He’s Spent 20 Years Trying to Change The World | Scott Harrison

0:00Jonathan Fields: 20 years ago, Scott Harrison set out to bring clean water to every person and village in the world who needed it, and along the way, save millions of lives. It was one of those rare problems that was actually 100 % solvable. The technology existed. Even if it took a lifetime, it became the defining mission of his life, leading him to launch Charity Water, the billion-dollar movement that began with a birthday party in New York nightclub and grew into one of the most trusted models in philanthropy in the world. What's happened over those two decades, and how it's impacted Scott, his family, and millions of others, is where we're headed in today's deeply inspiring story-driven conversation.

0:40Jonathan Fields: We talk about the pivotal moments and insights in his quest to build something that changes millions of lives. And Scott also shares how he thinks about the tension between mission and family, what it means to build a life around service instead of accumulation, and why work that has no end may be the right work to choose. This episode is Essential Listening. If you care about doing work that genuinely matters, the power of a clear mission, a story well told, and how all of it changes not just you but everyone that you touch, including your family, your friends, and those around you along the way.

1:15Jonathan Fields: So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. and we'll jump right in after this short break.

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2:01Jonathan Fields: This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, hosted by Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of the best-selling book, How to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes, and everyday people about why we do the things we do. Listen to Choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen. Good Life Project is sponsored by Nature Raised Farms. So if there's one thing I have learned after 14 years of deep conversations about living well, it's this.

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3:18Jonathan Fields: No trade-offs, no second guessing. Look for Nature Ray's Farms chicken in your freezer aisle and get back to simply enjoying dinner. Scott Harrison, so great to have you back in the house. It's been eight years, my friend. Way too long. I can't wait to be back with you. This is such an honor. I know. You and I are longtime New Yorkers who have found ourselves outside of New York since late pandemic days. I want to take you back in time. When you turned 31, which as we're having this conversation 20 years ago, you throw yourself a birthday party. Back in one of the clubs in New York City, you raise about 15 grand to provide water for some villages in Uganda.

4:02Jonathan Fields: If that guy walks into Charity Water today, the foundation that that very party birthed some 20 years ago, the foundation that you have built over the last two decades, what would he say? Well, I hope I would try to hire that guy. 20 years on, we need that energy. um i'm reading a book at the moment called from barbarians to bureaucrats trying to make sure uh you know as we turn 20 you know that same uh sense of possibility and inspiration and uh you know craziness in a way uh remains a value of the organization um if he walked in today i don't think he would recognize it i don't think that guy ever knew what an organization looked like behaved like was structured like i mean that guy was a kid who threw a party at a nightclub because he wanted to build a well uh and you know wasn't sure what any of it or how to do any of those things so i'd hope he'd be pretty impressed and think it was pretty cool that that, you know, that one well in Uganda has turned into, you know, over a billion dollars and 216 ,000 projects in 29 countries.

5:27And, you know, certainly more of a going concern now than, than a nightclub party, um, where people threw$20 in. But, uh, I, I think the whole organization now, you know, would, uh, would hopefully be infected by that enthusiasm and idealism maybe.

5:47Jonathan Fields: Yeah. Idealism is an interesting word, right? 20 years, over a billion dollars, some 21 million people with clean water, probably a lot more than that actually, as we have this conversation, over a million people have contributed in various different ways. When I first sat down with you years back, one of the things that really caught me and stay with me is this notion. You basically said, when I first realized that this was a problem, one of the things that you realized at the same time was this is one of those rare problems where it is deep, it is vast, it's global, and it is 100 % solvable.

6:24Jonathan Fields: Solvable, yeah. And I was struck by that, and it stayed with me. So you've been at this for 20 years now, for two decades of your life. It has been your central devotion. Where are we with that? I mean, I probably feature that line and that idea more now than ever before in a world of seemingly unsolvable problems. I feel like the world has gotten more complicated in many ways. A global pandemic, wars, you know, some of these major diseases, which now as we get older, our parents succumb to. um my mom was a big part of my story you know lived her whole life kind of battling a compromised immune system from a carbon monoxide leak and then eventually died of pancreatic cancer in a couple months from diagnosis to death and and doctors had no idea how to solve that problem you know i have a family member with parkinson's they have no idea how to solve that problem my best friend's dad just passed away from als lou gehrig's disease no idea how to solve that problem.

