📅 This post is the English version of my book club reflection written on November 5, 2026. Korean version
I first read Good to Great during my military service. I loved the Hedgehog Concept at the heart of how great companies work.
As far as I remember, it is partly thanks to that concept that I found the work I do now. (The book reports I wrote so intensely back then vanished along with Cyworld, so I can’t fact-check it. I wonder whether WordPress reduces that kind of risk.)
For two straight years I kept asking myself what I loved that also mattered to the world, and what work would satisfy me financially. (I didn’t dare add “what could I be the best in the world at” to the conditions.)
I also liked the author, Jim Collins, quite a lot. Somehow it struck me as cool that he is a serious rock climber.
In 2019 I came across Nassim Taleb’s books, and the way I looked at the world changed.
He criticized the methodology that Good to Great is built on: you must not gather successful people and successful companies and then extract a recipe for success from them.
Taleb was not as lovable as Collins, but he was enough to cool my love for Jim and his book. It felt like finding out, years later, that the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which I had read over and over as a kid and even played as a game, is 70% fiction.
I started this book with that doubt, but it turned out better than I expected. He does not talk about recipes for success or self-improvement. He says it is a book about self-discovery, or self-knowledge.
Having lived a while, I find this really matters. It may be the secret of my happiness. I always introduce myself as someone who does work he loves, with people he respects, at a company he likes. That claim doesn’t always hold, but it mostly does. I think that was possible because, before joining the company, I had thought hard about what I want and had tried things out.
This is that kind of book. It asks what I need to know in order to truly live my life well.
For someone like me who loves biographies and autobiographies, the book was full of people’s stories. Jim says several times that the point is not to succeed like them. He filled the book with their stories simply because there is plenty of data on them; many people who live well never get seen by the world. We can be those people too.
Looking at all those people comforted me a little. Not everyone was recognized and successful in every situation. But they had an inner flame and lived around it. Some were recognized early in life, others only late. What matters is not when you are recognized or when you are ignored, but whether the inner flame is still alive and whether I am tending it well.
(Writing is one of the things I love, and even now the sound of my typing is gently stoking the fire.)
Even so, there will be times of despair (the Cliff), and times when I can’t tell how I should live (the Fog). It is also a comfort that every person in this book, without exception, went through such times. “No finding is also a finding.”
What people who kept their fire alive into the second half of life have in common is that they chose responsibility. The flame lasted because they committed themselves to something beyond themselves. I agree. I think this reaches the same conclusion as Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor and psychiatrist. Someone who has found a reason to live can survive any hardship, and someone who hasn’t may not be able to live even in abundance. In the same way, if I have people I am responsible for, and I get feedback from those who were helped under that responsibility, could my flame ever go out?
The book tells stories of people who achieved things only in the second half of life. The Jim Collins I remember is the young man from over a decade ago, when I first read his book, but he is now in his mid-to-late sixties. He seems the most excited of all about this discovery. Anger and desperation to escape a hard childhood were his drive, but now he enjoys his work more and keeps growing, he says. I remember the eyes of John Bogle, the founder of the index fund, still shining in his old age, as described near the end of the book.
Doing work I love that fits the encoding I was given, contributing little by little out of some sense of responsibility to the world, and living a harmonious life while at it. Working through the cliffs and the fog one at a time. I want to live enjoying that taste.
So what? I will not be impatient, because I can still shine in the second half of life. Instead I will focus on my harmonious family, which I am responsible for, and work to get better at what I love and do well. If that lets me contribute something to the world, I will try to make that happen. Having to be rich, having to be recognized: those are secondary.
Nov 5th 2025, so yesterday I joined a book club on this book. Maybe because we all came together through a similar route (people who share investing posts on Threads), it felt like our MBTI types and temperaments were alike.
It made me think about what an encoding is and what it means to find an environment that fits it. I also learned how enjoyable it is to talk with people who can relate to one another, because with people who can’t, you rarely get empathy and are easily treated as a strange person.
We got so carried away talking about encoding that nobody had brought up the Cliff, so I raised it, and I realized that all of us are facing a cliff right now: a historic market correction. What should we do in this correction?
Let’s write about it as ‘writing is thinking’.
