I DM’d a Korean Presidential Candidate — and Ended Up Building His Core Campaign Platform: The Full…

It’s been five months since the Korea presidential election ended, but it still doesn’t quite feel real to me.

I actually wanted to write this during the presidential election period, but things felt too sensitive back then — and to be honest, I was a little scared. So I kept putting it off until now.

I hesitated because of the topic, but it’s not something I need to hide. And more than anything, it’s a fun story — one that only I can tell. So I figured there’s more to gain than lose by putting it out into the world.

In this post, I want to look back on how a complete political amateur like me got interested in politics, how I came to cross paths with Lee Jun-seok (a former party leader who later ran for president), and what kind of work I did with him during this most recent election.

Along the way, I’ll go into extra detail about the campaign that ended up getting the most attention: a project called “Let’s Eat Lunch on Campus” (학식먹자) — a web service I designed and built for his campaign.

Politics Felt Too Difficult

I was born in 1998 and I’m 27 now. If I start counting from when I became a legal adult at 19, I’ve definitely spent more years not caring about politics than actually caring.

When former president Park Geun-hye was impeached, I was just starting university.

My reaction at the time was basically:

“Wow, I guess she must’ve done something really bad. Something huge is happening in our country’s history.”

And that was about it.

To be honest, I didn’t really care what exactly had happened.
Figuring out what to do with my friends the next day felt way more important.

But somewhere in the back of my mind, there was always a bit of discomfort.

“I’m an adult now. Shouldn’t I at least have some idea how my own country is run?”
“Even if I don’t understand everything, shouldn’t I at least try to care?”

It became a kind of low-key complex for me.

Still, whenever I saw politicians on TV, the way they talked felt oddly high-level and abstract — like this was some distant, complicated world that wasn’t meant for people like me.

So I just let it all wash over me and went on with my life.

Huh, This Is… Kinda Interesting?

The ‘MS Office’ Hearing

That mental barrier slowly started to crumble when I began bumping into politics in lighter, more accidental ways.

There were two videos in particular that became turning points.

The first was the famous “MS Office” parliamentary hearing clip.
Even a lot of people who don’t care about Korean politics have seen this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9RZZKCYtt0

A lawmaker basically says:

“Why are you only buying MS Office from Microsoft?!
That’s illegal. You should resign!!”

I completely lost it.
I laughed at that clip for like a week straight.

It wasn’t a “positive” moment by any means, but it definitely made politicians feel a lot less distant and untouchable. The mental barrier came way down.

Later I found out the exact context was a bit different, but the gist is similar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjLeRKBIgTQ&t=457s

Governor Lee’s Valley Demolition Talk

The second video was this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuxZUHZ97yw

It was a very viral video of Lee Jae-myung, then a provincial governor, visiting restaurant owners who had illegally taken over a stream/valley area and were charging people seating fees. He was there to tell them the structures would be demolished.

What struck me wasn’t just the content, but how he talked.

Instead of the usual vague, noncommittal political language, he laid everything out clearly, face to face, with the people involved. It was direct, uncomfortable, but honest.

If someone asks me what first got me interested in politics, these two videos are what come to mind.

Because of things like that, I started paying attention to what politicians were doing and saying.
I began watching political news and debates here and there, almost accidentally.

Signing Up as a Party Member for the First Time

A Third-Party Winner?

As I got closer to graduation and job hunting, my interest in politics started fading again.

Then the 2024 legislative election happened, and I heard that Lee Jun-seok — who led a small “third zone” reformist party — had won a seat in Parliament.

I thought:

“Wait, didn’t this guy get kicked out of the big conservative party and disappear? I thought he was done with politics.”

I honestly didn’t even know who was running in my own district, so I ended up submitting a blank ballot. It was only after the election that I learned about his new party and that he had run.

Actually… These Policy Talks Are Kind of Fun

I started looking up how he’d ended up winning as basically the only successful candidate from a small third-party.

The story went like this:
He became leader of a major conservative party, helped that party win three elections in a row, but then got pushed out by the very president whose election he had helped deliver. After that, he started a new party and won a seat as its only district representative.

It was a cool story, but “fighting through intra-party conflict” alone wasn’t enough to make me want to support him. That felt too factional, too much like inside baseball.