7:34So it seems like we are faced with many intractable problems. But yet, as you said, we know how to give every human being on planet Earth clean water. There's not a single human alive where we're scratching our head saying they're beyond hope. It's so simple. It's so basic. And a lot of different things work in a lot of different environments. So there's no one size fits all solution, but you can always get clean water to people 100 % of the time for 100 % of the planet. And I think, you know, what is, I don't think anger is the right word, but maybe, you know, what has perplexed me at this moment in time, 20 years later, is that we've really done so little to solve this problem.

8:26You know, a billion dollars is a fraction of what I imagined we would have mobilized by now for an issue as basic to humans as water. You know, the fact that, you know, we can record this podcast and while we're comfortably sitting here with our lights in our microphones, there are 700 million humans right now that are drinking dirty water is kind of mind blowing. It's like we have the cure and we've had it for many, many years, but we have not decided to implement the cure. But yet we'll spend tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars looking for other cures, which may, we may or may not find, and specifically cures for health.

9:16but we can't deliver the most basic need for human health to 10 % of the planet. So that keeps me going because I believe it's possible. And, and it's, it's really as simple as mobilizing the resources and mobilizing the will. And the challenge is nobody's experienced this problem. Now I bet nobody listening has ever had to poison themselves with dirty water, drink from a brown viscous river or a contaminated pond, walk eight hours to a far away water source, and then haul 40 pounds of dirty water back home. It's a problem that we just don't interact with. So it's tough to get people to want to solve a problem they have no experience with.

10:07Jonathan Fields: so when somebody says okay i get that i acknowledge that it's hard and i would love to see if there's somewhere in your heart left for you to find a little bit more for somebody on the other side of the world who you will never meet how do you do that i mean you do it through storytelling you do it by telling stories that connect people uh not by statistics not by percentages messages uh not by 90 page white papers on the state of the global water crisis you do it by telling stories of of real people and you know i think that's what has helped us build you know the movement of charity water now to include a couple million donors around the world who have actually resisted that apathy that is so easy to embrace with any of these paralyzing global issues, right?

11:03That don't affect us and has moved people to say, yeah, I can do something. I can help one person or one family or one community or, or a hundred communities. And it's really the stories of the people just like us and who were born in a very different circumstance that don't have that most basic need met. But yet, I mean, many of these communities are living about a hundred feet on top of the resource that could change their lives. But they don't have that$10 ,000. They don't have the drilling rigs, the equipment, the hydrogeologists. They don't have the knowledge to actually access that aquifer of clean water that's trapped in the rock.

11:52And one of the stories that hit me the most, I've gotten to travel now to 72 countries and I've been to Africa 55 times. So I've gotten to see a lot of things around the world. And I was in Ethiopia and this is a place where we've worked for very many years. It's a huge need and there's also just a huge amount of progress that's being made. And our partners were drilling a well. And when you drill a well in a community, it's a party. Hundreds of people come out. They circle this million dollar machine that is spinning and grinding and, you know, turning this, this drill bit into the earth. uh there's about nine locals that will run one of these rig packages they're all ethiopian so it's kind of cool to see this community celebrating people that look like them you know heroes uh and you know about 90 some percent of the the time they're successful and on this village they were successful they find the clean water and then they begin flushing it so this giant stream of clean water from beneath the earth starts shooting up into the sky and people are clapping and they're cheering and the women are dancing and fathers are picking up their daughters and swinging them around.

13:17And, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a moment, right? Where everybody realizes nothing will ever be the same again. You know, clean water has been struck. Uh, and in one of these villages, there was an older woman off to the side and she was not a part of this party, she was weeping as she watched all this going on. And one of our drilling partners came up to her and said, like, I don't think you got the memo. Like, this is a happy day. You know, why are you off here? Like all, you know, verklempt and sad. And she said, because I just realized that my entire life, it was right beneath my feet. And all the children that died in this village, all the walking to these faraway sources, right?

