The Gumption of Mr. Toilet by Jack Sim

Page Count: 391
Chapters : 88
Time Taken: 3 Hours

Keith's Take

I finished Jack Sim’s book to moderate a dialogue with him as part of my preparation.

I think Jack is given less credit than he deserves. In knowing him, I know some may find themselves frustrated by him.

But, I think to do so betrays a lack of intellectual humility.

Jack has spent the past two decades obsessed with shit. (Literal shit)

He constantly thinks about how he could broaden access to clean sanitation globally, and after reading the book, you know he has indeed made a difference.

It’s not easy to move the needle on something as unsexy as toilets, but somehow he did it.

He effectively shifted the Overton Window on ‘shit management’. It went from a taboo in polite society to a development agenda that the UN recognises.

If you are in a first-world country like Singapore, where clean toilets are everywhere you look- you might dismiss his cause as trivial. But, if you were to be transplanted into a third-world country- you would kill to have someone like Jack fighting on your behalf.

In that regard, Jack is indomitable.

If you think his work is trivial, the next time you visit the toilet, pause before you flush and ponder for a moment how different your life would be if you couldn’t flush.

George Yeo in his foreword, wrote this,

We can’t all be like Jack and we don’t want too many people to be like him but we should be inspired by his lifework.

My hope is that when you read his book, you will be inspired by his lifework.

Keith's Notes

The Market Failure of Clean Toilets

The negative externalities generated by poor sanitation is extremely costly in terms of public health, economic productivity, and environmental impact.

A 2012 Lancet report showed that diarrhoea kills more children under five than malaria, measles, and HIV/AIDS combined. Young girls are dropping out of school because of the lack of privacy when they menstruate. Girls and women are often molested or raped while defecating in the open. Untreated human excreta contaminate rivers and water sources, killing marine life and spreading diseases. Flies visit the open poop piles and transfer pathogens to food, making the poor sick.

These problems are invisible to us in Singapore. But for many in countries like India and China, this lack of access to sanitation can significantly impede societal progress.

Jack pointed out that funding for water was easily accessible but not for sanitation. I think this is because decision-makers tend to underestimate the importance of sanitation and don’t consider the knock-on effects.

In fact, it turns out that Singapore can also suffer from the same issue.

Here's Jack recalling a story about unclean toilets in Singapore's schools back in the 'good old days' after hearing from his daughters why they would refuse to use the toilet in schools.

I went to a series of schools and told the principals that when students hold their bladder in class, academic results suffer because their ability to concentrate is reduced. This message aligned their key performance with the toilets’ cleanliness. I successfully persuaded them, egging them to hire professional cleaners for their schools. I was ready to do the same thing in China.

There is another layer to this problem.

Mitigating poor sanitation suffers from a moral hazard.

Policymakers often do not effectively solve poor sanitation issues due to a moral hazard. They are typically far removed from the consequences of poor sanitation, which creates a disconnect between their actions and their real-world impact.

Even in Singapore, one asks if a Minister would often use the toilet of a hawker centre. If they don’t really have firsthand experience, could they sufficiently grasp the urgency of the problem?

It’s obvious that you need potable water to survive but how does having say, a clean toilet help?

Lee Kuan Yew called air conditioning the most important invention of the 20th century. I think a clean toilet is at least in sniffing distance of being a close second.

The Counterfactual of A World Without WTO

I’ve often been asked how I should quantify the role of the WTO in impact measurement. I tell them it is easier to answer that question with another question: What would have happened if no one broke the taboo of sanitation? What would the world look like if the WTO did not exist twenty-four years ago?

Since the founding of the World Toilet movement, it has created an exponential impact.

Jack cites the 3 billion audience reached annually, the World Toilet summits organized, the 110 million toilets built in India and the creation of the UN World Toilet Day.

But he is right in saying he can’t claim credit for that. After all, neither he nor the WTO built the toilets.

His greatest contribution is shifting the Overton Window on toilets. Once it became normal to talk about toilets, the floodgates of change opened. Looking at Jack and his disposition, I don’t think anyone else could have done what he did.

His example makes me wonder what other Overton windows need to be shifted to unlock social change and create a better world.

The Origin Story of The Contraband WTO & Guerilla Marketing

There is no such thing as bad publicity with an agenda like Sanitation, which is a taboo in itself.

I created the World Toilet Organization with the WTO acronym to play a pun on the World Trade Organization. I was hoping that the WTO would sue me, then I’d be famous. It turns out that they didn’t sue me, but we became known as the other WTO forever. Nothing sells like contraband. Either way, I won. Eventually, the journalists started calling me Mr Toilet and that moniker created another intellectual property for us with highly sticky brand equity. The most elegant thing is we achieved all this without paying a cent for media publicity and have never paid marketing dollar in the last twenty-four years. When you have no money, work around it.

The Gandhians said: ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.’ Ten years later, I met Pascal Lamy, the Director-General of the World Trade Organization at the World Economic Forum in 2011 in Jakarta. I introduced myself and he exclaimed with some jest: ‘Oh, I know you. Yours is the more important WTO!’

Singaporeans need to learn the art of irreverence. It’s not about being crude; it's about finding creative ways to differentiate oneself in the market.

Jack has an intuitive grasp of the Streisand Effect.

The Streisand Effect refers to the phenomenon where an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information has the unintended consequence of increasing awareness and publicity of that information. It's named after Barbara Streisand, who, in 2003, tried to suppress photographs of her Malibu home, inadvertently drawing more attention to it.

