A year ago, in April 2025, I got sober.
After a decade of startup grind, I have come to understand that agency, health, and self-command are not separate from leadership.
They are part of the foundation.
This was never an abstract subject for me. My grandfather died from alcoholism-related complications when my father was young. The story I was told was that even after surgery had taken much of his liver, he still demanded and drank copious amounts of soju.
I’ve had a complicated relationship with addiction.
I didn’t drink through most of college. But in my early career in New York, alcohol became an easy escape from the grind. I thought I could handle it. I thought: this time is different.
Addiction is a quiet, pernicious snake. It weaves its way into your life over years, and then, in the darkness, binds you.
For years, I knew I had a problem. But I told myself I was functioning. From the outside, I seemingly was. I was working hard, leading, producing, keeping things moving.
But functioning is not the same as being free.
Over time, the degradation of my health and mind became obvious. And by then, I feared it was too late to escape.
Last April, at the urging of @GreemKim , I quit.
I was afraid I was losing something that defined my happiness — the thing I thought kept me sane in this insane world.
But I was wrong.
Instead of losing something, I got something back: myself.
Not quickly, nor all at once. But slowly, softly, bit by bit.
My mornings came back.
My body came back.
My energy came back.
I could start to hear my own thoughts again.
The joy in the quotidian came back too. Sunlight through leaves, a quiet walk, a meditative afternoon.
My sense of agency came back: the feeling that I’m not just being pulled around by impulses, habits, substances, moods, machines, or old stories I tell myself about who I am.
I’ve been quiet here for a while. I needed space. And I didn’t want to perform a version of life I was no longer interested in living.
With time, I hope to share more again. Not as a highlight reel, but as field notes from the path: rebuilding, health, discipline, creativity, technology, embodied practice, and the kind of human future I want to help create.
Because in an age increasingly designed to capture our attention, automate our choices, and mediate our sense of meaning, self-governance is not merely a private virtue.
It is how we stay human.
And I believe this even more deeply now: if you cannot govern yourself, you will struggle to govern anything else with clarity.
Self-command is not merely related to leadership.
It is one of its foundations.
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