I wanted to be a teacher.
Ever since I was a kid, I was the type to share what I'd learned with my friends.
For memorization-heavy subjects, I'd type up my notes into a stack of pages and hand them out during exam season, saying "just memorize this and you'll get a perfect score." I loved doing that.
I thought it would be great to keep doing this kind of thing as an adult, and if possible, to be someone who had a positive emotional influence on people too.
So I decided to become an elementary school teacher, and that became the first memorable failure of my life.
At the time, I didn't want anything other than to get into a teachers' college, so I enrolled in the business school at Chonnam National University (a national university in Gwangju, in southwestern Korea), where I could skip tuition for four years just by showing up.
The professor who interviewed me looked at my background and told me, "Study hard and become someone who can teach business to others." I didn't realize it then, but I think those words changed me quite a bit.
As I'll explain later, I want to make this blog the place where I fulfill that dream.
I decided to become a marketer.
I think I spent half of my college years kind of lost.
My GPA hovered just above the cutoff for the national scholarship that covered my tuition, and I couldn't find anything I really wanted to do.
Then, after finishing my military service, I felt like I needed to work hard at something, anything, and what I wanted to try most was marketing and business case competitions. So I joined the university marketing club.
Out of all the things I could have done, why marketing?
Honestly, I still don't really know. I think I just wanted to do something that made my heart race, and I wanted to get good at presenting in front of people.
The effort paid off: I won a lot of competitions and ended up as club president. Presenting once a week, I eventually stopped being afraid of it.
Even so, I hadn't thought as far as getting a job as a marketer. My mother wanted me to join a public corporation or become a civil servant. Everyone around me did.
But I wanted my work to come with a sense of fulfillment and enjoyment.
I'd seen plenty of older friends live happy lives working at public corporations or as civil servants, but I never got the sense that any of them loved what they did.
In the end I gave up on being the good son and decided to make marketing, the only thing I'd ever found fun, my career.
But once I actually started working, the person who supported my life the most turned out to be my mother.
I'm really grateful for that.
I realized becoming a marketer is hard.
When I actually tried to get hired as a marketer, I ran into a lot of difficulties.
Looking back now, I should have moved to Seoul as early as possible, but at the time that decision scared me.
I ended up starting my career at one of the few IT startups in Gwangju, run by a senior from my university. The industry was B2B SaaS, same as now.
Without a proper mentor, I spent over a year handling everything from HR to marketing, sales, and customer support.
What's really foolish is that back then I thought a marketer absolutely had to know how to run ad tools, and I didn't think getting prospects to leave a sales inquiry on the website I managed counted as marketing.
These days I spend a lot of my time thinking about exactly how to do that.
For various reasons I left that first company, finished school, and moved to Seoul.
I worked for two months as a copywriting intern in Seongsu (the Seoul neighborhood where my current company is), spent half a year in B2C at an early childhood education company, and then came back to B2B.
Along the way I got to experience, however briefly, work across B2B, B2C, IT, e-commerce, education, publishing, and more.
For better or worse, most of the bosses I met in Seoul were people who had once made a real mark on the industry, so they were extremely strict and gave sharp feedback.
So I think my real mentors were Google, YouTube, PUBLY (a Korean business-content subscription service), and all the materials scattered across the internet.
A lot of other things happened along the way, and early this year, with about three to four years of experience, I became a B2B marketer at Indent Corporation.
Why I started the blog: I want others to go through less of what I did.
I started a Tistory (a Korean blogging platform) blog at my previous company.
The goal was to write up and share what I'd learned on the job, roughly once a month.
That led to good opportunities: I met a lot of people, and it laid the groundwork for moving to my current job.
Even back then I tried a few times to share what I was learning, but organizing it on my own wasn't easy, so I kept putting it off.
But at Indent, where I've just moved, my job is to solve the problems and worries of e-commerce marketers.
I now have an environment where I can be a marketer for marketers and put everything I learn to use for both my customers and myself. It was the best opportunity I could ask for.
Now, whenever I come across useful marketing information, I can send it to customers or use it myself, getting 100% efficiency out of it.
And if I'm allowed one more ambition: I wanted to give a gift to people like my past self, who are still carrying their worries as they prepare to land a marketing job.
Why "Josh's Life"?
After setting up the blog, I thought about what to call it and just went with "Josh's Life" (the site's original Korean name).
If being a teacher is the reason I was born, marketing is an important reason I'm living right now.
Since the two overlap, I figured it was fine to just call it my life. It's a brand name from a thoroughly producer-first point of view, but for now this is the feeling I want to keep.
As an aside, I love Pixar's Soul. My favorite part is the story of the supporting character, the barber.
He had to give up his childhood dream of becoming a veterinarian to pay for his daughter's medical treatment, but he says he's still happy.
I want to be that kind of person.
I want my life to be happy, and I want to do work that's enjoyable and meaningful.
And I'd like to become good friends with you, the person reading this on my blog right now.
I can't be your fixer, but I think I can be someone who thinks through problems and solves them alongside you.
If you'd like to join me, sign up using the button below and say hello.
PS. Thanks to this blog, I've met many wonderful people whose success I want to cheer on. There's a certain book I give them as a gift.