What actually made me want to support him was this series:

Yeouido Reconstruction Association (YouTube Channel) — Policy Talk Show (with Lee Jun-seok, Chun Ha-ram, Lee Gi-in)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkfIKNxYrC3J0APE2xEu220KubeQAKwBn

It was a series of videos where they said, “We’re only going to talk policy.”
No drama, no gossip, just actual issues.

There were almost 60 episodes, and I watched all of them for fun.

Topics ranged from fresh, slightly provocative ones like:

“Should North Korean broadcasts be fully opened to the public?”

to urgent real-world issues like:

“What should we do about the collapse of local healthcare systems?”

I got the sense that you couldn’t talk like this unless you were constantly thinking deeply about social issues from many angles and trying to come up with your own solutions.

At some point, I found myself thinking:

“I want to see what it would look like if someone like this had more power and responsibility.”

Then I asked myself what I could do.

That’s when the idea of joining his party as a dues-paying member came up.

I didn’t know anyone around me who was a party member of any specific party, so it felt like a big step.

But this was the first time I had felt this level of support for a politician.
I wanted my actions to match my feelings. I also thought it’d be a good forcing function to really learn about politics for once.

So I signed up as a member of the Reform Party (개혁신당), paying about 2,000 KRW($1.5) a month.
That’s how I became one of their grassroots members.

Time to Study Politics Properly

The Political Academy

About two months after I started my first full-time job, the Reform Party launched a political academy called L&L.

It was a 16-week program: 2 hours of lectures and discussion every week.

For me, it sounded like a rare chance to hear directly from people I’d never normally meet in my life — politicians, TV hosts, journalists, producers, and so on. (They even invited lawmakers from both major parties, which I found refreshing.)

I also figured I’d get to meet people my age who actually cared about politics, which is pretty rare in my immediate circle. So I put real effort into the application.

What I wrote in the application was basically the same story I’m telling here:

MS Office hearing, Lee Jae-myung’s valley visit, how I came across Lee Jun-seok, and so on.

Writing that application was actually the first time I really sat down and sorted out how I ended up becoming interested in politics — and in Lee Jun-seok.

In the academy, we even took turns giving short “opening statements” like politicians, then held debates on hot issues at the time — things like parliamentary confirmation hearings and whether to increase medical school quotas. It was a genuinely valuable experience.

Martial Law and an Early Election

Then, toward the end of the program, on December 3rd, 2024, martial law was declared in South Korea by President Yoon Suk-yeol.

It was surreal.

Lee Jun-seok predicted there would be an early presidential election.
In January, he reached out directly to the L&L graduates — including me — to ask if we’d be interested in joining his campaign.

There were about 50 graduates, and what impressed me wasn’t just the content of the message, but the fact that he had written it himself for that group of 50.

Kakao-Friend Lee Jun-seok

(Now it gets really fun)

All screenshots of my KakaoTalk (a popular Korean messaging app) conversations with Lee Jun-seok are shared with his permission.

From what I could find, working in a presidential campaign is mostly volunteer-based and pretty much full-time.

It sounded fun and like an incredible experience,
but I was already working full-time and didn’t have that kind of availability. So I politely declined.

My thinking was:

“When will I ever get a chance to DM a presidential candidate 1:1 like this again?”

So I crammed a lot of my personal PR into that message… only for him to reply in 3 minutes. All that time I spent drafting suddenly felt a bit unnecessary.

We ended on something like,

“If there’s anything I can help with, I’d be happy to,”

and that was that.

At that point, the only real outcome was a fun story I could tell friends:

“Hey, I DM’d Lee Jun-seok on KakaoTalk lol.”

Nothing more.

A Chance Encounter in Shanghai

About two months later, I went on a trip to Shanghai with some friends.

Out of nowhere, a video pops up:
Lee Jun-seok giving a speech at the site of the Korean Provisional Government in Shanghai, for March 1st (a major independence movement anniversary in Korea).

I thought, “Wow, what are the odds?” and was about to move on when a friend said:

“You already messaged him once. Why not DM him again?”

It was half a joke, but when you’re traveling with just guys, that kind of reckless courage comes easily. So I messaged him again.

In hindsight, just because a video is filmed in Shanghai doesn’t mean he’s there at that exact moment. 😂

It was totally random, but again, he replied in about 3 minutes — with a heart, and a request for help.

A presidential candidate, Lee Jun-seok, was personally asking me for help.

“Can I actually be useful?”

A lot of thoughts went through my head.

But I didn’t want to miss this chance. It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime moment.

