BreakFirst’s second season began in September.
In Season 1, which took place in the first half of the year, we interviewed 11 people who broke the mold.
As a reader who joined Season 2, I rediscovered stories worth reflecting on.
As the Chuseok holiday approaches, I hope this will be a time to look at the stories of those who are too precious to be left unsaid and come up with new insights.
‘Seven falls and eight losses’ called ‘Luck’
Eunwoo Cho (43), CEO of ‘People Who Make Fortune (Bokmansa)’, is the founder of frozen kimbap. He transformed the stereotype of ‘cheap frozen products with somewhat poor quality’ into ‘vegan kimbap’ through technological development. CEO Cho experienced several ‘misfortunes’ before creating frozen kimbap. He changed his business seven times, starting two meat restaurants, porridge, baby food, bread, hotteok, and cheese sticks, but failed for various reasons.
He said that his success so far was ‘a lot of luck’. In fact, there were many people who said ‘I was lucky’ like CEO Cho among the interviewees in season 1. They did not find the secret to their success in outstanding ability or fate. It may be an expression of humility, but it was not like that in the production team’s view. In fact, they were constantly working hard and challenging themselves until ‘luck’ came. The moments they expressed as ‘luck’ were actually close to ‘failures and failures’.
If we look into CEO Cho’s challenge, his success is more a result of effort than luck. If he had given up when he returned to Hadong with 10 million won after experiencing the bitter taste of business failure, he would not have had the success he has now. It was not luck that led to his success, but his secret to success was that he kept challenging himself until he succeeded.
▶Related article: ‘Is frozen kimbap a cheap frozen food?’… The way appeared when we broke the prejudice[BreakFirst]
https://www.donga.com/news/Economy/article/all/20240401/124252727/1
‘Experiment’ rather than a grand challenge
![Those who say ‘success is luck’, is it true?[BreakFirst 스페셜]](https://dimg.donga.com/wps/NEWS/IMAGE/2024/09/13/130037772.1.jpg "Those who say ‘success is luck’, is it true?[BreakFirst 스페셜]")
Broadcaster, writer, English teacher, environmental activist, agency CEO, Korean snack entrepreneur… .
It seems like a list of unrelated jobs, but would you believe it if I said it was one person’s identity? The main character is Tyler Rush (36), a broadcaster who has lived in Korea for 14 years. He is also well known as the ‘Korean-American’ and ‘Brainy Sexy Man’ who appeared on ‘Abnormal Summit’.
What is the driving force behind his constant challenges? Instead of ‘challenge’, Tyler used the unique expression ‘experiment’. When we talk about challenges, we think of setting grand goals, and it’s easy to give up because of the scale, but if we experiment on a small scale, we can try everything we want to do. When I think about ‘start small, and if it doesn’t work out, I’ll stop’, I feel a little more at ease.
“When I want to try something, I first think about ‘what is the minimum scale of action that can be carried out?’ If you set a grand goal from the beginning, you might be overwhelmed by the scale and give up, or it would be inefficient because a lot of time and money would be invested.”
So what was the driving force behind that ‘minimal action’? Tyler said, ‘What if this idea were to come true?’ He said, “There are many cases where we give up because we are overwhelmed by the negative emotions of ‘Is this possible?’, but we have to overcome those emotions and have the mindset of ‘Let’s try it.'” It’s about ‘taking a small step to a place of curiosity.’
▶Related article: “Red Ocean, Boldly Throw Away. And Experiment. In My Own Blue Ocean”[BreakFirst]
https://www.donga.com/news/Economy/article/all/20240426/124669030/1
Fighting the ‘inertia’ of others
Many of you may remember the advertising copyright that says, “H is silent.” Some may have thought, “Is it a foreign brand?” but it is actually a brand created by Gilim Yanghaeng, an almond import and distribution company. Yoon Moon-hyun (46), who leads this company, took over the company in 2006 after his father suffered a stroke. At the time, he was in his late 20s.
If you do this, you might think of him as a second-generation businessman who succeeded in a new business with his father’s halo and youthful sense, but he had to deal with the inertia of the organization that was reluctant to take on new challenges and had difficulty. You might think, “He’s just doing what the ‘CEO’s son’ tells him to do,” but the inertia of thinking is not so easily broken.
“At first, everyone at the company hated me. One day, the president collapsed and his young son came and started messing around in the company.”
It must not have been easy to go out and persuade employees who looked like, “The CEO is saying something strange again,” while running around as a “player.” His story of how he got to where he is now by unraveling the tangled threads one by one contained many things worth pondering.
▶Related articles: ‘The CEO is saying something strange again’… The world recognized it when he developed it while playing as a player himself.[BreakFirst]
https://www.donga.com/news/article/all/20240405/124340927/1
The freedom that ‘ignorance’ brings
The 160g ultra-light baby carrier from Koniebayerin, known as the nation’s baby carrier, was created based on the concerns that Lim and Koniebayerin CEO (39) personally felt during the child-rearing process. About 40 days after giving birth to her first child, CEO Lim, who was breastfeeding, suffered a relapse of cervical disc (herniated disc). She thought she needed help from equipment in a hurry, so she looked for a baby carrier that fit her body, but she said she couldn’t find a satisfactory product. Her husband, who was an entrepreneur, suggested to her, “Why don’t you try making it yourself?”
CEO Lim is a marketer, but he was not from the industry, so he was in a state of ignorance, and was able to break the industry’s inertia and create products. He produced his own fabric for baby carriers because there was no fabric he liked on the market, and he used expensive thread despite the factory manager’s complaints. “I think I was free from convention because I was not from the industry.”
Inertia is a strange thing. When you are still, being still becomes inertia, but once you start rolling, moving becomes inertia. Everyone we met in Season 1 was rolling a stone that was still and drawing a new orbit. The easiest way to roll a stone was with the spirit of ‘let’s just try it’.
“The most important thing when studying is not to do everything perfectly, but to go through it from beginning to end and then review it. Just like studying, I wanted to go through the entire process of starting a business. I wanted to start lightly, and if it worked, I wanted to reinforce it a bit more and try again. The mindset of ‘let’s just try it’ is also my inertia. Don’t think too hard about it and just try it.”
▶Related article: Why a Seoul National University graduate marketer jumped into developing a baby carrier[BreakFirst]
https://www.donga.com/news/article/all/20240517/124981211/1
BreakFirst will continue to work hard to uncover stories of ‘people who broke inertia’. See you again!
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2024-09-17 06:21:04