Tips for Career Success – Tip 13: Volunteer

This is a good life tip in general. There is something incredible about what it can do when you give your time and energy to something outside of yourself. For the purpose of this tip, I want to break this into three types of volunteering: within your job, outside your job but with benefits, and outside your job without benefits. I will further explain each of these in the following sections.

Volunteering WITHIN Your Job

Within your job, you should be the person that volunteers for everything. I literally mean EVERYTHING. Why? Because most places will lighten workloads for people who have too much on their plate, but you are going to get a lot more recognition for the tasks you volunteer for than the ones you are assigned. There is a very minor nuance there. It is not that you are necessarily working more (although I would argue that working more is not a bad thing for career success), it is that you are working without having to be told to. I can promise you that this has a very real impact within managers’ minds. As a manager, I had one colleague who would always volunteer for everything. This person was great, because every meeting when a task came up, they would jump in and say, “I will take that one”. I spent the first two years working with this person thinking that they were my hardest working employee. However, in reflecting, I realized that they were not working more hours or putting in extra effort, they were simply working on the things that were at the top of my mind – my top priorities. As a result, when I would think about who the absolutely irreplaceable rock-stars were on my team, I would always think of this person: often over the people that were actually performing much better.

I believe that many people avoid volunteering for things at work because many of us are already feeling overworked. However, by volunteering, you guarantee that you are working on the things that matter to your management. If you then find yourself overwhelmed, you can have a conversation with management about how to prioritize your workload, and chances are good that the things you volunteered for will stay on, and some of your other work will fall off. The end result in these scenarios is that you will find yourself working on more high-priority activities, and that will inevitably lead to greater career success.

Volunteering OUTSIDE of Your Job WITH Benefits

The second area that we can volunteer is outside of work but with benefits. What do I mean by this? Often when you reach a certain level of success, you are encouraged to join the board of different organizations, and these board positions more often than not are unpaid. However, this type of volunteering is still rather self-serving in the fact that it is done for the purpose of advancing one’s career. By being a member of certain boards, it boosts your resume for your next C-level job and makes you stand out more as a professional. Other ways that people volunteer with benefits would be through their companies. Many companies are starting to promote “Volunteer Days” or other events to help push people to volunteer. While these are great, and I have always enjoyed participating in these types of volunteer activities, if this is the only place that you volunteer your time, you are likely still only doing so for some benefit. Something like this could benefit you by having people you work with see you volunteer, giving you an opportunity to connect with management that you would not have otherwise, or any number of other side-advantages. These are great to have, and if they are what get you to start volunteering, I am happy they exist. However, I think the purest form of volunteering, may be the one that benefits us the most.

Volunteer OUTSIDE of Your Job WITHOUT Benefits

The final area that I recommend volunteering is outside of work without any benefits in return. I have found that spending time giving back does two things: it helps remind me that we are not in this alone, and it gives me a reprise from the daily grind.

Most of our lives are about us. We spend our days working so we can have the things we want. Even when we are giving of our times for our families, friends, or co-workers, there is an element of selfishness, because they on some level are really just an extension of ourselves and our daily lives. I believe that in order to truly give of our time, it must be for someone who has no means of giving back to us.

This type of volunteering was best personified to me through my roommate in college, Aaron. Aaron and I lived together in a modest rental in Cleveland, Tennessee. Our rent I believe was $450 per month split between us, which was actually relatively high at the time. To paint the picture here, Cleveland, Tennessee is one of those small towns in the Bible belt that makes me embarrassed to tell people I’m a Christian. The town has some of the most beautiful churches you will ever see, an incredible wealth basis centered around the Church of God headquarters, the founder of Check Into Cash advanced payday loans and a few of the original members of Amway, and one of the nicest looking college campus in the country (largely funded by the Church of God and the founding member of Amway). It also has one of the most distinct wealth and poverty divisions I have ever witnessed. There are literally tracks that run through town dividing the wealthy and their large church “have” lives from the poor and their trailer park “have not” lives.

