Jonny Kim Quotes

I live in Boston so I’m used to small spaces.

All things that are worthwhile are very difficult to obtain.

I think living with humility, and serving with humility, is one of the most important things humans can do.

When I was a young kid, I didn’t have a lot of confidence.

The SEALs were very good in teaching me hard skills – that means resilience, pushing past your mental and physical boundaries; and having an enormously high threshold for pain.

Don’t let that hunger for the unknown go away. That curiosity is so important, so you should maintain that passion for what you do.

I fundamentally believed in the NASA mission of advancing our space frontier, all the while developing innovations and new technologies that would benefit all of humankind.

My parents were South Korean immigrants who came to America in the early 80s for the hope of a better life for their children.

I was a really low-confident kid. I did have friends from playing sports – I played water polo and I swam. But at the heart of it, I was really scared of talking to people, and making friends, and making relationships.

Ego is probably one of the biggest poisons we can have – it’s toxic to any environment.

I never want my children to ever feel like they need to be a SEAL, or that they need to go into medicine, or be an astronaut in order to please me – because I don’t think that’s very fair. I just want them to live their own lives. I don’t hesitate at every opportunity to remind my children of that.

You’re going to learn a lot every time you fail. So embrace that.

Going into the Navy was the best decision I ever made in my life because it completely transformed that scared boy who didn’t have any dreams to someone who started to believe in himself.

If there was a time machine and I could tell my younger self what I’d be doing in 2020, there’s no way I’d believe it.

High school was interesting. For a lot of people, high school was just a big social experiment, and I think the value of high school was not so much learning how to be a great student… but I think it’s learning how to interact with people and be social. I would say that in that endeavor, I completely failed.

I applied to zero colleges.

For me… after having some intense wartime experiences where I lost a lot of good friends that I’ve loved, I made a promise to those guys who died – that I’d do everything in my power for the rest of my life to make this world a better place. Because those men were great human beings and they left a void.

I was told that with the right attitude, and with enough hard work, if you get up after every time you fail, you can amount to something and you can do positive work. You can leave a positive mark for our world, and that’s what I aim to do.

I didn’t have the confidence from my childhood, but dreams are possible and all good things in life are hard to get, so persevere and don’t give up!

Success to me means serving a calling higher than yourself that improves the lives of everyone and is done completely in the name of service.

Controlled aggression, to me, is one of the most important traits to have. To have that social intelligence to know when to exert aggression in the military environment, and when to stay calm, cool, and collected.

If I could talk to my younger self, I would just say that the path to great things is filled with a lot of stumbles, suffering, and challenges along the way. But if you have the right attitude and know that hard times will pass – and you get up each time – you will reach your destination.