Jack's use of the WTO acronym (World Toilet Organization) to play on the World Trade Organization demonstrates this effect. By creating a potentially controversial name, he increased awareness of his cause, even hoping for a lawsuit that would further publicise his organization. This guerilla marketing tactic immediately 100x the spotlight on the issue of global sanitation, effectively using the Streisand Effect to his advantage.

Retaining the Childlike Wonder

As I grew up, I realized that adults are jaded versions of children. They give up their idealism and innocence. They became afraid and their fear blocks their freedom to learn and experiment as they used to do in their childhood. Children can fight with each other, forgive and reconcile quickly without bearing grudges. They can cry and laugh the next moment, but adults can’t because they are too worried about the loss of face and embarrassment. They are even worried about being called childish. I hope I don’t have to grow up. I want to remain childlike all my life, no matter how old I become.

Although I knew the ways of the world are complicated, I also knew that if I subdivide any big problems into small slices of questions, and recombine the answers into a main solution, complicated problems can be simplified and understood from a child’s view. And everything becomes easier to understand by adults. While the entire society avoids political incorrectness and does not challenge the authorities and the norms, it takes a child to shout that ‘The Emperor has no clothes!’ so that everyone can suddenly explode into laughter that makes the Emperor realize he is duped. This was how I created the World Toilet Organization to give the Sanitation Agenda its own media centre stage when I saw that it was clearly drowned under the banner of the Water Agenda.

When you grow older, ego gets in the way.

You lose your curiosity and this is where you lose your edge.

Note to self: Preserve your childlike wonder.

Rejecting Materialism

One little-known fact is WTO actually achieved all these with a very small and frugal team. In the first seven years, it was a one-man-show with me alone. In our seventh year, we received some funding and employed our first staff. This grew to nine staff but with the end of the grant, we ran out of money. Today, WTO has two full-time staff and one part-time staff. This is the miraculous sustainability of our leverage model of social entrepreneurship.

I have been working for free for the last twenty-seven years, and my family survived on the passive rental income from the properties I invested in at age forty.

To change tracks at forty and go all in on pursuing a social mission you fully believe in is nuts.

It’s easy to be a prisoner of hindsight bias and say- “Well, he made a name for himself.”

But, when he was starting, he would have to face the ridicule and scepticism head-on.

I’m almost sure there were many times he would want to go back to the ‘rat race’ where he could continue accumulating more money and status.

What I admire about Jack the most is that he was willing to go against the social norm to pursue what he thought was personally meaningful (even when it looked dumb)

Thick Skin

Jack recalls a story of a convention that he attended,

Later, when Bollywood megastar Salman Khan came for his session, I arranged with the host to allow me to ask a question: ‘Salman Khan, you are known as the sexiest Bollywood actor. Can you make a film to make toilets sexy?’ He was clueless and asked the host who I am. The host introduced me as Mr Toilet. Salman Khan invited me on stage.

Upon realizing that I was a Singaporean helping Indians to get toilets, he offered to fundraise for the World Toilet Organization on the spot. He personally donated USD 20,000 and immediately six other companies pledged USD 20,000 each ‘live’ on national TV that night. It was impromptu, but we raised USD 140,000 that night and all donors were captured ‘live’ on national TV.

One question earned WTO - $140,000.

Most people would fawn over Salman Khan.

Who in the right mind would ask a Bollywood MEGAstar about making toilets sexy?

Would you dare to ask an ‘embarrassing question’ given the same chance as Jack?

This reminds me of Noah Kagan's Free Coffee Challenge. If you are worried about asking big questions, you can always start small.

Jack’s Law of Bureaucrazy

Jack stumbles on a truth- bureaucracies are not friendly to outsiders.

This is not because they are anti-progress or innovation.

It is that they have to bear the heavy cost of doing more work and expending their social capital for an untested idea.

The price might just be too high.

If an innovative idea is submitted to the bureaucrat, here are four of their most common reactions:

Option 1: Reject – This is the default step because it is safe to do nothing. Bureaucrats are incentivized to make no mistakes and are risk-averse. Work avoidance is their default mode.

Option 2: Eject – Send the innovator for the run around to other departments and agencies. Tell him this is not the right department. This is another work avoidance tactic.

Option 3: Deject – If the innovator insists on coming back, leave him hanging in mid-air with non-committal replies. Let him feel the hopelessness of waiting and give up.

Option 4: Hijack – In case the innovator attracts your superiors who like the idea, hijack the idea and claim it as your own.

To make it simple, if I can cut to the chase and make him hijack my ideas immediately, a motivated bureaucrat would create the desired system change at a much faster speed

Remembering You Will Die

It is natural for us to be afraid of death, since our will to live is strong. However, it is also clear that all our ancestors are dead and it is certain that we’ll soon become ancestors too. We cannot save time in storage to use later. Time is consumed regardless of what we do or don’t do. Since it is a perishable good, I need to exchange it for the highest value of exchange. I concluded that the highest value is service to humanity.

Since I had the privilege of working for free, I chose to address those agendas that nobody wanted to fund and were neglected, like sanitation and poverty alleviation through market-based solutions.

I am happy with myself, but I want to do more. I am greedy to serve, to solve difficult problems, to fight injustice, to be useful, and to see people’s lives getting better. I also realized that time is more efficiently used if I can create movements that facilitate and help accelerate others who will implement them.

No matter how young or old you are , remember that you will die.

Remember that you will one day be an ancestor.

Now, choose what you really want to spend your time on Earth doing.

If you would like to purchase Jack's book- click here.