The Truths of Life

created: 2024.09.20. 11:54 · modified: 2024.09.29. 08:54 ·  · license

This post was automatically translated and has not yet been reviewed by me. Please read with discretion.

It was last October, during a trip to Jeju Island with my friends from Stroke. I left them partway through the trip and headed to Daejeon for an IR meeting. Leaving in the middle of a trip for a single-day meeting—on the day before we were to climb Hallasan, no less, and for a meeting scheduled after the trip had already been planned—was a terrible thing to do. But the meeting mattered that much to me. Since graduating, I had been living under the banner of starting a business, without any real title to show the outside world. I felt this meeting might be a chance to change that. I am still sorry, and grateful, to the friends who traveled with me and understood my situation.

The meeting was over in less than 30 minutes altogether. That included my presentation, the Q&A, and the immediate answer that an investment would realistically be difficult. As the investment manager explained the reasons one by one, I understood every one of them. If I had been listening to my presentation and the Q&A as a third party, I would have opposed investing too. Only then did it occur to me that perhaps the mistake had been arranging the IR meeting in the first place, with no clear reason to seek investment beyond the thought that surely I could do something if I got funding.

By then, I had spent nearly a year trying businesses with low chances of success in ways that were not very effective. I do not mean to disparage my efforts at the time; those experiences made me who I am now. But that is how they look to me from my somewhat less subjective perspective today.

Surprisingly, the hardest part of those attempts was not the business ideas or whether they had promise. It was doing everything myself. I was growing exhausted in a situation full of questions I had to answer but with no answer key. There was no one to talk things through with, or to steady me and give me strength when my state of mind wavered.

At a time when I felt a greater need to belong than ever, I did not turn down a job offer from the very VC where I had given that IR presentation. About two months after the presentation, in December, one of the investment managers who had heard it called me. At first, I thought he was saying the firm had a new area it wanted to invest in and would give me an idea to try. When we met in person and I heard more, though, the question was whether I would join the firm.

I thought I would enjoy working with other people again and learn a great deal about fields unfamiliar to me, such as investment, finance, and accounting. At the same time, my long-term goal was still to build a successful business. I planned to work and learn as hard as I could for three or four months, then leave and use what I had learned to try again.

And so, early this year, I started my first job. The office was in Centum City, Busan. Someone with an ordinary life in Seoul might have been horrified, but I have always had a restless streak. Exploring a new city was fun, and I liked that it was less cold. Thanks to that(?), I barely saw any snow last winter.

I enjoyed the work, too. The development skills I had taken an interest in and built up were an excellent match for what the company needed. I got to make things people at the company needed, enjoy doing it, and get paid! Since I was the company’s only developer, I also had a fair amount of control over how much I worked and how I worked. With a regular routine and long-term development goals, the loneliness and anxiety that had plagued me throughout the previous year gradually began to lift.

But as the anxiety left, a new worry took its place. My plan to stay at the company for only three or four months before trying to start a business again was fading. It was not that I wanted to settle into life as an employee. I wanted to grow, but my work at the company felt less like growth than like using up what I had already built. Yet after nearly a year of trying to start a business, I also thought that unless my next attempt succeeded, those experiences might no longer be growth either. They might be stagnation, or even a step backward.

So everything depended on the odds of my next business succeeding, and they did not look good. The backgrounds of the many founding teams I had seen at work, the attitudes toward business of people I had met in a startup club I was involved with over the same period, the startup support programs I had not been selected for—everything I had encountered and every indicator I had seen over the past few months was telling me: no-go. I had neither the conviction nor the human or material resources to make a business succeed. I might try again at another stage of life, but now was not the time.

What, then, should I do until that day came? Go to graduate school, where I could pursue new research? Move to a large company, where I could grow by working with senior colleagues? Move to a fast-growing startup, where I could experience a business’s success secondhand? Or pursue my ambitions at this company?

After much thought, I chose graduate school. The choice was not logical at all. What I have found when making decisions, whether about business or my career, is that the more important a choice is, the harder it becomes to arrive at it through logical reasoning. There are so many factors to consider that, even if each one could be measured quantitatively, combining them into a single conclusion through logic is nearly impossible. At that point, the choice comes down to personal philosophy and conviction. Perhaps that is why Kazuo Inamori emphasized philosophy in running a business.

I thought about my own philosophy and convictions. What do I live for? What would make me willing to give up other things? For me, it was the sky and outer space. I have long imagined my moment of self-fulfillment as seeing something I helped research and develop reach a part of space no one has ever ventured into. If I could do that, I would be fine with a little less sleep and a little less money. And I felt I could let go of the many other paths I would have given up to get there.

