Top 25 Jonny Kim Quotes

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.

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

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.

All things that are worthwhile are very difficult to obtain.

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.

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

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.

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.

My father was the classic epitome of a very hard immigrant-worker. He made up for his lack of education by working really hard… He worked six days a week for as long as I can remember.

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.

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

I applied to zero colleges.

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

I didn’t like the person I was growing up to become. I needed to find myself and my identity. And for me, getting out of my comfort zone, getting away from the people I grew up with, and finding adventure, that was my odyssey, and it was the best decision I ever made.

A lot of those soft skills – working with groups of people who I’ve never met before to accomplish a mission, adapting to personality types – those are skills I’ve learned outside the SEAL time.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Once someone is no longer a threat, you look at them like anybody else.

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.

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.

Never in a million years would I have thought I could have been an astronaut candidate.