Aaron and I both worked during college to pay for school, rent, and other activities. Neither of us came from wealth and like many college kids enjoyed a diet of ramen noodles and sandwiches. After a few months of college, I started to realize that Aaron was always MIA on Saturday mornings when I’d wake up and back shortly before lunch. Despite being close friends, we also had different circles of friends, so I assumed he was hanging out with different friends, and it took me a while to catch on to the fact this was happening every weekend. Finally, I asked him where he was going, and rather than tell me, he got a weird look on his face and invited me to come with him. I probed for an answer, but to no avail. So, the following Saturday, we woke up bright and early at about 7am and jumped in his pickup truck. From there we proceeded to drive to the local grocery store and to my shock Aaron was greeted by name by every employee we saw. Instantly I thought he had a Saturday morning job working at the local grocery, but that still didn’t explain why he wanted to bring me along. Maybe there’s a need for another bag boy? However, he walked straight past all of the greetings to the back and grabbed two gallons of milk and a few cartons of eggs and headed back to the front checkout. As we were checking out with the milk and eggs, a few guys started stacking cartons of vegetables, fruit, and bread up at the end of the checkout line by the bagging area. When he was done paying for the milk and eggs, he looked at me and finally started to let his stoic demeanor slip saying with a smile, “hey lazy, ain’t ya going to help me carry anything?” We then pulled his pickup truck around back, where a couple of other guys started loading in boxes of newly-expired items, past their shelf life produce, and damaged items.

What I found out that morning was that Aaron wasn’t working a second job to make ends meet or to have extra spending money; he was sacrificing his time and his sleep every Saturday morning to go to the local grocery store, gather their perished perishables and drive it in his pickup truck to the poor part of town – to the other side of the tracks. When we crossed the tracks and pulled up along the side of a street lined with trailers, there was already another line waiting for us: a line of people. These were mothers, fathers, children, and grandparents, all waiting for Aaron’s weekly delivery of over-ripe fruits and vegetables and stale bread. I helped him distribute the food as best we could and then we just hung out and talked to the people that stuck around to talk to us. He kept one carton of vegetables and fruit, and the 2 gallons of milk and cartons of eggs in the truck. After the group had all dispersed, we drove over a few streets to a makeshift little house. It had a ramp going up the front, one room with a tiny kitchen and way too small of a bathroom. Inside, we were welcomed by an elderly couple who both were in wheelchairs (one of whom was also on oxygen). The place reeked from months of not being cleaned and you could tell they were embarrassed as I was the new person. We brought them their milk, eggs, and what I later learned were the best vegetables that Aaron would always pull out for them. After a while, their granddaughter came over and picked up the other set. She lived across the street in a smaller home with her parents and her kid. She was approximately sixteen. We stayed and talked with this elderly couple for about an hour.

What I saw that day was true giving. Aaron could not have possibly expected any of these people to give him anything in return when they were in so much need that the leftover groceries led them to line-up early every Saturday morning and most of them were struggling daily with how to get by. I truly believe that this type of giving is the purest and most rewarding form. When we give of ourselves, our time, and our resources without any hope of return, we change lives. This type of change creates a ripple. If enough of us do this, we can create waves. And waves have the power to change not only our lives, but the lives of those around us.

Conclusion

College Days

Rachel (Aaron’s wife), Aaron, Amanda (Dustin’s wife), Dustin

To wrap up the story of Aaron feeding the poor, one of the local churches that was focused on the students at our college and was quite different from the other churches eventually got word of what Aaron was doing. They put together a ministry to support his efforts, and when we graduated a few years later, there were over twenty people serving the community every Saturday, multiple grocery stores giving, and financial support to provide milk and eggs to even more of the people. As a result of Aaron’s willingness to volunteer selflessly, hundreds of people in Cleveland, Tennessee are still being fed today. If a college student with no money and a pickup truck can do that, just imagine what you can do!

Next Steps

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