14:03All the attacks by animals and hyenas and all of the sadness and suffering didn't need to happen because it was about 100 feet underneath the village. And that's really, I think, kept me going, knowing that whatever the solution is, whether it's rainwater harvesting or a solar-powered pipe system or a bio sand filter or drilling a well, you have people waiting right now and unnecessarily suffering. And we have the problem. And it's just up to us to solve it, to bring that solution. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

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17:07Jonathan Fields: That's B-O-M-B-A-S.com slash good life. Code good life at checkout. I mean, it occurs to me, you really, you're, so you're simultaneously drilling two wells, right? One, you're using physical equipment to access water and bring it to people in need. And the other using the mechanism of story to open people's hearts and their generosity to help make this all possible. sometimes both heavy lists, um, but the elation on the other side, you know, when you strike water, um, or when you strike generosity. Yeah. I might've told this story, uh, the last time I was on, uh, back in 2018, but, you know, one of the kind of, uh, organization's most famous stories, I think that would illustrate that is, uh, of this little nine-year-old girl named Rachel Beckwith.

17:57And she lived in Seattle. Um, she'd heard me speak at the time we were asking people to donate their birthdays. And instead of accepting gifts or throwing themselves a party to celebrate their birthday, they would donate their birthdays for clean water. And kind of the sticky marketing message was you'd ask for your age in dollars. So if you were turning nine, you'd say, could I please have a$9 donation? And if you were turning 89, you would ask for$89. Well, this little girl, Rachel, she was eight, she was turning nine, heard me speak, you know, couldn't believe that children were drinking dirty water a world away.

18:38And she canceled her birthday party and she refuses to accept any gifts. And she set a$300 goal. And she didn't quite get there, Jonathan. She raised$220. And she told her mom, you know, I feel like a failure. I'm going to try harder next year. I didn't reach my goal. and then sadly right after her birthday she was killed in a terrible car crash it was a 21 car pile up on the interstate her mom was driving she was in the back seat and she was the only fatality as this tractor trailer just took out her car and her life and the family reached out to us and said, we'd love to reopen this campaign that was$80 short.

19:25And story of the story of this little girl who had considered people drinking dirty water more important than what we'd expect every nine-year-old girl would want the stuffies or the party or the celebration. It just traveled around the world and i think it was 59 000 strangers gave nine dollars or more in her honor and she wound up going from 220 dollars of impact to over 1.2 million and what i wouldn't have known the last time i was on if i told that story was that she inspired so many other people to follow her lead and donate their birthday, that they raised millions more. So this little girl, you know, who wanted to help a couple people wound up helping well over 100 ,000 humans.

20:17You know, five Madison Square Gardens, where we're from, full of clean water. Because she got it and she opened up her heart and she tapped into that. You know, there's something about the innocence of a child, I think that sometimes makes us consider our way of life and our values. And, you know, just, uh, she, she never got to live to see that impact. But I remember on the one year anniversary of her death, I got to take her mom and her grandparents village to village in Ethiopia. And they got to meet the children who had clean water because of their child and their grandchild. They got to meet other mothers and other grandmothers who watched their whole communities transformed.

21:04And it was just, it was one of the most powerful things, getting to see two things happen at once. The legacy of a child, inspire 60 ,000 strangers towards generosity, and then to actually see the 100 ,000 people who got clean water as a result.

21:23Jonathan Fields: You know, I hear that story and I hear so many of the other stories that I've heard you share over the years and I see the impact that you're doing and my jaw drops. It's astonishing. And in the right moment, in the right way, people can be incredibly generous. There's something that awakens in them. Never, never, of course, wanting to invite any kind of tragedy as a motivation. But that's led to an incredible amount of impact. at the same time, and tell me if I'm getting these numbers right or wrong. I believe I've heard you say that of the 100 % that we talked about eight years ago and that you sort of said, this is 100 % solvable.

22:04Jonathan Fields: I would like to 100 % solve this. You're probably somewhere over two decades now, somewhere around three to 5 % into that. You're very close. Of the available problem, we've done about 135th. Yeah. So how do you keep working on something that you care so deeply about when the honest scorecard says on any given day that you've barely started and you're turning 51 at this pace, the likelihood of you finishing this in your lifetime is slim to none. So how do you stay in it? well i don't know that i agree with that let me talk a bit about progress so when i started 20 years ago there were a billion people drinking dirty water and there were six billion people living in the world which is astonishing so one in six i remember these shirts we printed like one glass of dirty water five clean okay now we've got you know almost eight billion people in the world but we're down to 700 million people drinking dirty water so we went from one in six to one in 10, one and 11.

