The Hyundai Founder Who Put a Country on His Back

On june sixteenth, nineteen ninety eight, an eighty two year old man climbed into the lead vehicle of a convoy of fifty truc loaded with cattle. Behind him were Five hundred cows raised on a farm he'd reclaimed from the Yellow Sea. As the cows passed, Buddhist monks chanted, and women in traditional handbok dresses lined the road waving as the convoy of the rolled through the last village before the razor wire barrier separating North and South Korea. The man in the lead vehicle was Chengju Young, the founder of Hondae. He was the first South Korean civilian to cross the border since the country was split in half. Four months later, he came back with Five hundred and one cows, one thousand and one cows total, one for the cow that he had stolen from his father sixty five years earlier. And one thousand for interest. Cheng was so determined to change his situation that as a teenager he stole a cow so he could sell it to buy a train ticket out of the farming village where he was born in what is now North Korea. He left in the middle of the night.

told no one, not even his father, and arrived in Seoul with only a sixth grade education and no connections. In order to survive, he swept floors, hauled freight on the docks, ran a rice shop, and even fixed cars. Of course, this was all before he built Hyundai, but You can start to see the type of person he was. While many people think of Hondae as a car company, at its peak, it accounted for sixteen percent of South Korea's entire economic output. It built the highways that connected the country, the ships that carried its goods, And the cars that so famously announced Korea's arrival to the world. Zhu Young wasn't an inventor or a theorist. What he was, more than anything, was a force. He was a person who could not be stopped. Welcome to Outliers. I'm your host, Shane Parish. Today we're gonna explore the incredible life of Cheng Ju Young, and it's one of the crazi I have ever heard in my life. This is the story of a man who refused to be stopped, no matter the circumstances, no matter the obstacles, he simply would not quit. He was so poor at one point, he's eating tree bark.

and so rich near the end of his life that he's in the top ten in the world. And in between these, he created entire industries and put an entire country on his back. One quick note before we get started. This is a longer episode, and I kinda like this format. It lets me go below the surface, beyond the sound bites, into the mindset and details that really matter. Let's dive in. In the village where Chengju Young was born, the children ran home from school during the day to go to the bathroom because their family needed the feces. Human waste was the primary fertilizer for the dry fields, and in a bad year, a few extra contributions from a small child could mean the difference between eating through the winter and not. Chung was born in 1915 in a small northeast corner of what is now known as North Korea. At the time, it was just Korea, and Korea did not belong to the Koreans. Five years earlier, Japan had taken the whole Korean peninsula, and what they did to the farmers was Brutal. Japan seized the land through a paperwork trick. Korean farmers held their land by custom, not by deeds, so when the colonial government demanded written proof of ownership, most of them had none. Overnight, everything changed.

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