So I replied within 3 minutes as well.

That’s how the “election dev duo” of Lee Jun-seok & JP Jeon was formed.

Election Efficiency Dev Project Begins

The first request was fairly easy.

He even said, “I might ask you for help from time to time,” which made me feel pretty good. Maybe I was actually useful.

The next day, the second mission arrived.

Automating Banner File Generation

Banner automation script
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HcIrAHfQmlOr8DBfsW9Efv9hcFHhjE7u582Oh5bXoJo/edit?tab=t.0

This one was no joke.

In short, the goal was to quickly generate print-ready banner files by modifying text in .ai (Adobe Illustrator) files without doing everything manually.

(Video omitted for now.)

Somehow, I managed to hack together a first version and send it to him.

After building it, I thought:

“Hmm… is this actually convenient to use?”
“Maybe it’d be better if they could just upload an Excel file.”

With any software — especially tools meant to help people on the front lines — there’s always the risk that using it feels more cumbersome than doing things manually.

That’s why it’s so important for the developer to fully understand the actual workflow and pain points.

While working on this, I realized how many things I still didn’t know:

• What do we do when the text length changes?
• How are the slogans managed overall?
• How many files do they typically generate in one batch?

Of course, I could always ask and he would explain in detail, but communicating purely by chat felt inefficient.

It seemed much faster to sit down face-to-face with him and the staff actually printing the banners.

So I took a deep breath and sent a message offering to come in on the weekend to help in person.

Part of me wondered if I was overstepping, but we immediately set up an in-person meeting — at his National Assembly office, no less.

(Yes, that was definitely my hidden goal.)

Looking back, it would’ve been hard for him to ask me for something like that first.

First Meeting at the National Assembly

And just like that, I was on my way to Parliament.

I’d been there twice before: once during the impeachment protests, and once for the political academy. But this time I was going to meet a sitting lawmaker.

To enter the building where lawmakers’ offices are, you go to the first floor, explain who you’re visiting and why, and get a temporary badge.

So there I was, a young guy in a hoodie at 7 p.m., telling the security desk:

• Staff: “What brings you here today?”
• Me: “I’m here to see Representative Lee Jun-seok.”
• Staff: “???”
• Staff: “Uh… one moment please.”
• Staff (on phone): “Hello, there’s someone named Jeon Jeong-pyo here to see you. Is that correct?”

😂

And that’s how I got my visitor badge and went inside.

Once inside, I did a tiny bit of “oops I’m lost” wandering around and even saw the Speaker’s office. It was surreal.

And then I really did meet Lee Jun-seok.

We dove straight into work talk. In fact, the banner automation was just one of many ideas.

Because his party was tiny compared to the two major parties, he said they wanted to run this campaign as efficiently as possible and lean heavily into “air war” — media, online, and scalable strategies.

Some of the things he was already building:

1. “Penguin Feeding” — a simple online donation service
   — https://givemoney.kr/
   Previously, most campaign contributions were made via bank transfer. That meant staff had to process receipts one by one, and if the sender name didn’t match a legal identity, the funds couldn’t be used at all.
   So they were building one of the first systems that allowed card-based political contributions, making everything more transparent and much easier to track.
2. “Jun’s Talk” — a 1:1 chat app with him
   An app where people could message him directly.
   The plan was also to stream live broadcasts inside the app, accept real-time political contributions, and more.
   It made me think, “Wow, they’re really trying a lot of creative things.”

We ended up talking for so long that we ordered pizza and kept going.

We bounced around ideas like:

“What if we made a political MBTI-style quiz?”

It was just genuinely fun.

People later asked me what he was like in person.
Honestly? He felt more like a neighborhood engineer-type — someone who just genuinely loves building things, not a politician.
(He actually studied computer science as an undergraduate at Harvard.)

We barely talked about anything other than development and product ideas.

Second Meeting — The Beginning of “Let’s Eat Lunch On Campus (학식먹자)”

While I continued helping out here and there, he messaged me again with a new idea.

His idea was something like a “Call Lee Jun-seok” website, where universities, companies, and groups could “invite” him, and he would go to the place with the most requests.

As soon as I heard it, three thoughts hit me:

1. This is a really fun idea and I can already tell it’ll work.
2. But if I can’t build it well, the whole thing fizzles. Can I pull this off?
3. We have to narrow this down to universities first.

On that last point, I was almost certain.

