across the globe. So a hundred percent of your money, when you donate to that, you know, it's going to actually impact somebody's ability to get water. And then they have the other one, which is funded by, I think it's like 146 families or something like that. And they take care of the operational costs of running the charity, which I thought was awesome, because it brings radical transparency to the thing that most nonprofits get wrong, which is managing their funds. And so that's the first thing. But the second thing is that sometimes you can give money to a bunch of charities and the funds are for research or development, like a lot of R and D projects and things like that. And of course, those things are helpful and necessary. I'm not suggesting that that's not. That's something that we should be doing, because it is. But what I really liked about this one is, in Scott's words, is like, this is a 100% solvable crisis. There are still over 700 million people on the planet today that do not have access to clean drinking water, which again, is pretty insane considering the amount of resources that go into, like, treating illnesses and diseases and things like that in third world countries where this is, you know, upstream from that. This is taking care of the problem before the problem. Because if you can solve access to clean water, a lot of those diseases and a lot of that, a lot of those medical problems go away. These people are. And most of the time, Scott said, actually 100% of the time that he's seen it's for whatever reason, the women and girls in the culture that are responsible for getting water to the village. So there was a crazy stat that he mentioned, which I'm completely blanking on right now, and I don't even have it in my notes. So I apologize. But it was some crazy number of crazy volume of hours on a daily basis that Women are spending just collecting water. And so when you go to the exhibit, you can step inside this heated room to get the, and to get an idea. So there's a little treadmill and it's like 90 something degrees.
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Travis
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Liberty Mutual Advertiser
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Travis
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Liberty Mutual Advertiser
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Travis
Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. He's in there on 98 degrees or something in there. And it, and it's supposed to replicate the water walk that this like 12 year old girl is doing like five times a day. She's hiking multiple miles every day to go to this water source to get buckets of water to bring back to her village. And the water's still not clean water. So imagine having to do all of that work and still not being, and still not bringing back water that's clean to, to your village. And this is what people are experiencing on a daily basis. So in his words, this is a very solvable problem. It like they know how to do it, they have the infrastructure to do it. They just need funds. So in his mind I asked him this question. In his estimation, they need about 100 million or a hundred billion dollars. Quite different than a hundred million. A hundred billion dollars and the entire water crisis is solved for the entire planet, which I thought was interesting. So again, another thing where it's like, you know, when you're giving the money, it's going 100% to building water projects. And you know, it's actually a solvable problem which I, which I thought was, was really unique. So there's several lessons that I took away from this because Scott was also a former nightclub promoter. So he's a New York City nightclub, was at the top of the game. He said there was like him and six or seven others that were sort of like the people in New York City of all places, which is a very coveted market when it comes to nightclubs. And he had this sort of awakening where he realized that he was on this hedonic treadmill and that there was never an end goal. And then he just changed everything and moved and volunteered at this charity that went to Africa, which Opened up his mind to the idea, and then he started this charity out of it. And just a crazy, crazy story. So a few of the key lessons, takeaways from this conversation. Number one, sometimes you have to go all the way to the bottom of the wrong life before you can build the right life. So Scott didn't have this, like, gentle awakening over time. He spent 10 years as one of New York's top nightclub promoters. You know, all the drugs, models, cars, watches that you can dream of. Had all of it until half his body went numb one day and had this scare that was undiagnosed. And frankly, it was basically just like, hey, you can't keep living this way. This is an insane way to live. When you're starting your workday at like 1am and then going to bed when most people are just out and about having their morning cup of coffee and you're trying to sleep and it's noon, and then you sleep till 6pm and then get up and go work the night. And it was just like his body almost gave up on him. And so he sat there with the question, if I die right now, what was my life about? And his answer was, a selfish man who got a million people drunk. That was like the thing on his tomb. Like, if you could picture his tombstone, it would say, oh, Scott got a million people drunk. And that was the most honest eulogy that he could come up with, the most honest thing that he could say about his time on the planet. And most people probably would have just like adjusted one or two things and then moved