My father was never around, but even if he was, it wouldn’t have made a difference, because he didn’t really care about his family. All we had to eat were soybean sprouts, called Kongnamul in Korean. That’s all we had, just that and rice every day for every meal. For some meals, the soybean sprouts were pan fried, for others we ate it as a soup or steamed. But that was literally our only option when it came to food.
When things got really bad, I went from house to house to beg for food. My older brothers were too embarrassed to do it, so I had to. It wasn’t like the families around us were doing any better. We were all living in poverty. I wonder if children today realize how lucky they are. They have their own rooms, video games, iPhones and iPods, clothes they don’t have to share with siblings, meals any time they want. They take all of these things for granted. The family whose house we lived in had a TV, and they’d let us watch it for one hour a week. Watching that TV for that one hour was a luxury for me.
I believe every parent has a choice in how to raise their kids. If they were raised by unloving, abusive parents, they could raise their kids the same way, without any love. Or they can do the opposite and shower them with love. One time I was with my daughter Sofia, who was 3 at the time, at a restaurant and I remember three older women kept looking over at us from their table. I wondered why they kept looking over constantly. When we finished and were leaving, they came up to me and told me they’ve never seen a father show so much love and attention to a child before. They said I must have had a really good role model growing up. In a way, they were right. My father made me realize that I never wanted to treat my kids the way he treated his. I wish I didn’t have to learn that way, I wish he could have shown us even just a fraction of the good he’s shown other people. It’s unfortunate, but in life, sometimes pain is our best teacher.
Even through all that, what kept me sane and focused was Taekwondo. I hated teaching it and running the school, but I’ve always loved practicing Taekwondo. It was the only thing that made me feel good. I was chubby growing up and my brothers used to call me “fat boy” all the time, so I loved that doing Taekwondo helped me lose weight and feel confident about myself. No matter how bad things got because of my father, when I did Taekwondo, it was always a great stress reliever. It made me feel like I could handle whatever came next. I figured I could always practice Taekwondo on my own—I didn’t need to practice it at my father’s school—so even though I loved training, I was still looking for a way out of running my father’s school.
After I graduated high school, I enrolled at an engineering college, Polytechnic University (now NYU Polytechnic), but after a couple of months, I had to drop all my classes. Even though I was taking a full semester’s load of classes, my father didn’t care. He still made me run the school fulltime without anyone to assist me. That’s how it was for me during my high school years too. My father never paid any interest in how I did at school. All that mattered was that I taught the classes and made money for him. During my first semester at college, I’d only have an hour a day to study for six classes. Some days, the only time I had to do homework was on the train! So to make my schedule easier, I enrolled at two other local colleges in New York and I did very well but it wasn’t what I was looking for. One of my dreams was to be an actor, so I pursued that. I enrolled in acting school at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and really learned about myself there.
I became friends with the other students and they used to complain all the time about work. Most of them waited tables and hated their jobs, they hated how people treated them. I thought about my own job situation. At the Taekwondo school, everyone called me “sir” and treated not only me with respect, but their fellow students as well. I realized it wasn’t the teaching and running the school aspect that I hated. It was teaching and running the school for my father.
I thought about opening my own school and just separating from my father, but I saw the potential of my father’s school. My father taught the same class every time, he placed a heavy emphasis on basics, but I could see the students were getting bored. He didn’t have the creativity I had in teaching different types of classes. At 22, I made a deal with him and bought the business from him. Part of the terms of the deal was that I would pay off his credit card debt and pay for his living expenses for 20 years. This included paying his rent and bills. It basically let him retire a lot earlier than he would have. When I first offered him a deal to buy his school, he laughed. He didn’t take me seriously and he laughed every time I asked him. But I was persistent and after a year, he finally gave in. The school was mine to run my own way.
People assume he just gave me the school for all the years of working for him for no pay. I wish that was the case! Anything related to tuition or test fees went to my father, but he let me make money from seminars and private lessons. On Saturdays after the last class, I’d do a board-breaking seminar or a sparring seminar or special kicking seminar. I’d experiment with classes. I’d teach a cardio kickboxing class or a stretching class or a body-toning class. This is how a lot of my classes were developed. These classes became so popular, that when I took over the school, I incorporated them into the curriculum. In fact, this method of teaching specialized classes—classes where you work on a specific aspect of Taekwondo, be it basics or kicking or hitting the bag or working on fitness, like cardio, strengthening, and stretching—became so effective that many of my former students who went on to open their own studios used my method of teaching. New students, especially children, often ask me: “Are you a grandmaster because you can beat up anybody and you were a champion in tournaments and you’re not intimidated by anyone?”
My answer to them is always, “No, that’s not why I’m a grandmaster.”
Grandmaster is really a teaching title, like a professor, but in many ways it’s a bit more. You can almost say that I’m a teacher of teachers (or professors). It’s a title that takes more than a few decades to achieve—it usually requires a lifetime of dedication.
A grandmaster’s expertise should go beyond teaching individuals just martial arts skills.
A grandmaster should be able to get into the minds of the students.
A grandmaster should be able to teach them how to develop a higher level of integrity, humility, self awareness, and confidence.
A grandmaster is a teacher who is not selfish, but willing to share his life’s hard work, and able to pave an easier and clearer path where others can follow and learn to be their personal best.
Finally, a grandmaster is one who can express his true level of confidence by making his ultimate goal helping others to develop and even surpass himself.
CHAPTER 2
Jump Start
There are many books out there that advocate weight training and dieting for a short period of time—4, 8, 12 weeks, etc. These books show incredible transformations of the body through before and after pictures. How many people do you know, or can think of, that tried one of these workouts or diets and went through an extreme transformation from overweight to shredded and were able to maintain their new bodies? I’m willing to bet not many. What these books don’t tell you is that extreme workouts and diets don’t work in the long run. To lose that kind of weight in such a short period of time requires extreme physical and mental exertion. Even professional athletes have trouble adjusting from being mostly sedentary during the off-season to getting back into game-day shape. And these are athletes who are still active—retired athletes are a different story! Let’s be honest, it’s not easy maintaining that kind of discipline after completing one of these workout or diet regimes. They’re temporary cures for a permanent situation.
Not only do these extreme workouts and diets not work in the long run, but most of them are based on a short, fixed period of time. If you lost 50 pounds in four weeks, you’ll look fantastic. But your internal organs will not reflect how good you look on the surface. When your body goes through such a drastic change in so little time, it wreaks havoc on your