In my day job, I’d learned firsthand that clearly defining a minimum viable audience and value is crucial early on.

I’m a backend dev, but at our company, everyone in the scrum team can contribute to product decisions. Being in that environment taught me how important it is to narrow the focus early.

Anyway, based on just that brief chat, I started sketching a rough concept:

A sort of “Presidential Candidate Verification Tour”:

• Students would invite the candidate to their campus to “verify” him for themselves.
• It would give people a fun way to engage with the election.
• The site could host recordings of his talks and Q&A sessions at each location.

Early concept doc for the “Verification Tour”
https://reform-mac.notion.site/1d576a9b7f138065861fdb3a7b2da417?pvs=21

It could’ve just been “Call Lee Jun-seok” and still worked, but I wanted some participatory twist that would make it more engaging.

Two days later, on my way home from work, we set up a sudden in-person meeting.

But when we actually sat down and talked, I realized what he had in mind was quite different from my initial assumption.

I thought he’d be giving full-on speeches or lectures, and that the website’s main purpose would be to build online buzz around that.

The First 30 Minutes

Here’s roughly how that first meeting went:

Me: “What’s the main purpose of this? Is it mainly an online viral campaign?”

Lee:
“In campaigns, it’s important to choose effective and meaningful locations for on-the-ground events.
Usually, we do morning street greetings and then have this awkward gap around lunchtime. I want to use that time better.”

“Everyone has to eat, but it’s hard to just show up randomly, and you can’t schedule full events everywhere. So instead, I want to reverse it and go wherever people actively call us.”

Me: “So you’d give a talk when you go, right?”

Lee:
“If we do full lectures, we have to book venues, coordinate with schools or companies in advance, and recruit attendees. That’s a lot of overhead.”

“Instead, I just want to grab coffee or lunch with people who show up, and have a casual conversation.”

Me: “What if too few or too many people show up? What’s an ideal number?”

Lee:
“Honestly, if 10 people show up and we eat together, that’s already good.”

“If a ton of people show up, we’ll figure it out when it happens. That’s a good problem to have.”

“We could just use a Google Form to collect invites, but then we’d have no way to know if people are trolling. It’d be a disaster if we went somewhere and literally nobody showed up.”

“So I want a system where people’s identities are somewhat verified and each person only gets one vote.”

Once I heard that background, it clicked:

• The core was offline campaigning.
• The website was just a tool to optimize where he goes for lunch.

Things like:

• Collecting questions in advance
• Adding bells and whistles to the site

weren’t actually necessary.

The only real requirement was:

“One person, one verified vote.”

Let’s Narrow It Down to Universities

Next, we talked about specific features.

He suggested:

• Universities would be preloaded into the system.
• Companies or other groups could be user-generated entries.

But I came into the meeting already convinced that we should start with universities only.

If we tried to support universities, companies, and all kinds of groups from day one, we’d need to:

• Define what counts as a “group”
• Design the UI for user-generated entities
• Implement and test everything properly

All of that would blow up the scope and delay launch.

So I suggested:

“Why don’t we start with just universities, and if it works well, we can expand to companies and groups later?”

He agreed immediately — no pushback at all.
So we locked in “universities only” for version one.

I’ve Never Done This Before

To be honest, I’d never built and operated a from-scratch service that I expected to get real traffic.

I was worried.

I told him:

“I haven’t fully built something at this scale before. It might not go smoothly.”

He replied that it wasn’t a highly sensitive system, and if it crashed, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

That helped me relax.

I told myself:

“I’ll just do my best. If it breaks after we ship, that’s life.”

And that was pretty much that.

From there, he basically left everything — detailed flow, design, and implementation — to me.

It was like:

“We’re on the same page, so I trust you. Just run with it.”

After about 30 minutes of discussion, I headed home.

Development Begins

As soon as I got home, I opened Figma and started designing flows and screens.

I threw out my earlier “Verification Tour” idea and focused purely on:

• Login
• Signup
• Voting
• Ranking

Just the minimum necessary to make the campaign work.

Then I started thinking about the name.

“Call Lee Jun-seok” would’ve been fine, but I wanted something more intuitive.

If you’re visiting universities and meeting students around lunchtime or over coffee, what does that all share?

The campus cafeteria — what Korean students call “학식” (short for “campus cafeteria meal”).

Campus cafeterias are open to everyone — students and non-students alike — but they’re especially symbolic spaces where students naturally gather. It felt like a perfect fit for the concept.

