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*** Main items of the People Profile
1. Personal Info
1) Name: Byeon Chan-woo
2) Hometown: Daejeon
3) Hobbies: painting (semi-figurative, oil, knife on canvas), learning-to-code (생활코딩)
4) Specialties: questioning the question. Finding things that look like nothing. Projecting other people's situations onto my own
5) Likes: the real thing
6) Dislikes: quick-fix improvisation; the idea that making an unavoidable choice in an unavoidable situation is what it means to be a grown-up
7) What I want to do: branding
8) Family: parents and a younger sister (everyone except me is a sole proprietor)
2. Work Info
1) Current main work: occasional proposal writing, web planning, app planning
2) Work I'd like to take on next: running our own revenue-model business
3) Work-related concerns
: Really? Should I write this here? I thought about it a lot. In the end I was going to write it anyway. But I think it was a necessary time of thought.
(1) Situational concern: I think "an unavoidable choice only creates an unavoidable situation,
and once again we have no choice but to make another unavoidable choice."
Sometimes people say that making an unavoidable choice in an unavoidable situation is "grown-up."
But I think that's just another clever form of self-deception.
(2) Work environment concern: There are only about ten of us who use Macs.. but the time it takes to (diligently) set one up averages 2 days.
I understand this is because various unavoidable circumstances were weighed.
But if we're going to install them anyway and use them anyway, I think we need an alternative.
(3) Concerns about collaboration
- Though we work in the same company, there are times when I'm more careful than when I work with MayEye.
- I had a similar experience in the Pantech App Store build-out project. (a freelance TFT group of second-, third-, and fourth-tier subcontractors)
- The sense of work distance I feel when working with MayEye is not much different from the internal procedures required to coordinate work within our own team.
(4) Concerns about organizational culture
- Violent joking: Probably. As literally as "probably." It probably started as one person's joke.
The person on the receiving end must have been uncomfortable the first time, but, understanding the situation (after all, we're adults?),
they laughed along and let it go, and at some point that joke turned into "a joke between close friends."
The interesting part is, when you fire back with a joke of similar intensity, the reaction is "Oh? You wanna go?"
Even knowing they'll be mocked as petty and oversensitive, they still say what they want to say…
Organizational culture is a stubborn thing — the person who made it leaves, but it stays.
Of course I think the answer starts with being careful ourselves.
- "That very shop": I know quite a few people said it would eventually fail.
But with their own way of surviving, they are still running a business.
And I, complaining as I go, still find myself filling my hunger there from time to time.
I heard there was a day like this..
"Ma'am, the taste of this place is different from the Eunhaeng-dong branch. If it didn't taste good I could just not come again, yet I'm bothering to say this —
please think about why." It was not criticism but a sincere, carefully-offered question,
but in the end it sounds like the lady wasn't willing to acknowledge it.
Personally I guess it was because she had been a veteran working all the way from the main branch,
or because she took pride in having been thoroughly trained by the main branch.
I don't think "that very shop" is foolish at all.
They are quietly surviving in their own tried-and-true way.
- Blood-type-A complex, or the "nice person" complex
4) Main strengths: asking questions, thinking in reverse
3. What I'm good at
1) Questioning the question
: In professional life, "being good at something" often means not your own satisfaction but meeting other people's expectations.
And the criteria and common sense used to judge whether you've met those expectations differ so much by organization.
Like the way even a gangster is a decent guy if he's my friend, in the end, I think there's no definitive answer to "did well" or "turned out well."
Just as the saying goes "don't weigh right against wrong," I think judgment is ultimately decided by the situation and environment, not by the facts.
2) Personal reinterpretation
: So I step a little sideways from the question "what are you good at?"
If I can't clearly answer what I'm good at, maybe I can start by finding what I'm not good at? That's what I thought.
3) As for myself
(1) I'm weak at quick improvisation.
: Some call it "wit," but — I haven't lived all that long, but based on what I've seen,
I personally tend not to get close, off the clock, to people who are good at improvising or skilled at office politics.
(2) I'm not "nice" (for the sake of others). But I do try to be kind.
: So I often get misunderstood, but I have no intention of meddling with other people's opinions, nor of changing my stance.
(3) I'm weak at situational compromise, or pretending to have something I don't have.
: Probably because I think an unavoidable choice only creates another unavoidable choice.
But I realize this keeps making me look like I'm falling short in work and in social life,
so I want to find a way to calibrate.
(4) Even if I've had a similar experience before, I don't readily make judgments based on it.
: Because I have to try it for myself, so even the same task (work, relationships, challenges, etc.) takes me longer than others.
(5) I'm very conservative about trying new things.
: Some assume I must be adventurous because I'm curious about new things.
But I'm not someone who is calm in the face of risk. Most of my choices are "I know the outcome, but let me just try anyway."
It's just that I deliberately behave so as not to generalize the current situation based on imperfect past experiences.
(6) Relatively speaking, I try to learn more from teenagers and young people than from older adults.
: Probably because I prefer answers-that-work over "right" answers.
I'm quite critical of the habit of judging things in advance as if one's small experience were the whole. When you've been in professional life long enough, you often face unavoidable situations. Plenty of adults, in those moments, end up making unavoidable choices, over and over again. And they tend to think of that as a grown-up choice made under unavoidable circumstances (self-deception).
4) My own conclusion
: Actually I don't really distinguish between weaknesses and strengths. For example, you can't say whether a pawn or a cannon piece is superior in janggi.
What matters is to recognize them clearly, accept them, and use each for what it's for.
But.. whether by my own doing or not.. when I find myself facing one of those moments that society calls "a grown-up choice,"
I sometimes re-read the autobiography? or diary? I wrote at twenty-eight. (http://goo.gl/NFDoms)