23:17Now the pace of progress is far too slow. And as we play this out, you know, we think we're about 60 years from solving the problem. So to your point, Jonathan, I probably will not live to one 11. So I will give you that. But 60 years feels, you know, within reach for a trajectory change or a moment that could change, you know, tipping point moment that could change that trajectory. What animates me 20 years later is knowing that we are working on a solvable problem down to the last human being on earth. I can't overstate that. Like if you knew that whatever you were doing, like a hundred percent of people need your product to live, right?

24:04It's And you feel unanimously, unequivocally good about delivering your product to the entire world, to 8 billion humans. So I feel that way. I've gotten to make a lot of speeches over the last years and do a bunch of podcasts. No one has pulled me aside at the end of a speech or at the end of a podcast and said, Hey, Scott, we think you're wasting your time. Let them drink bad water. like why, you know? Right. So it's kind of this universal, inarguable common good. And we know how to solve it. And we have, you know, I call it a 60 year ish timeline of solving it. If all things are equal and we just keep kind of plotting along.

24:53And there really is that sense that we, because we have showed up for 20 years and we have never compromised our integrity and we've tried to be unbelievable stewards of the money that we have been trusted, um, that you never know, you know, someone can walk in the office and make a billion dollar commitment.

25:14Jonathan Fields: Yeah. Over that 20 year window. I mean, nobody does anything at scale for two decades and has it always go well, were there moments where you showed up one day and you're just like, can you consider walking away or shutting it down? i mean there were a lot of moments i think our business model uh is unique and also existentially difficult yeah for people not familiar with charity water from day one we opened up a separate bank account to pay for all of the staff salaries for the overhead for the flights for the office rent you know anything that wasn't kind of directly going into the construction of a life-saving water project.

25:57And I mean, that posed challenges and continues to pose challenges. I just came out of a three-hour budget meeting. You know, we don't have the funding to do the things that we wish we could do. And in some ways are constrained by that model. Yet it's also led so many people to donate and tell us that it's the first donation they've made because they know 100 % is going directly to help people. And because we bifurcated all of the overhead and all of the public donations, we were able to build out unbelievably cool tracking technology that would track every single donation down to the village and show people who was helped.

26:44So if somebody gave$6.12 of lemonade stand money, we could show the little girl or the little boy where the$6.12 went and make that gift real for them and to restore their faith in giving. So I think that's been kind of, you know, in some ways the blessing and the curse, um, harder to grow because you have to raise all of that growth capital separately. And the way we do it is there's about 150 families who show up in that bank account and their donations go to pay for the hundred and some staff and the flights and, And, you know, and then millions of people in the other bank account have been able to give in that purest way possible, whether they give a dollar or a million dollars, knowing that 100 % goes to help people get water and then is all tracked.

27:34So, yeah, I think that has just posed a lot of extra challenges along the way.

27:41Jonathan Fields: You know, for those who don't know your fuller story, you spent about a decade in New York City as a nightclub promoter. One of the holiest, most honest, sincere careers that you could ever have. For those who don't know, this is the world of promoting. Just put an un and an in between all those adjectives and you've got it. There was a moment in New York City, like in the 90s especially, where you can make a metric ton of money and basically get thrown everything you ever wanted. The most hedonistic way that you could possibly live. And it was good until it wasn't. But you did that for about a decade and then had a moment of reckoning and started a bit of a redemption tour.

28:22Jonathan Fields: But you've used the whole time in Charity Water, I think this was so apparent, especially in the early days when nobody else was doing this, you use your nightclub promoter skills, your ability to tell a story that everybody wants to be invited into to build Charity Water. 20 years down the road, what part of that guy from the clubs is still running this joint? I mean, I think a lot of them. Look, I mean, when you promote nightclubs, and I promoted 40 different nightclubs over 10 years in New York City from 18 to 28, you are trying to convince people that yours is the place to be, right? Get past your velvet rope into your club where you have the best DJs and the best room in the city.

29:10spend a whole lot of money on overpriced alcohol, right? $25 cocktails,$1 ,000 bottles of champagne. And if you do all of this, your life has profound meaning. Well, maybe you leave with a pretty boy or a pretty girl at the end of the night, right? So that's kind of the story that you just keep telling in different ways and variations on a theme for 10 years at 40 different venues, getting people to come and to move and to spend their money. And, you know, I think what I realized at 28 was I'm telling the wrong story. This does not give life profound meaning. Running around, getting drunk, doing drugs, you know, smoking cigarettes and going home at six in the morning.