on, or they would've tried to maintain some sort of relevancy in that space and just pivot into something different, but stay in that culture, which makes it much more difficult to change who you are. But Scott just blew up the entire thing, which I thought was really interesting. So sometimes you gotta go all the way to the bottom of the wrong life before you can build the right life. Number two, the environment is the intervention. Scott didn't quit the nightclub world by white knuckling his way through willpower. He sold everything, got rid of all of his possessions, left the country, and moved onto a hospital ship in post war Liberia for a year. And the charities that he was trying to apply to, to, like, work for, none of them were hiring. And so for this one, it wasn't even like he was volunteering. He actually had to pay. He had to pay 500 bucks a month, do this thing. So not only was he not getting paid, but it wasn't even volunteering. He had to pay to do this thing, but he did it. And he found himself on a hospital ship in post war Liberia, which forced him to completely give up all of the things that were ingratiated into his lifestyle at that point. So, you know, the doctors around him on the hospital ship weren't smoking. You know, there wasn't clear access to alcohol and drugs and cigarettes aboard this, this ship that was basically like a refurbished cruise ship that they built into a mobile hospital bed ship that stationed in the port there. And then they would see as many people as they could. And doctors were. And so the doctors that he was around, these are all medically trained professionals from all over the world who were volunteering their vacation time to do free surgeries for people. So he went from being in this like crazy world of hedonism, where it's the next girl and the next model and the next car and the next bottle of liquor and the next bottle of champagne and all about. All about, you know, seeking pleasure. And then. And then stark contrast to the direct opposite, which is a boat full of a bunch of people who are volunteering their vacation time that could have been spent in Tahiti, but they're here in Liberia giving away free medical procedures. And so the lifestyle that he was used to just stopped being available. And he was very deliberate about this. You can't fix who you are while staying in the place that made you the way that you were. So you have to change the environment, you have to change the container, which is obviously something we talk about on the show a lot. And so I really like that point. So the environment is the intervention number three. The question that he asked himself, I thought was really valuable. The question he asked himself, what would the opposite of my life look like? I think that's a very powerful question. If you're completely dissatisfied with everything going on in your life and you were pursuing the wrong things and you're in the wrong crowds and you know that you're meant for something better, for something deeper, and you want to make a real impact in the world around you. What would the opposite of my life look like? And that was the actual framing that Scott used. Not how do I get a little bit better? Not the 1% better every day type of thing, but what's the exact inverse of everything that I've been doing? You know, he's a promoter telling people they're getting past the velvet rope gave life meaning. So he went and found the most under promoted, ignored, invisible problem in the world, dirty water. And put all of his Promotional skills, marketing abilities, relationship skills that he had from the nightclub world, and put all of those skills to use in this context and built that instead, which I thought was really cool. Number four, radical transparency about where donations go is a competitive advantage. I mentioned this a little bit at the beginning, but this is one of my favorite parts about what has done is sort of reinventing what the nonprofit sector looks like. Because they did a survey, not charity water, but some survey company did a survey and found that like, 78% or something of people in America distrust nonprofits. And for good reason. There's a lot of shitty nonprofits out there who siphon money, mismanage funds, and then just turn you off to ever wanting to give money to other people again because you've been given money to this charity. And then something big comes out in the news where it's like, oh, they found that only 2% of all funds donated were actually going to solve the problem. The rest of it was for bloated executive salaries and things like that. And so when Scott started Turdy Water, he didn't try to argue against the cynicism. Instead, he designed a solution to that problem. So, separate bank accounts. A hundred percent of public donations go directly to water projects with no exceptions. And then they also built technology to show every donor exactly which village their money went to, down to GPS coordinates on Google Earth. And I've actually seen this live in person at the facility that we went to. We can go to a map, see all the projects that have ever been installed, click a little pin, and it shows it an actual picture of the well that's at that location that they built to help solve the water crisis for that particular group of people. So it was the first charity in the world to do this. He turned that skepticism into an asset by making the trust impossible to fake. So when you give money, 100% of it goes to water projects, and then you get the GPS coordinates and pictures and everything of the exact water that your money went to help develop. So radical transparency about where donations go