Reading the Story Behind a Korean Produce Chain

Chonggakne was once a familiar name on neighborhood produce shops. Its founder, Lee Young-seok, became known for a story about starting with very little and turning it into a business people recognized.

His story reached television and the stage. Later criticism over labor practices and accounts of power imbalances during training made it harder to read the founder’s advice without thinking about what it asked of people around him.

The founder’s account of getting started

The book appeared in the early 2010s, when South Korean readers were also buying books that offered consolation. Lee’s tone is more urgent. He wants a reader to decide what to do and begin.

He started out selling produce from a truck. By the time the book appeared, the business had grown to dozens of stores.

His own account of that move, from the truck to a chain, is the part of the book that gives the advice a place and a set of customers.

Accept the circumstances and work from there

Lee begins with a person taking stock of the conditions in which they find themselves, then choosing what they can change about the way they do their work.

He prizes diligence and a strong sense of urgency. He wants a reader to feel that a decision matters enough to follow up on it.

Two people can face the same setback and make very different estimates of what it will mean a year from now. Lee is interested in the person who keeps enough of a view of the future to try something else.

He also asks a reader to look for the work behind the success story, the part that is easy to pass over when the result has already arrived.

What you can picture in a written goal

The book suggests writing a goal clearly enough to picture it, then keeping the words where you will see them. Its examples also show something of the time and perspective in which it was written.

• One example sets a date for buying an apartment in Bundang and specifies its size.
• Another describes a future spouse as a list of physical measurements. I read that as a reminder of how reductive a goal can become when it treats another person as a thing to obtain.

Learning something before you commit

After writing it down, Lee wants the reader to find something they can do. He makes the gap between imagining a purchase and learning what it is like unusually concrete.

He suggests trying a car you want to own, perhaps by renting one first. The book also entertains buying on installments. For me, the rental makes the more interesting example because it can tell you something before you make a long commitment.

Lee also returns to learning from someone who already knows the trade. A new idea can come from watching how they handle an ordinary sale.

A monkey on the banana truck

One scene I could not forget involved selling bananas from a truck. Lee says he brought along a monkey to get passersby to look.

It is a striking story from the early business, and one that raises obvious questions about the use of an animal for promotion. Its place in the memoir is as an example of the lengths he once went to get a customer’s attention.

Learning by watching someone else work

Lee offers a more straightforward method for learning a trade.

• Look across the industry and identify the people whose work you can learn from.
• Choose someone whose standards will make you work hard and pay attention to what they do.

The part that interests me is the apprenticeship. A person who works beside someone more experienced can see judgments that a book has room only to describe.

Who gets to say how good the work is?

Lee also asks whose assessment counts when you want to know how good you are. Customers and colleagues have seen what happens when they actually depend on your work.

That idea was easier for me to take away than some of his other rules. What I intend to do and what somebody receives from me can be two quite different things.

The book made me want to approach difficult work with some of the confidence Lee describes. I also found myself asking how a manager makes that work bearable for the people doing it.

The later labor controversies are part of the context in which I read the story now. They give the reader reason to examine what happens when the founder’s appetite for hard work becomes an expectation for everyone else.

I kept the parts of the book about paying close attention to a trade. Those were the parts I could imagine putting to use in my own day.

Book details

Make No Excuses in Life

Author

Lee Young-seok

Published

August 27, 2012

ISBN-13

9788965700869

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