{"id":625,"date":"2020-02-16T03:44:13","date_gmt":"2020-02-15T20:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/?p=625"},"modified":"2020-07-16T15:39:08","modified_gmt":"2020-07-16T08:39:08","slug":"my-volunteering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/?p=625","title":{"rendered":"My Volunteering"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is this saying that I think has a lot of truths to it: You should have three hobbies — one selfish, one selfless, and one that makes money.<\/em><\/p>\n

A selfish hobby and a money-making hobby are easy. Anyone can have one. A selfless hobby though? Not many people can claim that.<\/p>\n

I’m always fascinated by the concept of altruism — people volunteering their time and effort with no expectations of a reward. To me, in a cynical way, we are fundamentally selfish. Everything we do is self-serving, ultimately for our own interests or benefits. And as such, whenever I see someone doing something purely to help and contribute, I always find it incredibly fascinating.<\/p>\n

There are even levels to altruism. I think at the most basic level, there are those who volunteer on a ‘gig’ basic: they go on a food donation trip up to a remote region; they donate blood once or twice a year, help clean up the streets, or they help in a charity kitchen every once in a while. I think most of us fall into this category, i.e part-time volunteers.<\/p>\n

A bit more rare is workers or volunteers in emergency situations: nurses working overtime in an epidemic, firefighters going into the epicentre of a wildfire, or soldiers going beyond the call of duty in a war. I think this is temporary altruism driven externally by a heightened sense of responsibility.<\/p>\n

At the extreme end is people who go out of their way<\/em> to contribute. I can think of the people who adopt children after children regardless of the headache it brings; people who fight to exonerate wrongly incarcerated inmates (the Innocent Project); people who donate the majority of their income (not wealth) to philanthropy and choose to live modestly, and et cetera. They willingly bring trouble into their otherwise peaceful life! Why, I have no idea.<\/p>\n

As for me, even though I’ve always thought of myself as a rather selfish person, there have actually been a few instances where I do volunteering work. I once handed out gifts to the homeless, swept the street, helped in a soup kitchen, taught free English classes. But those are all one-off occasions, nothing significant. In this article I’ll look back on some of the longer work that I did that can probably be called volunteering.<\/p>\n

(Embarrassingly, I have not done any volunteering in the past 4 years… too busy with work. I’d love to get back to it soon.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Sub Translation<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In high school, I was part of a subtitle translation group. Back then there was a real lack of Vietsub, so only people who understood English could enjoy the movies. So we’d find movies without Vietsub, translate the sub, and upload it to SubScene.<\/p>\n

It was… a lot of work. It’d take me 2-3 days of full-time work (8 hours a day) to fully translate a movie, depending on how dialogue-heavy it is. My English wasn’t even that good back then, so I’d have to constantly look up the dictionary. And then there were those movies laden with slang, so I’d post a question on Yahoo Answers and waited for an explanation.<\/p>\n

I ended up translating around 10 movies over the course of the summer of 2009. Last I checked, some of the sub have amassed over 100,000 downloads. Even as of now, some of the subtitles that the modern streaming sites use still have my credit on it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Of course the translation was also an English-learning opportunity so I did gain something from it, but I think overall it qualifies as volunteering.<\/p>\n

Wikipedia<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Also during high school, I would write quite a few articles for the Vietnamese Wikipedia. Back then the Viet Wiki barely had 100,000 articles, mostly poorly written. Now it has 1.2 million articles! I’m sure the quality has massively gone up since.<\/p>\n

Anyway, of course as a high school kid I knew jack to write an encyclopaedia. So I did what I could and translate articles from English. I’d translate articles about history, science, sport — subjects that had my interest basically. Does this count as volunteering? Probably, I’m not sure. Wikipedia editors are called volunteers, after all.<\/p>\n

I came to find out how incredibly time-consuming it was to write a proper article. You have to work with the HTML formats, check the reference links, watch for vandalism and so on. I did write an article<\/a> about the guy who has made the highest number of Wikipedia edits. He truly is an amazing individual.<\/p>\n

Wikipedia was such a big part of my life back then that I even decided to donate. I didn’t have much, so well, 10 dollars it is.<\/p>\n

\"\"
I was a broke high school kid back then. But well, $10 is $10.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Bodybuilding<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In the summer of 2013, I started to bodybuild. I’d had it with my skinny body.<\/p>\n

