Yul Kwon built one of those lives that seem almost fictional: Stanford, Yale Law School, McKinsey, Google, public service and a victory on Survivor. Yet behind the résumé was a shy child struggling with anxiety, OCD and bullying, who slowly learned to confront fear by placing himself in situations that forced him to grow. His story is a reminder that exceptional lives are rarely as effortless as they appear from the outside.
A few months ago, I listened to an episode of People I (Mostly) Admire featuring Yul Kwon. His résumé seems designed by someone who deliberately tried to exaggerate: Stanford, Yale Law School, McKinsey, Google, Facebook, public service, and winner of Survivor, a famous US TV show. He later moved through nonprofit work, entrepreneurship, the Federal Communications Commission and teaching at the FBI Academy.
Being in a bit of a low point at that time, as it happens when you’ve just arrived in a new city, my first reaction after listening to the episode was feeling down because I felt I could never achieve a fraction of what Mr Kwon had. You all know the struggle of applying for a million internships and opportunities, and feeling like you don’t even get the chance to put your foot in the door. On the other hand, I was listening to this guy who has one of the most interesting lives I heard of (at least, since we can’t explore the Earth anymore and can’t set foot in space yet) and got to prove himself in all kinds of situations. What does he have more than I do? What should I do to get in the same lane? Can I even get there, or am I just not good enough?
Comparison becomes particularly destructive when its premises are false. I was taking the finished record of another person’s life, accumulated over decades, and placing it beside my own unfinished present. His résumé contained the outcomes; mine still contained uncertainty, work in progress and things that had not happened yet.
Once the initial crisis had passed, I began to notice how distorted my reference group had become. Milan, and our university, place us inside an environment almost entirely populated by highly ambitious and connected people. We are not observing the general population, and even within this already selective group, we mostly see those who currently have something to celebrate (damned LinkedIn). We are comparing ourselves to a carefully selected stream of other people’s announcements and only get to witness the exact moment when they have something successful to report. Their failures disappear from the sample, while ours remain fully visible to us.
That is also why Kwon is my choice of a legend, because he shows us his process and not only his destination. His parents emigrated from South Korea to the United States in 1970 with very little money. He describes himself as an introverted, painfully shy child who struggled with social anxiety and severe obsessive-compulsive disorder: he washed his hands around twenty times a day and was fixated on even numbers. He was bullied, and after older boys started ambushing younger children in school bathrooms, he developed paruresis, an inability to use the bathroom when other people were nearby. In practice, this kept him away from parties, cinemas, shopping centres and sporting events and made him spend, by his estimate, half of every day worrying about finding a private bathroom. He did not ask for help. In his account, mental health was taboo in the Asian community around him and could be treated as an embarrassment for the family.
By middle school, he had concluded that if he did not begin changing, fear would determine the rest of his life. He did not attempt a dramatic reinvention. He gave himself small tasks, like raising his hand in class, or sitting beside someone he did not know, and saying hello. He enrolled in drama because changing his environment made changing his behaviour easier. He did not always complete each challenge, but found that trying often led to something positive and that, when it did not, it was not the end of the world. He later went to therapy and says he wishes he had done so sooner. His progress did not come from becoming fearless. It came from repeatedly acting while still afraid. Biographies often make change look clean; in reality, it is usually a long sequence of incomplete and uncomfortable attempts.
The same pattern continued in adulthood. When he felt that he had plateaued in college, he applied to Marine Corps Officer Candidate School because it seemed like the hardest thing he could force himself to do. He recalls nights spent weeping in bed, being mocked as overeducated and weak, and feeling marginalised as the only Asian American in his platoon. Years later, on Survivor, he arrived seasick and claustrophobic and came close to quitting after the first journey to the island. The contestants received no food and lived mostly on coconuts, without bathrooms or soap. He nevertheless applied ideas from game theory to the relationships around him and won the season.
His professional life was equally restless. Kwon moved among law, politics, consulting, technology, government, television and entrepreneurship while searching for work that could offer meaning, challenge, excellent colleagues, financial security and a mission he believed in. Eventually, he stopped expecting one role to provide everything and began to think of his career as a portfolio, optimising for different things at different times. He also acknowledges the cost of that approach: perhaps he changed too often, and sometimes wishes he were the deepest expert in the room. In my opinion, it would have made things more comfortable, but certainly less enriching.
His story exposes a mistake that I sometimes make: treating another person’s success as evidence against myself, as though life were a universal ranking and every victory elsewhere moved me one place lower. It also reminds me that a résumé is not a complete account of a life. It records selected outcomes, not fear, timing, illness, support, luck, hesitation or the many attempts that produced nothing worth adding to a profile.
Kwon’s story is also an antidote to the mythology of the entirely self-made outlier. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that exceptional achievements are never produced by talent and effort alone. We pay too much attention to what successful people are like and too little to where they come from: family, culture, generation and opportunity. Talent and work matter, but they operate inside circumstances we do not fully choose. Being in the right place at the right time does not create achievement by itself, but it creates an opening for the people prepared to use it.
That idea should not become an excuse. The fact that effort does not guarantee a result is not a reason to stop. We cannot control whether the decisive opportunity appears next month or three years from now, in a form we fail to recognise at first. We can control whether we are still learning, working and placing ourselves where something good might happen.
I still doubt myself, frequently and enthusiastically. I still wonder whether I am doing enough, whether I chose the wrong route or whether everyone else is moving faster. Don’t get me wrong, doubt is a natural thing, and only idiots are always 100% sure of themselves. The difference is that I am trying not to mistake those thoughts for evidence. Many people who look perfectly certain from the outside are managing fears and doubts that never appear on their résumés. Perhaps confidence is sometimes nothing more glamorous than acting before uncertainty disappears.
The most honest test I have found is therefore simple: am I still moving? There is no guarantee that the opportunity I want will arrive. The point is to remain ready to recognise and use the opportunities that eventually appear.
I originally wanted to end with “Shoot for the moon. If you miss, you may hit a star” and manufacture a grand conclusion that would make you think about how inspiring I am. While trying to establish where that sentence came from, I found a passage of this poem, called The Church-porch, written by George Herbert, an Anglican priest who died in 1633, which will do a much better job:
“Pitch thy behaviour low, thy projects high;
So shalt thou humble and magnanimous be:
Sink not in spirit; who aimeth at the sky,
Shoots higher much, than he that means a tree.
A grain of glory mix’d with humbleness
Cures both a Fever, and Lethargickness.”
