Ask HN: How has volunteering helped you grow?

Not to be too cynical, but in my case volunteering resulted only in troubles and no growth at all. What I ended up beside some singular cases was fighting with people that internally resigned on something, accumulated bad habits but still narcissistically viewed themselves as perfect. The most brutal outcome was that the people I helped for free and dedicated a lot of time to improve their life, changed for much worse once they "saw the light" and their life improved - from a resigned person turned into a self-confident predator, throwing away most of human decency, trying to outright buy me or boss me. I really started to be cynical that perhaps there is a reason they were down and it was for the better... Then there are a few romantic, pure souls that are taken advantage of by everyone around them, ending up in the bottom - those are rare pearls that make it somewhat meaningful.

That is a divine mystery of python, child.

We are not to understand it's meaning, but to understand it's glory.

Great. We need more things like this.

Here is the thing to know about volunteering: you get out of it only as much as you put in.

Back in 2010 I founded a local volunteer organization[1] for young professionals. The idea was to go above and beyond regular volunteering (although we did plenty of that too) and use our professional skills to organize and run larger projects. It was an avenue for personal and professional growth as well as scalable positive impact.

I worked non-stop getting this organization off the ground for over two years, to the point where it became a second job on top of my day job. In the end it seriously burned me out, but I'm proud to say it was a huge success and is alive and well today, despite the fact that the original leaders (including myself) have moved on.

I also learned a lot about the challenges of starting something from scratch, and it's how I originally got interested in startups and ended up joining HN. I apply the lessons I learned from that experience seven years later, in areas that are often completely unrelated.

[1]rotaractlb.org

I'm one of those people with loads of ideas stewing at the back of my head. They come and go (out of fashion) but one idea stuck around for more than five years. It's an edtech for children, so by the end of last year, I decided that maybe I should take the plunge. Plus I was getting bored of freelancing for corporations. First step is to find out whether I actually like to work with children - because I think that's important even though it's edtech - and whether the assumptions I made were sensible enough. My dream is to make reading (English) as universal and enjoyable as possible, particularly for disadvantaged children.

So off I went to South East Asia. I volunteered at a semi-Montessori school for poor and refugee kids for three months. To talk about the experience will take much more than a single post, but let me just say that without it, I would still be feeling that I'm so clever of thinking about this idea when I was actually faffing about. The reality of poverty and hardship came down like a ton of bricks. I saw clearly the barriers that the children had, for just being born in the wrong place at the wrong time. And the usefulness of books and the Internet stuck out like ... they're essential, they're the only fair chance these kids can ever get. (One thing I also learnt is that mobile phones are practically universal, poor or not.)

So that made the idea all the more urgent. And another thing that I never expected to pick up was that I gained a lot more confidence - I'm the shy type who would shake and get sick just thinking about presenting in front of my team - but in those classrooms, man, it's merciless, and plus you love those kids and have the ultimate responsibility to manage them ...

I wouldn't say that this fully prepared me for the CEO job but it's definitely a strong stepping stone for me :) And those memories really stay with you forever. So if anyone's thinking about volunteering - because this feeling doesn't occur but in specific times - I highly recommend you to go for it. It will at the very least teach you how to give without expecting anything back in return.