29:54Yeah, this is not the life plan that I should probably be promoting. and in in many ways for the last 20 years i have i have been super promoting just a very different story a story of generosity and care and compassion and clean water and just sort of maybe promoting a simple idea that you know i'm i'm creating or together we're co-creating a world where every human has clean water to drink and everyone is invited to the party, right? Nine-year-old girls are invited to the party and 89-year-olds and billionaires and people who own a single car wash and a single mom with three jobs. Like everyone is invited to this party where we're creating the world that we wanna live in where humans have the most basic need for life met.

30:50And everybody has access to this thing that again, so many of us were just born into a world of. of us just take for granted. So it's really just using the same skill now for 30 years, but really changing the direction that skill is aimed in and certainly changing the story.

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32:30Jonathan Fields: Good Life Project is sponsored by Hostinger. So Good Life Project started as actually a year-end blog post. That's it. No plan, no big vision, just me kind of trying to work through some questions about what it actually means to live well and hitting publish. And it took a while before I built anything close to a real website, design, code, hosting. It felt like a whole separate project, something for later. Except later is when someone hears an episode, gets curious about you, and goes looking at what they find either builds trust or it doesn't. And that's the gap our sponsor hosting or closes.

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33:39Jonathan Fields: The places where exceptional design shows up where you least expect it, where someone decided that an everyday object, something completely ordinary, deserve the same level of intention and craft as anything else in your life. That's exactly what Kohler is doing with their smart toilets. Their Veil smart toilet doesn't look anything like what you'd picture when you hear the word toilet. It's sculptural, considered the kind of design that makes you do a double take, and the experience is designed to match. Elevated, personal, quieter than you'd expect, the kind of thing that transforms your morning routine without you even fully realizing it.

34:13Jonathan Fields: That's what good design does. And Kohler has been doing it, refusing to accept that every day has to be ordinary for over 150 years. Discover Kohler smart toilets at Kohler.com. Talking about changing and stories, just on a personal level, you're a very different human being than you were 20 years ago. You're in a very different position in your life than eight years ago when we had a conversation. If we zoom the lens out, bigger picture. While you've been building Charity Water, you've gotten married, became a dad to four kids, left New York. At the same time, where you are still deeply involved and running, centering in no small way, 3%, 3 % to 4 % into this 100 % mission that consumes a lot of you, your waking hours, your bandwidth.

35:10Jonathan Fields: How is it when you're so committed to something that you feel is so deeply important, how has it been trying to do right by your foundation, which could easily consume all of your days, do right by the millions of people who you want to stay alive, when you know you could make a difference, which could also consume 200 % of your day, and at the same time, do right by your family. and your wife and your kids all at once. I mean, Jonathan, that is the tension to manage, the tension of all tensions to manage. And I think I'm very, very fortunate. I read a book when I first started Charity Water about a very famous international charity founder.

35:54And he went on to create a multi-billion dollar org. and he was a force of nature flying around the world to disaster zones to earthquakes you know to famines and just with his larger than life personality meeting needs and building this organization and one day his daughter committed suicide and in her note i said something to the effect of my dad might have been there for millions of other kids but he was never there for me and I just remember thinking I think that's the wrong choice I'm pretty sure that's the wrong choice and I don't want to ever make that choice so I think there are uh there are moments of balance where I feel like I am serving the organization and the mission and serving my family and both are getting served really well.

36:56And then there are moments of imbalance where I could be over-serving the family and feel like I'm letting down the organization by not getting on the planes the way that I used to. There are also moments where I'm working too hard and I'm not home. And I get home after five nights on the road and I'm home for eight hours and then I leave on another plane for something and I'm not serving the family so well. So I think I'm so aware of trying to do both things as well as I can, maybe not at deficit, but it's attention to manage because every plane I don't get on and spend that time with my family, being a husband and a father, there are lives at the other end of that that could be compromised with clean water.

37:48but you know, if I am on all those planes and I'm chasing, you know, all these donor meetings and making all the speeches, um, there's a family at home that is, is being sacrificed for that. So it's, it, there's no easy answer to that, except I think knowing that this is always attention and trying to manage it and then getting feedback, you know, on, on how you're doing.

