Renowned School of Life comes to Seoul

From left, Yi Young, former head of Penguin Random House Korea; Park Ji-ho, chief editor of ARENA HOMME+; Sohn Mina, chairman of the School of Life Seoul; Alain de Botton, author and founder of the School of Life; and Choi Ina, former vice president at Cheil Worldwide, talk at a special lecture held on April 3 at Korea University in Seoul. / Courtesy of the School of Life Seoul

Sohn Mina, chairman of the School of Life Seoul

Alain de Botton, author and founder of the School of Life

By Kim Ji-soo

The School of Life’s Seoul campus is situated among the busy Itaewon alleys, behind the Yongsan-gu office.

There, Sohn Mina, the school chairman, was meeting with Choi Ina, former vice president at Cheil Worldwide who currently teaches there, and Shin Ki-joo, editor of Esquire.

“We call them class leaders, not teachers, as they lead the participants,” Sohn, 43, said.

With her velvety voice and professional tone, it was easy to see how the former KBS announcer and current travel writer and sohnmina&co. CEO could lead the school.

The three were discussing subjects at the school, the delivery tone or style and even the school’s spatial structure. After only several months since opening, the Seoul campus of the popular self-development school founded by Alain de Botton, author of best-selling books such as “Essays in Love” and “How Proust Can Change Your Life,” is thriving.

De Botton, the everyday philosopher

On a rainy Sunday afternoon on April 3, de Botton, accompanied by his family, came to Seoul to deliver a special lecture. His two young sons looked around with curious appreciation at the crowd that filled the auditorium of Korea University. The lecture was scheduled for late afternoon on a weekend, a time when one feels like slacking off and dreading the week ahead.

“Nightmare tends to come on a Sunday evening. About now,” is how de Botton began the lecture on happiness in relation to work for some 1,000 attendees. “Nightmare” describes how modern people, living in a democratized and wealthy world pursuing the “beautiful dream” where they must have a job they love and a marriage to a person they love, realize that a gap exists between their hopes and reality.

On stage, de Botton captivated the audience with his humor and charming British accent. He was a natural on stage, deftly moving from one end to the other, yet smart, sharp and humane.

“I want to try and feel sympathy for the very difficult situation we are in. We have built a world in Korea, the United Kingdom, the United States, we have built a world that is efficient, and very rich and that is very productive and also strangely ... unhappy,” he said.

“This unhappiness interests me. It is the greatest challenge that we are facing,” he said, giving the reason for emotional skills training.

One would have to be very singular not to be impressed by how thoroughly he digs in to philosophy, literature and psychology to arrive at accurate insights that are as broad as they are deep, and that are known to draw from the classics to everyday issues. In a way, the rigorousness one detects in his insight is delivered on how he calls attention to how much time — “hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of hours of conversation with yourself” — it takes to know about oneself.

For the lecture, de Botton stressed the need for emotional training in a world now plagued by “job snobbery,” touching on how to find the right job, why we work and how we can be good at work. He stressed people have to be “teachers” to be good in their jobs.

School of Life in Seoul

He founded the School of Life with the aim of tackling complexities of modern-day life. Most of the curriculum of the school’s Seoul campus comes from the London campus, while some cases have been adapted for Korea.

The Seoul campus offers various self-development courses, such as how to realize your potential, how to balance work with life, how to face death, how to be creative and how to be confident. Korea, which has the highest suicide rate among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, may well be in dire need of this school.

“It’s not your typical school, but rather one for those who need a ‘jjimjilbang’ for the soul,” said Sohn, referring to the sauna house Koreans go to de-tox, relax and de-stress, as well as to talk with friends. It is not a hospital either, but a place where students share their thoughts under the guidance of a class leader.

Sohn herself teaches a class on how to make decisions.

“One of my criteria for making decisions is to have your eye on the future,” she said. It means dealing with the feelings of stepping back and realizing that change is scary, she said.

“In making choices, you should have an ultimate goal. However, you need to plan interval small wins in the process to get there,” Sohn said. “They say in business you need quick wins, but in life, I think small wins work,” she added.

She shares stories from her life in her classes.

The students who sign up for classes at the School of Life are mainly in their 30s and 40s, but there are also high school students and those in their 70s who sincerely want to reflect on their lives and their existence, Sohn said. She has found that more Koreans are spending the time and effort to learn intellectual material that will help their inner selves grow.

“They actually start to open up too, as the class progresses,” she said. Each class starts with a 20-minute ice breaking activity, followed by several intermissions where students talk to each other. Each class is comprised of about 20 people and lasts for three hours. The fee is 88,000 won per person.

She first met Alain de Botton in 2008 when she interviewed him for a magazine. They kept in touch, and in October 2015, Sohn officially opened the school in Seoul.

The opening of the school is one of Sohn’s many decisive efforts in a society that champions stability and longevity. She took a leave from her coveted announcer job at the state-run KBS in 2004 to study journalism in Barcelona. She finally quit the job in 2007 to become a travel writer.

Since then, she has published several travel essays on her trips to Spain, France and Peru and has written one novel. She has also evolved in many other aspects of her life. She said her parents helped her make her own decisions and take responsibility.

“I believe in a life of changes and growth,” Sohn said.

She also set up sohnmina&co., a lifestyle company, in 2013, and has been an editorial director of the Huffington Post branch here since February 2014.

Sohn said the school has meaningful projects planned for the students. For the Seoul school, Sohn said the planned projects will involve teaching workers, in partnership with corporations, and teaching a class for underprivileged youngsters.