is a competitive advantage. Number five, your darkest chapter can become your clearest purpose, but only if you're honest about what it was. So Scott didn't sanitize his decade in nightclubs. He owned it fully. You know, he talked about the drugs and the strip clubs, the MDMA, the nights stumbling home at 11.30am to try to come down off of the highs and get a little bit of sleep in broad daylight. And that that honesty is really what made people believe him when he pivoted it wasn't a, wasn't a PR stunt. It was a confession of how he was living his life to that point, followed by a bunch of actual action. And then the people who partied with him for 10 plus years were suddenly opening his emails about blind women seeing their daughters for the first time because they trusted him. He'd earned their trust. They knew him from this previous life. And so the first money he ever raised, he came back to raise money for the charity that he worked with in Liberia and raised over a hundred thousand dollars from his email list from the nightclub promotion days that he used to do. So there's a lot of value in owning the prior life that you had, or even if it, even if you're not framing it as regret, you're not framing it as mistakes. Because that's something we talked about in the full episode too, was like, yeah, but would you have had those realizations had you not experienced this sort, you know, almost rock bottom moment? And I understand that rock bottom moment's different than what it looks like for other people, which is part of what I learned from him. Because I think, I think about Scott a lot when somebody asked me about the concept of hitting rock bottom and we talked about this in the episode because his rock bottom didn't look like rock bottom, like what most people would describe as rock bottom. You know, he, he was, he was at the top on the private planes, the yachts, model girlfriend, best clubs in New York City. By every external measure of what most people would equate to success, he'd won the game that he was playing. But inside it was all hollow. And he said it himself. He looked around all these rich and successful people and basically was just like, yeah, they're not happy either. Like, he was at this beautiful resort, on an amazing vacation, sitting on a yacht, looking around at everybody and just realizing, like, this is just a treadmill. Nobody here is happy. Like, they're all trying to, they're all trying to fill that void inside with more alcohol, more models, more yachts, more Rolexes, and nobody's able to do it either. So it's not necessarily like a rock bottom like most would describe it, where he's like broke, sitting in his basement and addicted to drugs and not able to do anything is like he was at least a useful drug addict, a useful alcoholic, and was still doing everything that he was intending to do and doing very, very well with it. But he just had, he still had that moment where he realized that this is not exactly, this is not at all What I want out of. And that moment to me is more useful than any story about someone who's lost everything because that's more. And a, that's more of an apparent wake up call when you lose everything and you have nobody. Like, that's more of an apparent wake up call. This, this wasn't because the lie that Scott had to confront was the same lie that most of us are living. That more will fix it. That if I, that, that this internal problem that I'm struggling with, if I just go get more from life, then that's going to fix the problem. That the next thing that, that you do will finally fix the problem. And he actually tested that hypothesis fully. He was actually able to live this out to its fullest extent. He ran the experiment all the way to completion and came back empty and then asked the only question that mattered. What's the opposite? What is the direct opposite of how I'm currently living my life? And so it didn't just change careers and again pivot into something like whatever. Selling high rises in New York City would have been a great pivot to be a real estate agent in New York City. A lot of similar clientele, a lot of people with big money to spend, a lot of people trying to gain more status could have made a lot more money and gotten out of the nightclub space and then maybe donate a little bit of money. But instead he asked, what is the opposite, the direct opposite of what I'm doing now. He completely didn't just change careers, he changed hemispheres. He changed his entire environment, his entire identity, his entire purpose, and turned the one skill that he built over a decade plus of doing this, which is the ability to get people excited about something and use that skill toward a problem that actually deserved it. So now they've raised over a billion dollars, 21 million plus people that have clean water because of charity water. Pretty solid work for a guy that used to sell high priced vodka and champagne for a living. So there was so many pieces of this that I loved. The, the, the environment thing, I thought was a huge key insight that it was like if he had stayed in New York and pivoted to something like real estate or something like that, it's like he would have made some good money, but like he would have still been in those same environments. It's, it's still, it would have been, it would have been really difficult for him to like give up the smoking, give up the drugs, give up the drinking, give up all the stuff that he was quite literally addicted to at that time if he stayed even adjacent to the culture that he was in. So instead of tempting himself, he just pivoted completely and moved in a, in a 180 degree direction.