When I tell people I know that I went to graduate school for aerospace engineering, they often ask why I did not choose computer science instead. I think I have been asked more than ten times already. It is a perfectly natural question: I majored in both aerospace engineering and computer science, and most of what I had done recently was in development. But computer science research and web development are simply among the things I like and can do well. I cannot say they reach as deep as my convictions.

Once I made the decision, life moved quickly. I firmly decided to apply last April, just two days before the deadline for fall-semester applications. In those two days, I prepared and submitted my application, personal statement, and supporting materials documenting my achievements. The deadline was on a Thursday, and ordinarily I would never have had enough time after work. By extraordinary luck, the Wednesday before was a public holiday for the National Assembly election. I spent the whole day camped out at a Starbucks by Haeundae Beach, writing my personal statement.

After submitting my documents, I prepared for the interview by moving between study cafés near Haeundae and Gwangalli after work. Since I had taken almost nothing but computer science courses in my later undergraduate years, it was hard to recall material from courses I had taken as long as four or five years earlier. Studying after a day’s work was not easy, either. To be honest, I was far from fully prepared even on the day of the interview, and there were many questions I could not answer properly.

The interview was scheduled for a Friday in mid-May, and I was prepared to take a day off. Then the company suddenly announced that the entire week would be a company holiday(!), so I did not have to. I took the opportunity to arrange meetings on the Monday and Tuesday of that week with several professors to decide which lab to join. I had intended to finish those meetings early in the week and spend the remaining time preparing. But, as fate would have it, my paternal grandfather passed away on Tuesday. He had been ill for a long time, so I had had time to prepare myself emotionally. Even so, I remember going into the interview still shaken by the funeral and having barely slept for several days. There were exactly three days between the meetings with professors on Tuesday and the interview on Friday. It was hard on me mentally and physically, of course, but sometimes I wonder whether my grandfather was looking out for me: the entire three-day funeral fit into that interval without conflicting with anything on my schedule.

My admission was confirmed in mid-June, so I told the company I planned to leave and went to work for the last time on August 20. In the meantime, I took a family trip. Classes began in early September, and it has now been almost a month since I started going to the lab. I am enjoying it. My professor is admirable and kind, and the more senior members of the lab and my fellow newcomers are friendly. Above all, they seem like people I click with, which I appreciate. There are a little over ten of us, including the professor, and all are men. But it is not rowdy like an all-boys’ high school; it feels comfortable in just the right way. More of them than I expected married young or have children, so I think I can also turn to them for advice from people further along in life. Lately I have often thought it would be nice to marry and raise children while I am still young and have the energy. I think that feeling comes partly from the stability of knowing what my path will be for the next six years, assuming I continue through a PhD, and partly from watching the senior members of the lab.

I had no particular experience doing research in this lab before, so I still had not settled on a specific area of interest when I applied. After I had chosen my advisor, the professor suggested a topic for me to try. Right now, I like it a great deal. There will surely be many twists and turns ahead, but I hope that, if I do it well, the moment of self-fulfillment I mentioned earlier might come from this topic.

Two paragraphs ago, I added the qualification “assuming I continue through a PhD.” Of course, I hope the research topic I mentioned will suit me so well that I naturally continue from a master’s into a PhD. But things do not always go my way. Unexpected difficulties may make me want to stop doing research. It is true that doing something great takes everything I have, but I want to remind myself that I do not have to keep at it to the point of destroying myself. If I had gone straight from my undergraduate degree into a master’s and then a PhD, this path might have been all I knew. Having wandered outside it before returning, I now know there is a wider world beyond it. I want to keep that world in mind and make sure I can live a happy life.

To close, I want to set down the attitudes I should carry through my years as a graduate student, however many they turn out to be. It will not be a short time. These are what I think of as the truths of life. I give these small, obvious ideas such a grand name and list them here because, while working at the company this year and facing many different situations in other parts of my life, I saw the same principles at work again and again.

1. A positive mindset. Most things depend on how I think and what I do, regardless of my circumstances.
2. Consistent, long-term effort (consistency and perseverance). There is no single breakthrough that changes everything. (This includes establishing routines.)
3. Honesty, kindness, and a willingness to give way. If I can admit my mistakes and be generous about other people’s, most conflicts can be eased relatively easily.

Let’s follow these truths and give life our best.