[enraged_camel]

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