[Outliers] The Hyundai Founder Who Put a Country on His Back

**Shane Parrish** (0:00)
On June 16, 1998, an 82-year-old man climbed into the lead vehicle of a convoy of 50 trucks loaded with cattle. Behind him were 500 cows raised on a farm he'd reclaimed from the Yellow Sea. As the cows passed, Buddhist monks chanted, and women in traditional hanbok dresses lined the road waving as the convoy rolled through the last village before the razor wire barrier separating North and South Korea. The man in the lead vehicle was Chung Ju-yung, the founder of Hyundai. He was the first South Korean civilian to cross the border since the country was split in half. Four months later, he came back with 501 cows. 1001 cows total, one for the cow that he had stolen from his father 65 years earlier, and 1,000 for interest. Chung was so determined to change his situation that as a teenager, he stole a cow so he could sell it to buy a train ticket out of the farming village where he was born in what is now North Korea. He left in the middle of the night, told no one, not even his father, and arrived in Seoul with only a sixth grade education and no connections. In order to survive, he swept floors, hauled freight on the docks, ran a rice shop, and even fixed cars. Of course, this was all before he built Hyundai, but you can start to see the type of person he was. While many people think of Hyundai as a car company, at its peak, it accounted for 16% of South Korea's entire economic output. It built the highways that connected the country, the ships that carried its goods, and the cars that so famously announced Korea's arrival to the world. Ju-yung wasn't an inventor or a theorist. What he was more than anything was a force. He was a person who could not be stopped. Welcome to Outliers. I'm your host, Shane Parrish.
Today, we're going to explore the incredible life of Chung Ju-yung. And it's one of the craziest stories I have ever heard in my life. This is the story of a man who refused to be stopped, no matter the circumstances, no matter the obstacles. He simply would not quit. He was so poor at one point, he's eating tree bark, and so rich near the end of his life, that he's in the top 10 in the world. And in between these, he created entire industries and put an entire country on his back. One quick note before we get started. This is a longer episode and I kind of like this format. It lets me go below the surface, beyond the sound bites into the mindset and details that really matter. Let's dive in. In the village where Chung Ju-yung was born, the children ran home from school during the day to go to the bathroom because their family needed the feces. Human waste was the primary fertilizer for the dry fields. And in a bad year, a few extra contributions from a small child could mean the difference between eating through the winter and not. Chung was born in 1915 in a small northeast corner of what is now known as North Korea. At the time, it was just Korea. And Korea did not belong to the Koreans. Five years earlier, Japan had taken the whole Korean Peninsula. And what they did to the farmers was brutal. Japan seized the land through a paperwork trick. Korean farmers held their land by custom, not by deed. So when the colonial government demanded written proof of ownership, most of them had none. Overnight, everything changed. Suddenly, they were landless. By the time Chung was a teenager, Japanese settlers owned more than half the farmland in Korea. Korean families now worked as tenets on the same land they had once owned. Rent took more than half of the harvest. Taxes took around a quarter. A family kept maybe a quarter of what they grew. And that wasn't enough to survive on. Japan shipped the best crops home, rice especially, to feed its own population. Koreans ended up eating sorghum, a coarse grain they had previously used to feed their cattle. Historians later measured Korean heights from the 1920s to the 1950s. The average Korean kept getting shorter year after year, a little smaller than before. Chung's father farmed about three and a half acres. That sounds pretty manageable until you realize those fields had to feed a family of 10 through winter using farming techniques that hadn't changed in centuries. In a good year, the harvest lasted through long winter and into spring. In a bad year, the food ran out halfway. And there were a lot of bad years. Here's how Chung describes it himself. Back in those days, farming families were so poor that words cannot capture their suffering and destruction. After harsh winters, we would completely run out of food by the time spring arrived. From then on, we barely managed to stay alive by eating tree bark and grass roots and wild herbs. He had to eat tree bark just to survive. That's crazy, but it gets worse. Chung recalled his parents' arguments. I still vividly remember that my parents' arguments were always about food. Their arguments would become more and more heated until the table was overturned and the food ended up on the floor. Under Japanese colonial rule, Chung inherited two things from his parents. Let's start with his father. The man knew one thing, how to work. Chung described him as a man who farmed from birth to death, head to toe. He didn't say much. Chung wrote, Even when working beside him all day, I heard him speak at most three or four words. His father's total assets, as his son recorded them, were a healthy body and a diligent character. He worked from sun up to sun down every single day, with no exceptions and no holidays. As the eldest son, Chung was expected beside him in the fields after school until dark. In Korean life, the eldest son was the pillar. If the pillar fell, the whole house fell. His father understood this in his bones and organized his entire life around it. By seventh grade, Chung was no longer in school at all. He was farming full time. His father was training him patiently and relentlessly to become exactly what he himself was. From his mother, he got something else.