Dear Vets: Is Your Family in Order?
Dear Vets: Is Your Family in Order?
This one's more personal than what I usually send. I sat on it a while, because for a long time, I didn’t love my own answer.
The Mission is the Meaning
You know why I started MilSpec. Too many of us come home, take the uniform off, and can't find the thing that made the alarm worth answering at 0500. The mission was the meaning. When the mission ends, good people go looking for it in a bottle, a bar stool, a slow kind of disappearing, and too many of them don't come home from that search. That's why this company exists — the idea that work with real stakes can give someone a reason to stay alive, not just stay busy.
I still believe that. I've also come to think I was only solving half the problem.
家和萬事成
There's an old saying my dad told me once: 가화만사성 — gahwa mansaseong. 家和萬事成.
When the family is harmonious, all things succeed.
It comes from the Myeongsim Bogam (明心寶鑑), "The Precious Mirror for Illuminating the Mind," compiled in 1393. For centuries, it was one of the first books Korean children learned to read, not a philosophy text for scholars, a primer. Lessons learned before you anything else was taught.
Notice the order. Everything succeeds after. Not alongside — the house comes first, and the rest of it works because of that.
It sits in a chapter called 治家 — governing the household. Same verb they used for governing a state. The people who wrote this did not think running a home was the lesser assignment.
What building this company taught me
I want to be honest about how I figured this out, because it isn't flattering. I didn't have a revelation. I got busy.
Building MilSpec meant the hours went where hours go when you're building something — early, late, weekends, chasing ideas that more often than not turned out to be a waste of time. And through all of it, my house kept running. Meals happened. Appointments got made. Kids got where they needed to be, with the right forms, in the right clothes, on the right day. Somebody was tracking permission slips and dosages and which kid was struggling with what, holding all of it without a calendar invite or a staff meeting.
That somebody was my wife.
And for the first two decades of my life, it was my mother.
Here's the confession: for a long time I experienced them as background. The way you experience the lights being on.
It is not background. It is the operation. And they’ve held it to a standard higher than most of what I've seen in professional environments — with no rotation, no relief, and nobody running an AAR afterward to tell her what she did it well.
Raising children is the hardest sustained leadership I have ever been near. I say near, deliberately. I'm not going to claim I've carried it. I've watched it up close and started carrying more of it, and mostly what I've gained is an accurate sense of how much I wasn't carrying before.
A leader who leads at work and abdicates at home isn't a leader. He's a performer, with a good audience.
The thing that was actually costing me
I've written before that the secret to failure is trying to please everyone. I meant it about business: serve every segment, say yes to every request, and you end up with something nobody actually needs.
It took me longer to see that it isn't a business principle. It's a life principle, and it costs more at home than it ever did at work.
The trap isn't laziness. Most of you reading this are the opposite; that's the problem. You say yes to the board seat, the alumni thing, the acquaintance visiting who wants to grab a drink, the next committee, the group chat that needs a reply. Every one of those is defensible. None of them is wrong. And each one quietly draws from a supply that is strictly finite.
So we give the office the sharp version of ourselves — patient, strategic, unhurried — then drive home and hand whatever's left to the people we'd die for. Short. Half-present. Phone in hand.
The standard I'm after isn't splitting yourself evenly between work and home. It's full effort in both, and that's only possible if you're ruthless about everything else — the stuff that isn't work and isn't family, just accumulation. That's the real mechanism, and it isn't time management. It's subtraction: the obligations you took on to be seen taking them on, the networking that's really just visibility, the commitments you're still honoring because saying no felt awkward eleven months ago.
Which means the calendar gets thin. If you're genuinely all-in at work and all-in at home, there won't be room for a wide circle of people you see out of habit. That's not a tragedy. That's arithmetic.
But hear me on this, because I've written about isolation before and I meant it: thin is not zero. Cut the obligation crowd. Keep the few who'd show up at 0300 without asking why.
Back to you
So, is your family in order?
Not are they provided for. That's the easier question, and most of us pass it.
I mean: when did they last get the best version of you, instead of the one that was left over?
If you don't know, you're in good company. That's where I've been. 家和萬事成 isn't a rebuke, it's a sequence. Get the house right and the rest of it works. Get it wrong and no amount of professional success patches it. A hospice nurse once wrote down the most common regret among the men she cared for at the end of their lives. It wasn't a missed opportunity or a deal that fell through. It was that they'd worked too hard and missed their kids growing up.
You spent your entire career being excellent for your work fam.
Don’t stop there – try it on the ones who care for you most.
Press on,
Freddie J. Kim
If this resonated, join Azimuth Check: Adjusting your bearings after honorable service — a monthly reset for leaders adjusting their bearings after honorable service.
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