38:10Jonathan Fields: When you think about, about that family of yours, um, and you are you are the storyteller this has been this has been your cheat code for like pretty much our entire adult life what's the story that you want your vocation to tell your kids well it's pretty cool i was um i actually just came out uh two days ago from the wilderness of utah um i do a trip every year with one of my kids uh off grid so kind of four days no phone camping. And this trip was the first one I led. So I brought eight other fathers with eight of their sons. So there were nine dads, nine sons, kind of from 10 to 17. And we had some really intentional time around the campfires where we tried to speak life into our kids and what we saw in them.

39:04And then they got to talk about us as well. And my son went last. So I remember thinking like, what if he doesn't even want to go? You know, the other eight kids went and, and he kind of said two things. He said, you know, what I love most about my dad is he sees problems in the world and he tries to fix them and that he always has time for me. So, I mean, in that moment, three days ago in the Utah wilderness, like, you know, it seems like maybe that's enough balance, or at least for this 11 year old boy, dad's trying to do two things that are really often at odds, fixing a massive problem in the world and always having time for him and at least recognizing that.

39:49So that felt pretty good.

39:51Jonathan Fields: Yeah. I mean, as a parent, we're always trying to, you know, to model to our kids how we hope they might think about living in the world, right? And we all know that it doesn't matter what you say, they're just looking at how you behave. Yeah. Yeah. And the family story, maybe to more directly answer your question, I think is, hey, we've been blessed. And, you know, we have, I mean, we've been blessed in so many ways. I mean, I was born in a middle-class family in Philadelphia and I had clean water my whole life. My kids are born into a world where all four of them are going to have clean water their whole life and a roof over the head if they want it and food.

40:26And, you know, how, so I think, So then therefore, you know, what should we do with that, with that blessing? And I think it's just how do we use what we've been given? How do we use our time? How do we use the talents we've been given and then later develop? How do we use our money in the service of others? And that's going to look different at different points in life. They don't need to get into a humanitarian profession to make me proud, but they do need to be givers. They need to be generous to make me proud. So I think generosity is such a core value of our family. I mean, I've now personally been able to give a million dollars of our own family money over 20 years to Charity Water through writing a book in the advance and through just donating our own cash every single year.

41:19There's just a sense of, you know, I can't ask anyone to do something I'm not willing to do. uh and and i can't ask anyone else to make sacrifices unless i'm willing to make those same sacrifices so i i know that they see that as well um and you know i i want our family kind of motto to just be like the hairs are just so generous you know we're always trying to pick up the check we're always trying to help a friend in need you know and and we don't need the credit either you know we like doing it silently we like paying that bill because somebody you know was really hard up and them not knowing it was us that paid that bill yeah it's a it's an interesting point

41:59Jonathan Fields: also there's i remember years ago being exposed to um what was described as um ron bomb's ladder my mom and my mom these um sort of like has this really the levels of giving um and and the highest level um from what i recall was when the recipient has no idea that you gave um that always stuck with me you know but oftentimes if there isn't some promise of recognition on the other side of giving people don't want to give and i'm just pragmatic about that so you know i mean there's there's people who put their names on buildings and make big gifts and there's people who uh who who don't um and and will give in that way um it's funny china during our galas uh very early we used to do galas in New York city at the Met and other places.

42:50And very early I realized I needed to design the giving moments for those two kinds of people. So I would have a, an iPad connected to a giant screen and you could give and see your name or you could give and it would be anonymous and absolutely no judgment, you know? And I would say a lot of people who give to show their name could inspire others to follow their lead. and then there's other people who are like man if I ever had to put my name on a screen you would get zero dollars so I wanted them also to get that uh the pleasure the benefit of giving in that kind of secret way so I'm not out really you know preaching a philosophy except that the giving is the most important thing you know people find their own way with that right kind of people find their own experience and uh yeah I was I was actually one of the dads on this trip uh very successful venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and they're, they're Christians.

43:49So they tithe on gross. So 10 % of whatever comes into the family, they give to church and charity. But when he got married 26 years ago, he said, in addition to that, we're going to start adding an extra percentage of whatever we make of gross and every year it's going to grow. So this year it's 26%. So they're giving away 10 % plus 26%. Next year it'll be 27%. Next year it'll be 28%. And I kind of love, like everybody finds their own way. I heard of an author once, again, kind of a faith-based community, and he wound up reverse tithing. He said, I'll keep 10 % and give away 90%. We have another family who's donated well over$10 million over the last 15 years to Charity Water.

