Chairman Lee Byung-chul's “Hoam Jajeon”

One of the books that moved me most in my university days

was Chairman Lee Byung-chul's memoir, “Hoam Jajeon.”

One passage in particular stayed with me for a very long time.

“Say an unemployed man spends ten years … whiling away his days fishing. Whether those ten years were wasted or not depends on what that man does ten years later.”

I truly loved this story.

How much did I love it?

In university, I posted the same passage to Instagram three separate times.

Just because someone spends a stretch of their youth without visible results,

you cannot say for certain that the time was wasted — that's the idea.

From the outside, they may have looked like they were idling.

They may have been wandering.

They may have been lost, not knowing what to do.

But even in that time, a person thinks.

They watch the world,

observe people,

read books,

fail,

and endlessly explore what it is they want.

And if, one day, that person achieves something,

that past stretch of time takes on an entirely different meaning.

Then it was not time wasted —

it may have been the deep, absorbed exploration

of something whose use was not yet known.

I have loved this idea since I was a university student.

Not judging a person's time too quickly

just because there are no results in front of them right now.

And not defining my own past hours

as failure or waste based only on how they looked in the moment.

At some point in life,

the things you once read, once agonized over, once failed at —

experiences that seemed utterly unrelated begin to connect, one by one.

Only then do you realize:

ah, I wasn't doing nothing back then.

That time was becoming the material that makes who I am now.

Why I posted the same passage

to Instagram three times in university —

now, with a good deal of time gone by,

I think I understand a little better.

Whether a stretch of time was squandered

is decided not in that moment,

but perhaps by the life that comes after it.