The Longest Road Is from Head to Heart, by Kim Yi-yul

The title made me expect a light, reflective read. The book turned out to be closer to a guide to changing how you go about your life.

I picked it up to clear my head. Some of it gave me more to think about than I had bargained for, but I was glad of that in the end.

The longest road is from head to heart

Kim wants the reader to recover the energy to keep doing something that matters. The chapters come at that concern from several directions.

1. Resolve
2. Goals and principles
3. Attitudes and habits
4. Relationships
5. Enthusiasm, experience, and trying something unfamiliar
6. The importance of developing a skill

Frank Joseph’s idea of parallel lives

The book opens with Frank Joseph’s idea that lives separated by time can appear to follow the same pattern.

The supposed parallels between Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy are a familiar example. Such lists are built by selecting coincidences and leave a great deal out.

Kim uses the idea as a way into a question about agency. If someone recognizes a pattern early enough, can they act in time to change its outcome?

Taking the time to prepare

Kim argues that rushing into something can make it harder to succeed, while steady preparation gives you more room to respond.

The book brings together episodes about Napoleon, Jane Goodall, and McDonald’s to illustrate that point.

A joke often attributed to George Bernard Shaw

Kim uses a wry line often presented as Shaw’s epitaph to make a point about indecision.

• “I knew if I stayed around long enough, something like this would happen.”

The joke leads into the need to decide what you want and do something about it.

That takes some thought about why you want it and what you will do when it turns out to be hard. It also asks you to decide which principles you want to keep along the way.

Kim brings in Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden, as an example of a person who tried to live by principles he had chosen for himself.

“Dream is No Where. VS Dream is Now Here.”

The book also tells a fable about two brothers who grew up seeing the same phrase about a dream being nowhere.

The brothers take different paths. Kim uses their imagined lives to show how differently two people can read the circumstances they share.

The more hopeful brother breaks the word in a different place and sees the dream as being “now here.”

What you do after failure

A setback can teach you something about the choices that led to it. What matters in Kim’s account is how you respond once you have had time to understand what went wrong.

Steve Jobs’s departure from Apple is one example. His work with Pixar formed part of the intervening years before he returned to lead Apple.

Seeing your own strengths

Measuring yourself against your earlier self can tell you more than comparing yourself with someone else. The qualities you can build on also deserve some of the attention you give to your faults.

Kim makes room for taking care of yourself while still looking closely at what you need to improve.

Enthusiasm in a passage attributed to Carnegie

The book presents a discussion of enthusiasm through Napoleon Hill’s account of Andrew Carnegie. The following ideas are paraphrased.

• Enthusiasm can make a person think more freely and speak more forcefully.
• Someone who cares about a subject can make a conversation enjoyable and leave an impression.
• A salesperson’s repeated request is unlikely to persuade anyone who cannot hear any conviction behind it.
• The same holds for a conversation between friends.
• An unpromising topic can come alive when someone brings a little interest to it.
• A good story can fall flat if the person telling it seems bored.
• Enthusiasm can give a person the will to begin.
• Without some interest in the result, it is hard to do the work that might bring it about.
• It can help a person keep going when tired or tempted to do less.
• It can also shift attention away from worry and toward what a person can do.
• It has something in common with the determination to keep acting.
• It works alongside will and patience.
• It can turn energy that has nowhere to go into something someone does.

A spring breeze and an autumn frost

The book cites a Chinese maxim about how to treat other people and how to hold yourself to a standard.

• Treat others with the gentleness of a spring breeze.
• Hold yourself to the strictness of an autumn frost.

That may sound severe alongside the advice to care for yourself. I read it as a reminder that learning a skill takes an honest look at your own work.

What it means to overcome yourself

Competing with an earlier version of yourself gives you something within your own reach to work on.

Other people start in different places. Comparing my present work with what I used to be able to do makes it easier to see whether I have grown.

The head and the heart are close together in the body. What I intend to do and what I actually do can still be far apart.

That may be the distance the title is getting at. I came away wanting to close it a little in my own life.

Book details

The Longest Road Is from Head to Heart

Author

Kim Yi-yul

Published

September 30, 2012

ISBN13

9788975045783

View the book on YES24

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