The rubber band I’d worn on my right wrist for years finally snapped this morning. If you look closely, it reads “SSIT” — one of Samsung Electronics’ basketball clubs. I wore it from the time I returned from my posting in Ukraine until the day I retired, so it rode along with me for a little over ten years. I let go of a lot of things when I retired, but somehow I kept wearing this band — until it finally gave out this morning.
After a couple of years on back-to-back task forces, my real working life began at the Gumi plant. Life as a new hire more than twenty years ago wasn’t as easy as I’d expected. Along the way, a basketball club at Gumi called TNT gave me an outlet for stress and a way to meet seniors and juniors — it became one of the genuine pleasures of working life, and I put real effort into it. After leaving Gumi for a stint in Ukraine and then returning to Korea, I kept playing basketball with SSIT at the Suwon plant, and now, since retiring, I no longer have a company club to be part of.
Looking back, I met plenty of people simply through work, but the clubs introduced me to people across departments, job functions, and ranks that I’d never have crossed paths with otherwise. Building genuine human bonds with them, sometimes getting a hand with work, and growing and being comforted along the way — I feel real gratitude for that time.
Personally, I think that as adults, our motivation for forming relationships comes down to either benefit or meaning — and here, meaning includes things like love, friendship, and solidarity. Even relationships that start out driven by business benefit often end up becoming ones defined more by meaning. That’s how it was with my seniors and juniors at Samsung, and now at Coupang too — I’ve met people as colleagues, but some of them, beyond what I learn from them professionally, have revealed a personal charm that keeps adding meaning to the relationship. Meeting people like that always leaves me feeling genuinely grateful.
Even now, I stay in touch with people from my old workplace with whom I built long relationships and who now matter to me personally — trading updates on how life’s going and sharing what each of us is interested in these days, and I really enjoy that time. I’m grateful that, at Coupang too, I’m slowly gaining people like that, one at a time — but it also makes me wonder what I can mean to them in return. As time goes on, I find that maintaining a good relationship is harder than forming one in the first place, and this morning I found myself thinking again about what kind of effort that takes.
#WorkLife #HumanRelationships #SamsungElectronics #Coupang #OrganizationalCulture #Networking #SelfDevelopment #SSIT #NatureOfRelationships #SocialCapital #Growth