44:37and they've capped their income, I believe at 170 grand. And they just won't live on more than 170 grand a year and just believe that all the surplus of kind of meeting those needs should go to end suffering in the world. So I've gotten to interact with so many interesting people who even, you know, get me to think about how generous I am and, you know, how we should be living our life. And I think it's fun watching people find their own ways. And honestly, 26 % feels better than 25%. And 25 % feels better than 15%. So if you ask them along that journey, every year, it's not like, oh, wow, we have less money to keep.

45:19We have less money to spend and go buy expensive things. It's like, we have more money to give. We have more money to do good.

45:27Jonathan Fields: I love that take. Like it really, it's just, you know, the end of the day, the net impact is the net impact. Whether you're recognized for it on the giving side or not, the end of the day, like the generosity is there and it's there to do good work in the world. And also like circling back to the earlier part of the question, like if you can model that for those around you. And also create just an environment where it's like, you know what, maybe you're raising kids and you want them to be generous kids. It's whatever it is that makes you feel good, like anonymous, recognized, not whatever, that's good.

46:01Jonathan Fields: But just set aside a piece of your heart, a piece of your allowance, a piece of your lemonade stand money, whatever it may be. And just earmark it for something bigger than yourself. I think it's a good and inclusive and forgiving way to sort of like tee it up. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle. I asked you this question eight years ago and I actually went back because I wanted to see how you answered. And the way I always end these conversations is in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? I want to tell you, which I usually don't do.

46:40Jonathan Fields: Yeah, I want to hear it. Good, I'm glad. Eight years ago, when I asked you, you said, you know, somebody sent me a picture that they took of a sign in a bodega. And that sign said, do not be afraid. of work that has no end. Yeah, I mean, I still love that idea. The idea of, because you have to define the work. So if the work is service, if the work is generosity, if the work is sharing and giving, there's no finish line. I love that. There's no drop the mic moment where you can say, I've done enough. I have given enough. and yeah so i i just i i continue to love that idea of kind of the endless pursuit uh the be be not afraid of that endless work but make sure because we all know people who are working to accumulate that also has no end because someone always has a better house and a better car and a better boat and a better plane if you get there, right?

47:48The work with no end in wealth and accumulation. I was doing some research on Rockefeller recently, and he was interviewed in 1906. And he was asked, how much is enough? And you know what he said? Just a little more, right? So I think, you know, we all know people kind of pursuing just a little more in resources. And I think just a little more giving, just a little more sharing, just a little more service is the work I'd hope my whole family would continue to embrace. And so many people in the Charity Water community have embraced. So I don't know that I have a different answer for you, Jonathan.

48:28I like that answer.

48:30Jonathan Fields: It sounds like it's pretty solid. It's sustained for eight years, and maybe it'll keep sustaining beyond that. So let's talk about some of the big ahas and actionable takeaways from this conversation. One thing I keep turning to is really, it's how Scott talks about progress, 20 years, over a billion dollars raised. And by his own estimate, they've solved something like 135th of the actual problem, somewhere around 3 % of it. And he's not discouraged by that. Slow is not the same as stuck. He's making a difference and sees a future where that will accelerate. Then there's the way that he talks about generosity itself, kind of like something in all of us that gets easier to access the more we use it.

49:13Jonathan Fields: The same reservoir that let a nine-year-old girl's birthday raise over a million dollars in clean water when it inspired so many others to kick in. And there's the family that he mentioned who cut their own income at$170 ,000 a year, giving away everything above that on purpose every year for 15 years. So if there's a place in your week to notice this, it's the next time that you feel that maybe you're moving too slowly on something that matters to you or that you're doing something that's really hard work and it's so big and you're only making a small dent, even small dents make a difference.

49:50Jonathan Fields: And it's the beginning potentially of something much bigger. So ask yourself, are you really just stuck or are you just early in the game and just keep going? And hey, before you leave next week, we're bringing you a best of episode with Mark Nepo to talk about why falling down might be the most useful thing that happens to you all year. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcast so you don't miss that or any upcoming episodes. And do me a quick favor, share this conversation with just one person you know who you feel like really needs a little bit of inspiration these days.

50:21Jonathan Fields: They need to hear what we talked about and leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. It helps us get discovered and brings more people into the conversation. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers, Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields, Editing Help by Troy Young and Alejandro Ramirez, Chris Carter crafted our theme music, and of course, if you haven't already, please go ahead and follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a conversation. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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