Category: Lifestyle

A year and a half ago, I saw a speech that changed my life — and the lives of at least 600 other people in the developing world.

I was at the World Domination Summit in Portland, where I’d later be speaking. I sat in the audience as Scott Harrison took the stage.

Scott is a former nightclub promoter who, at age 28, had a crisis of conscience. His job was encouraging people to get drunk. He smoked two packs a day. He gambled. He felt like he wasn’t adding anything to the world. And he wasn’t sure if, or how, he could.

“One day, I woke up and I realized I was the worst person I knew,” he wrote in an article on Medium.

He quit his job, sold most of his possessions, and spent the next two years as a photojournalist on a hospital ship off the coast of Liberia in west Africa. He saw diseases that were unlike anything he’d imagined.

As WIRED describes: “Some of the patients were grotesquely deformed by grapefruit-sized tumors, while others were nearly blind from cataracts that turned their eyes opaque.” (Here are images.)

He felt surprised — and then sad, then angry, then determined — when he realized that thousands of people die from preventable diseases, like cholera and dysentery, that are spread by drinking dirty water. More than 660 million people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water, which is almost 1 out of every 10 people. That’s twice the population of the U.S.

That’s unacceptable.

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