So I named it “학식먹자 (Let’s Eat Lunch On Campus)” and designed a logo.

Worst-case, if he hated the name, we could always change it later.

A Quick Retro in the Middle

Looking back, the “학식먹자” (Let’s Eat Lunch On Campus) keyword itself became a big part of why the campaign went viral.

At universities that were famous — sometimes notorious — for their cafeteria food (like Korea Aerospace University and Hankuk University of Foreign Studies), the concept quickly took off.

On Everytime (에브리타임) — a popular Korean campus community app — the “학식먹자” keyword spread by itself.

Just from the name, students could instantly grasp:

• This is targeted at university students
• Lee Jun-seok will actually come and eat with you at your cafeteria

If we had gone with something like “Call Lee Jun-seok,” I think people would’ve needed to read more before understanding what exactly was happening. Even I initially assumed it’d be speeches, not casual lunches.

And we could only come up with “Let’s Eat Lunch On Campus” because we had already narrowed the target down to universities only.
If we’d tried to support universities, companies, and all kinds of groups, this kind of focused messaging wouldn’t have been possible.

Redefining the target audience and then crafting a new message around it is something I feel I did well.

But more importantly, none of that would’ve mattered if he hadn’t been the kind of person who trusts and empowers even a relatively inexperienced developer like me.

Tech Stack and Development Process

Next, I had to choose a stack.

I ended up with:

• AWS Lambda
• API Gateway
• DynamoDB
• Next.js, React.js
• Vercel
• TypeScript

A younger developer friend of mine who’s building a startup recommended this setup as one of the fastest ways to go from zero to a production-ready app.

He knows more than I do about this kind of architecture, so I just trusted his call.

I’m planning to write a separate post going into the technical details.

To be honest, aside from the initial setup, the actual development wasn’t particularly fancy.

What was interesting is that I wrote about 95% of the frontend code using Cursor + natural language prompts. I think that story will be fun to tell as well.

Since the development itself wasn’t too hard, I poured a lot of energy into UX and copy.

Things like:

• Main screen structure
• Signup flow
• Micro-animations when you tap something
• School search
• The actual voting experience

My goal was:

“Someone visiting for the first time should be able to understand what this is and complete signup and voting within 30 seconds.”

A former developer-turned-staffer in his office helped with Kakao login approvals.

Their legal team helped with terms of service and privacy policy.

On the night before launch, one staffer helped QA until late, logging about 20 issues we fixed.

Another staffer manually downloaded and labeled around 400 university logos.

It was very much a collaborative effort.

Shipping “Let’s Eat Lunch On Campus”

We started with our first in-person meeting on April 15.

Using evenings after work and my weekends, I managed to:

• Clarify policy goals
• Plan the service
• Design it
• Develop it
• And prepare it for launch

in nine days.

Let’s Eat Lunch On Campus — Lee Jun-seok (학식먹자 이준석)
https://www.eatlunch.kr/

News article (in Korean)
https://n.news.naver.com/mnews/article/421/0008214199?sid=154

On April 25, the “Let’s Eat Lunch On Campus” campaign went public.

I was excited and nervous.

Part of me thought:

“What if no one participates at all?”

Because it was so directly tied to a real political figure, I knew people could easily feel hesitant about engaging.

The result?

It exploded.

Aside from one press release and a Facebook post, there was basically no promotion.

But it organically went viral on Everytime (the campus app), and on launch day alone, we reached about 5,000 users.

In total:

• ~130,000 visitors
• ~15,000 unique voters

I had been worried about the system collapsing under load, but I learned that for this level of traffic, Vercel + Lambda + DynamoDB can handle things just fine as long as you don’t do anything too wild.

After launch, there really wasn’t much for me to do.

The response was so good that there was no need to iterate quickly.
If anything, the problem was the opposite: there were too many schools they couldn’t visit.

From that point on, it was up to him to show up on campus and handle the sea of questions from students.

Starting from Korea Aerospace University and ending at the Korea Polytechnic University, he ended up visiting 13 universities in total during the campaign to eat with students.

An idea we spun up in nine days, where I had thought,

“I’d be happy even if just 10 people showed up,”

ended up becoming one of his core campaign events.

It was a textbook example of a small, fast experiment working out.

Let's Eat Lunch On Campus — Hankuk University of Foreign Studies episode (video, Korean)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4hYI5POkDI

Seeing him actually sit down and eat with students, answering questions while cameras were everywhere — it felt surreal.

