“I joined the Peace Corps to put my life toward something useful, but I didn't know if I was actually helping until years later. The real lesson was learning to say more with fewer words, which is what I now teach founders when their decks get lost in translation.”

“The Peace Corps didn't make me useful in the way I hoped. I went to Botswana believing I was there to teach English, and I left realizing how much I had misunderstood about what help actually looks like across cultures.”

“In Zambia I spent two years helping farmers build fish ponds, but COVID cut our service short right when a canal repair was finally coming together. I think the help was real and small, and the bigger thing I took home was how much I needed that place more than it needed me.”

“I taught English in Kupyansk, Ukraine, from 2009 to 2011, and I saw that the most basic skills, keeping an agenda, taking notes, setting goals, changed my students' lives more than any lesson plan. Years later they still wrote to say those skills got them into university and into better jobs.”

“I shipped out to Nepal in January 2020 and got evacuated seven weeks later with every other volunteer. Seven weeks was not enough to help anyone in a lasting way, but it was enough to wreck my old plan and show me I wanted service, not a conventional career.”