On January 1, 2018, I start this blog: Reading Desire. As the payment for the domain was going through, I could feel my anticipation changing to excitement. I am beginning my journey as a global writer!

I have been creating online content since 2000, but have mostly written in my native language of Korean. My 10-year-old Korean-language blog brought me a lot of success. What I feel most proud of is creating the largest online community of international/ intercultural couples in Korea. This group of people were long subjected to negative stereotypes and hid their relationships with their foreign partners even from their family. Over the years, my blog and online community helped empower them, changing the Korean society to accept and even celebrate their identity.

Now, I want to empower people around world by helping them (re)gain their happiness and helping businesses market their products and services to enhance happiness. Most of our actions are driven by our desire to live happy. “Live” comes before “Happy,” which means survival is the priority. To survive, we need food and a home. Then, what brings us food and a home? Money. And money comes from jobs. Career success is critical to our survival.

When our survival needs are met, desire for happiness becomes more important. However, there is an unexpected roadblock to happiness. After living so focused on making money and succeeding in our jobs, many of us become used to living to work. For the sake of career success, we sacrifice our health and relationships – two essential elements of our happiness. Like most people around me, I worked, worked, and worked. I was doing what I was good at and making enough money to live in a nice house, eat out regularly, and travel abroad. I was supposed to be happy, but I wasn’t.

‘Why am I not happy and motivated?’ 

I decided to pause. I informed my clients that I was temporarily unavailable. During my break, I put my focus on my desires. I read as much as I wanted, took time to cook and exercise, and practiced self-guided hypnosis. At the end of my break, I wrote down all my interests, skills, experience, and personal traits.

And then, I asked myself, “What would I still want to do even if I became wealthy?” My answer was “I want to create content that impacts people.” I want to live happy to succeed and succeed to live happy, and help others do the same.

I continued to ask myself: “How?” Then, I thought about my biggest strengths: an unbounded desire for reading/learning and expertise in communication. I will empower people and businesses through the power of knowledge and language.

I start this blog for two main purposes:

• To explore the desires that drive human behaviors and identify ways to use language to empower people.
• To integrate new understandings of the brain into copywriting and social media marketing and revolutionize copywriting and marketing practices.

Using the knowledge of how our brain works, I will find how to use language to help people feel happy and motivated to succeed, and help businesses connect with consumers and bring more profits. Reading desire is key to leading success!

This blog will record my journey of learning through reading. I will share my learning from books on a variety of topics, ranging from happiness, neuroscience, rhetoric, copywriting, to others that will come along later. I am excited to take on this challenge toward achieving my goal: to live to work toward the life of my dreams. If you want to learn about how to live happy, or want to apply the knowledge of desire and the brain to marketing, subscribe to my blog: readingdesire.com

A new post will be coming every Monday (and more on other days)!