The questions were intense. It felt like half the students were in debate clubs.

If I were in his seat, I’d probably get indigestion.

It was impressive watching him handle all of that while just… eating lunch.

On the flip side, it also struck me how rare it is to get a chance like that as a student:

“How often do you get to have a casual meal and real conversation with a presidential candidate?”

The fact that I helped make that possible — even just a little — made me genuinely proud.

If I have one regret, it’s that he never came to my university.
Maybe next time.

Campaign effect

Source: https://namu.wiki/w/제21대%20대통령%20선거/개표%20결과/정당별/개혁신당#s-3.3.2

All of the top ten precincts (eup/myeon/dong) with the highest vote share were university areas.
The core supporters were already people in their 20s and 30s, but looking at the results, it feels like the “Let’s Eat Lunch On Campus” campaign might have helped solidify that base even further.

(We even got a mention on Namuwiki, a big Korean wiki site.)

I also got to bring my mom — who doesn’t really like politics at all — to one of the campaign events so she could see everything in person and take photos.

Even though she’s not into politics, she listened to everything I said about the project and supported me the whole way.

Losing the Election, Finishing the Run

On June 3rd at 9 p.m., the exit polls came out.

The result:

• Exit polls: 7.7%
• Final vote share: 8.34%

It clearly fell short of his target.

But still, it felt like an election where he gained more than he lost.

He refused to merge with either major party and completed the race to the end as a brand-new party.

When the results came in, he accepted them and went home.

I wondered if I should message him or just leave him alone, but in the end I sent a short Kakao message saying he’d done a great job.

I didn’t expect a quick reply, but he answered right away.

And instead of resting, he was already talking about long-term plans for the party’s future.

I thought:

“If you want to actually change something, maybe this is the level of persistence it takes.”

Right now, what they’re preparing is a candidate selection & support platform for the next local elections.

From the party’s perspective, they might field thousands of candidates across the country and need to vet them, nominate them, and support their campaigns. That process is extremely expensive in time and money.

The goal of this new project is to bring the cost down to around 3,000,000 KRW($2,000) per candidate.

I’m not involved in that project.

It’s the kind of system that really needs a full-time developer. Dropping in here and there like I did for “Let’s Eat Lunch On Campus” would probably hurt more than help.

So I’ve gone back to having my own evenings and weekends again.

As for my relationship with him going forward — well, we’re Kakao friends. We can message each other anytime. Maybe our paths will cross again, maybe they won’t.

Personally, I think it would be pretty cool if I keep growing in my field and one day we bump into each other again “up there” somewhere.

Maybe it’s the INTP in me, but my brain has already written about three different drama versions of how that could happen. 😂

To Wrap Up

What I Gained by Becoming a Party Member

When you join a political party, something interesting happens:

If that party or its politicians do something wrong, you feel like you did something wrong too.

When friends send me articles and ask, “What do you think?”, I have to organize my thoughts properly. It becomes a challenge.

I used to hate the kind of blind loyalty or automatic criticism you see in politics.

But once I found myself in a similar position, I started to understand why people behave that way — why they reflexively defend “their side.”

Understanding it doesn’t mean I want to become like that, though.

If anything, it made me more determined to apply the same standards to the Reform Party and to Lee Jun-seok as I would to anyone else.

I think that tension — the constant effort to stay honest even when it’s uncomfortable — is one of the big personal benefits of joining any party.

If someone around me ever said they were thinking about joining a party — any party — I think I’d encourage them to go for it. It really can make you grow.

A Round of Applause for My Own Courage

None of this would’ve happened if I hadn’t chosen courage over hesitation at each step.

• When I first signed up as a party member
• When I applied to the political academy
• When I messaged him on Kakao for the first time
• When I shared my thoughts and opinions in person

Every one of those moments required courage.
Whether I was “ready” didn’t really matter.

They were all things I’d never done before.
They felt unfamiliar, but I still chose to try — with as much confidence as I could muster.

The result is this story, this post, and an experience that is uniquely mine.

I want to keep living like that: choosing courage and trying new things.

Who knows what other fun adventures might come from it?

So I want to end this by giving myself some credit — for all the effort I put into this period, and even just for taking the time and courage to write this whole story down.

If you’d like to connect on LinkedIn, I’d be happy to:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jjp8789