I was struck by a comment a client made recently at a dinner. She said the odds of me being the U.S. CEO of a media agency were extraordinary—almost nonexistent. When I think about the trajectory of my life, though, from Seoul to the Bronx and up through the ranks in the media industry, there were many moments where my path could have diverted toward something very different.
I was born in South Korea and lived with my biological family until I was left at a local orphanage when I was five and a half. It would be six months before I was adopted by an absolute force of a woman, the oldest daughter of eight from an Irish Catholic family who knew she wanted to be a mom and decided she didn’t need to be married to do so. A month before my sixth birthday, I was on a plane from Seoul to JFK, welcomed when I landed by my new family of light-skinned, bright-eyed people who looked nothing like anyone I’d ever seen before.
Today, I feel just as much American as I do Korean. It must have been formative to how I’ve built teams around me. I often realize after the fact that the team we brought to a pitch was diverse without having to press my thumb on the scale one way or the other. Sometimes it takes only one person like that in the room to bring different people together. I love the organic nature of how it happens.