HANAH reads the same forward and backward. We chose this as the name of the company because it is the visual form of what we are trying to do: return people to a wholeness they already possessed.
I have been thinking about what it means for a life to have the same property.
The arc I expected
The arc I grew up believing in went in one direction. You study hard, you build credentials, you join institutions that transfer their credibility to you, you use that credibility to build something larger, you grow, and the trajectory is always forward and upward.
This is not wrong as a framework. It describes the first chapter of my career reasonably well: Korea University, Bain & Company, SoftBank Ventures, PeopleFund. Each step transferred forward.
The framework breaks down when the line reverses.
The reversal
In 2023, I left PeopleFund under circumstances that the business press covered with the kind of attention reserved for spectacular reversals. I had been building for eight years. I left with a criminal record and without the thing I had built.
The arc was supposed to keep going up. It did not.
What I understand now, sitting in 2026 with a group of companies generating more revenue than PeopleFund did at a similar stage, is that the line did not actually reverse. It was always a spiral. What looked like a reversal from inside the trajectory was actually the beginning of the return leg.
The palindrome was always the shape. I could not see it until I had lived more of it.
What returns when you return
There is something specific that comes back when you rebuild after a real loss. Not the things you had — those are gone. Something underneath them.
I am a better builder now than I was in 2021 at the height of PeopleFund. Not more capable in the credential sense. Better in the sense that matters: I know what I am building for. I know the difference between the company and myself. I know that the mission is prior to the business, and the business exists to serve the mission, and not the other way around.
These are things I could have said in 2021. I could not have meant them.
The two-country life
I run companies in Korea and the United States simultaneously. I spend parts of each month in both countries. My children are growing up between cultures in a way that will give them things I did not have and cost them things I cannot predict.
This life does not have a natural center of gravity. It is distributed, stretched across time zones and languages and legal systems and business cultures that understand each other only partially.
I have stopped trying to resolve the tension. The tension is the point. The person who can operate in both places — who can think in Korean and present in English, who understands both the han of Korean culture and the ambition of American business culture — has an advantage that neither culture can produce on its own.
That is also a palindrome of sorts. The diaspora condition, usually understood as a disadvantage, turns out to be the source of a particular kind of power.
What I know about the shape
The life of faith — which is also the life of this blog — does not promise that the arc will always go up. It promises something more useful: that the arc is going somewhere meaningful, and that the reversals are part of the shape rather than deviations from it.
I have lived enough of the palindrome to believe this now.
The journey home runs through the place where you got lost.
That has been true for me. I think it is true for most people. The question is whether you can read the shape of your life from inside it — and whether you can trust it enough to keep walking.