Scott Harrison - Life is what you make of it.

In 1973 EW Barker made a speech to the students of Swiss Cottage Secondary Sechool on Speech Day, and one memorable line was this: -

“Life is what you make of it. There are some who inherit wealth only to squander it away, while others make their fortune on their own effort by dint of hard work, determination and perseverance.

But happiness is not necessarily associated with wealth. The important thing is to have a purpose in life, a goal to achieve and the satisfaction of achieving it.”

Purpose in life is what Scott Harrison (43 - married with two young children) found after a long walk on its wild side. His life in the Sunday papers was captured by senior writer Wong Kim Hoh. 

Scott found a rock band called Sunday River and he grew his hair down to his shoulders. He then “moved to New York to become rich and famous.” 

He said: “I covered 40 clubs, the types that models, celebrities and all the beautiful people go to. People would come and spend US$1,000 on a bottle of champagne.” 

On some nights, Scott could earn up to a few thousand dollars. 

He admitted that “along the way, he picked up “every vice imaginable - drinking, gambling, drugs and pornography.””

Scott said: “I was chasing all the markers of success, which I though would bring happiness, I dated models on the covers of magazines, drove a BMW, bought a Rolex, had a grand piano in my apartment and got the perfect labrador retriever.”

Scott got the best of life that life has to offer, and by any standards, he should be happy. Life should be complete for him at the pinnacle of his success. Yet, he said that despite the jet-set life, “magnums of Don Perignon”, and nocturnal parties with fireworks and all, he “felt empty”. 

He said: “I felt emotionally and morally corrupt. I had served no one in 10 years. I hadn’t sent a cheque to a charity, I hadn’t volunteered, I was living only for myself. I asked myself, “What would be the opposite of my current life? What would that feel like or look like?”

With a Christian upbringing, Scott “decided that he could not continue to give short shrift to the Christian values he was raised on.”

Armed with a degree in journalism from NYU, Scott sold “everything in his possession, called it quits with a girlfriend he did not love and hit the road in a rented cobalt-blue Mustang.”

He joined a charity called Mercy Ships as a photojournalist and “ended up in Liberia” a country which was at that time (2004) torn by two civil wars. 

He said that the doctors on Mercy Ships “specialised in treating people with giant facial tumors, flesh-eating diseases, cleft palates and those who had been burnt during the war.”

As a photojournalist, what Scott witnessed changed his life. He documented it down: -

“We has scheduled 1,500 surgery slots and the government had given us a stadium to triage the patients as they came. I went out that morning all ready to capture the action but when I turned the corner, I saw that more than 5,000 people had turned up for the limited slots.”

Scott reported that he saw “the sight of a 10-year-old who had such a giant facial tumour that he was literally suffocating.”

It was at that time that Scott noticed in the villages that he had visited that people were “drinking green and brown water from swamps.”

He felt that access to clean water was a cause he would pursue and he started “charity: water”. 

In the last 13 years, the global charity has “raised more than US$350 million ($476 million) and funded nearly 30,000 water projects in 26 countries.”

Scott said: “The ultimate vision is that no one is drinking bad water. We do not have answers for many global problems, like diseases we do not know how to cure, but water’s not like that. It’s completely solvable problem.”

Yet, Scott felt that he haven’t done enough and said “we won’t stop fighting until everyone has access to clean water.”

Lesson? One. 

I am back to EW Barker’s quote: -

“Life is what you make of it...happiness is not necessarily associated with wealth. The important thing is to have a purpose in life, a goal to achieve and the satisfaction of achieving it.”

What is our purpose in life then? 

For Scott, his U-turn came when he realised the meaninglessness of what he did - a life he described as emotionally and morally corrupt or bankrupt. 

He then found purpose serving others, giving them access to clean water. 

If life is what you make of it, and happiness is not necessarily associated with wealth, then we should generally be happy with greater autonomy and being less obsessed with ”chasing all the markers of success” like wealth, title and fame. 

The reality is, how many of us can drop everything and go out there to make an enduring tide of a difference? 

There are surely many Scotts out there scarificing for the greater good, and there are even more Tom, Dick and Harry (and Susans?) here, that is, at home, struggling to make ends meet, fighting for mental sanity, worrying about the next meal, enduring emotional abuses, silently bearing with the torment they have been living with for decades, and so on. 

Alas, that kept me thinking about humanity and people like Scott, and led me to Mother Teresa’s quote that we can’t all do great things, but we can do small things with great love.

So unless we are all secretly craving for fame and attention for the good we do, and expecting big and quick returns for every ostentatious charitable acts we commit, finding purpose is not so much about the act but the drive behind that act. 

Ultimately, every small thing done with great love is great things done with purpose. 

Scott got his start primarily on that. It was a determination to offer clean water from the heart in place of green and brown water from the swamps. 

He never expected big attention or recognition, just to quench thirst with healthy, drinkable water. 

I believe his deep satisfaction came from satisfying one soul at a time, not a crowd or a nation at once. 

The attention he garnered now is incidental and not the pursuit he was dead set to chase after from the start. 

Therefore, his humble, unknown and almost invisible beginnings are what made the difference to countless of lives he met and helped. And it started one soul at a time. 

I believe that even if people like Scott found no fame or attention for his works, he would still go on for as long as it takes. 

In the end, that is one of the greatest struggles of man. Not so much for means to survive or to be fed and taken care of, but to find purpose in the lasting satisfaction one experiences by helping a soul in need even if no one ever finds out, and then, to continue doing so even if one dies unrecognised. 

No doubt, sooner or later, such people will become noticed, they can’t help it. But it is not the sooner or later that they are ever concerned with, but it is with the here and now where they put in their ceaseless effort. 

In other words, it is the difference the present makes for them, and not the longing for one day being recognised. 

That for me is the purpose Barker was talking about to the students of Swiss Cottage. It is not about self-obsession, but the faithfulness in doing small things with great love. Cheerz.