You Can Start Again#

I was born in Suwon, South Korea to missionaries. Shortly after, we moved to the Fiji Islands, and that became as close to a home as I’ve known. We attended a local school, practically lived outdoors, and had almost zero technology. Letters to and from family took over a month each way. Phone calls were a few dollars a minute, which meant a missionary family — poor by western standards, rich by village standards — didn’t make many.

It was a beautiful way to grow up. It was also unpredictable.

With the missionary work my parents were doing, we’d occasionally get our visas pulled — given 48 hours to be out of the country. I’m still not entirely sure how missionaries get the boot from a mostly Christian nation, but it happened more than once. Each time meant packing a backpack with a few clothes and possessions, getting on a plane, and landing somewhere stateside that we weren’t familiar with. No home. No friends. No stuff. Start over.

Losing everything is disorienting. Losing the people and the place you know — that’s the part that actually hurts. But we did start over. Every time.

I think about that a lot now, especially in the context of building businesses. Over the past 15+ years I’ve built things that grew fast and produced real results, and I’ve built things that didn’t make it and had to be shut down. The wins were exhilarating. The losses were some of the hardest stretches of my life. But neither one defined who I was — they were just things that happened along the way.

Here’s what growing up the way I did taught me: human beings are wildly resilient. Not in a motivational-poster way — in a real, historical, observable way. Less than 200 years ago it was common to lose most of what you had, load a wagon, and start over somewhere new. We come from people who did that routinely. That capacity didn’t leave us.

So if you’re a small business owner, a founder, a solopreneur sitting in a season where things feel heavy or uncertain — I want to speak directly to you. Your work might be imperfect. Your business might be struggling. You might be staring down something that feels like a reset. That’s okay. You are capable of navigating it, making the best decision you can with what you have, and if it comes to it, starting again.

The things you build and lose don’t define you. How you move through them does.

Don’t lose sight of that.