I was looking for a workout routine, and then I came across Scooby<\/a>. Scooby is a 60-year-old engineer who loves fitness; he loves doing cardio, lifting weights, being active, and he builds a website and a YouTube channel to share his knowledge and passion. You really have to watch this guy to understand. Unlike many other fitness personalities who are trying to sell something, Scooby genuinely wants to inspire and contribute.<\/p>\n

So I had been following Scooby’s intermediate home workout programme<\/a> for a while. I bought a pair of dumbbells home and did exactly what his routine instructed. I started to see some slow but quality gains.<\/p>\n

Around July 2013, Scooby was attacked. I think his personal information was released; he received threats to himself and his husband, and so he had to move to a new house (I’m not sure of the details).<\/p>\n

He made a tearful video<\/a> saying goodbye to his YouTube audience. I was damn near moved to tears watching that video. Here is the transcript of the first part:<\/p>\n

This is the last public video I’ll be recording for this YouTube channel. It’s time to move on. For the last decade, I’ve been showing young people how they can build stronger, leaner, more muscular healthy physiques, all without spending a dime. As you know I’m very passionate about health and fitness, and I’m glad I was able to pass that on to a next generation. I’ve always thought of you as my extended family, not as viewers or subscribers.<\/em><\/p>\n

I have just one favour to ask. For those of you who have benefited from my advice, please pass it on<\/strong>. Find some young awkward kid who doesn’t have self confidence and is horrible at sports, and take him under your wing. Show him about fitness, show him the joys of lifting<\/strong>. Teach them about nutrition. Show them how to lift weights. And most of all, show them that the journey is just as important as the destination.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I really took that advice to heart: pass the torch on! For the next year, I became ferociously active on webthehinh (a message board about bodybuilding). There was a lot of misconception and bro-science about bodybuilding back then. I’d spend hours every day on that forum posting high-quality and research-backed content, sharing my physique progress, and answering any questions that I got. I got quite a few messages from people saying how they were inspired by my posts, which I’m always glad to know.<\/p>\n

Can this even be considered volunteering? I was just sharing my knowledge about one of my hobbies. But then, I did it for free; many found my work helpful, and it made some people’s lives better, so I guess it can technically be called volunteering.<\/p>\n

Now if I find someone needing help with working out, I’m all for it. We’re working on a project called TeenFit to help teenage kids work out. This is not a charity project — we’re trying to make money, but in a way I really hope that it can make a difference in some of the kids’ lives. If somehow our work manages to inspire a young man to fall in love with fitness and self-improvement, then I am happy.<\/p>\n

Anyway, in 2016 Scooby came to C\u1ea7n Th\u01a1 on a bicycle trip. I decided to fly to C\u1ea7n Th\u01a1 just to see him and say thanks in person. He really did have a massive impact on my life. I felt like if I did not see him right then, I’d regret it for the rest of my life. Scooby was incredibly nice and down to earth — he knew I had just flown 2,000 km just to see him, so he spent the entire hour talking to me! Scooby has no children, but he considers all the young men he has helped over the Internet his children.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Meeting Scooby, one of my favourite memories in life.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Final Thoughts<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Alright, those are three major instances of my personal volunteering efforts that I can remember for now. I guess you can argue that everything I’ve just listed is all my passions and hobbies, so it doesn’t really count as “volunteering” because I’m enjoying it. Which is true. I don’t think I’ve reached that level of completely selfless altruism yet. I don’t think I ever will<\/em>, to be honest.<\/p>\n

In the future, I would love to get to a point where I have the time and the financial resources to start a non-profit project that can contribute something positive, no matter how minor. In other words, you have to be rich and have plenty of free time. Seriously — if you have to go to work and take care of your family, then charity should be the least of your concern!<\/p>\n

I hope in the next 10 years or so, my business projects succeed and enable me the time and financial freedom to make this happen. Hard to be a philanthropist when you have to work for a living. But then, there are regular people (employees with a 9-5 job) who have made doing charity part of their life, so I guess it is possible. It’s just a matter of whether you truly want to make it happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is this saying that I think has a lot of truths to it: You should have three hobbies — one selfish, one…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":628,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[105],"tags":[150],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=625"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1002,"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions\/1002"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}