A diagnostic look at identity formation through the lives of Chung Ju-yung, Greg Brockman, and the rising influence of AI on the next generation.
Most men do not author their lives. They perform a script handed to them by parents, culture, circumstance, and now increasingly by algorithms, and they call the performance a personality. The question is not whether you have a script. You do. The question is whether you know who wrote it.
Chung Ju-yung was born in 1915 in a village in what is now North Korea, the son of a poor farmer in a country occupied by the Japanese empire. Every external force in his life had already written his identity for him. He was supposed to be a peasant, illiterate, obedient to colonial rule, and dead before fifty. He ran away from home four times. He worked as a dock laborer, a construction worker, and a rice shop delivery boy who eventually took over the shop when its owner fell ill. He started a car repair business that burned down. He started it again. By the end of his life he had built Hyundai into one of the largest industrial conglomerates on earth, constructed the shipyard and the first ship inside it simultaneously because he could not afford to do them in sequence, and helped rebuild a nation that had been told it would never industrialize.
What Chung did was not grit. Grit is what you call authorship when you do not understand it. What he did was refuse the inherited script at every stage, and the refusal was a daily act. He rejected the identity of peasant. He rejected the identity of colonized subject. He rejected the identity of failed entrepreneur after the fire. Identity is formed, not found, and Chung formed his deliberately, against everything that wanted to form it for him.
Now move forward seventy years.
In November 2023, the board of OpenAI fired Sam Altman on a Friday afternoon. Greg Brockman, co-founder and president, learned about it minutes before the announcement went public. Over the next 72 hours, Brockman had to decide who he was when the company that had defined his public identity for nearly a decade was suddenly unrecognizable. He resigned. He joined Altman in what looked like exile. Five days later, both were back. The board was reconstructed. Everything went back to looking the same. But anyone paying attention understood that something underneath had been exposed. For 72 hours, every high-functioning leader inside that building had to discover whether their identity was anchored in the company, the mission, the equity, the title, or in something the crisis could not touch.
Most leaders never get that diagnostic moment until it is too late. Most do not get it at all. They keep performing a script written by boards, markets, momentum, and the quiet pressure of being seen as the kind of man who has it together, and they never learn whose script it actually was until something collapses and reveals the foundation underneath. Vlad Tenev found out during the GameStop crisis at Robinhood. Plenty of pastors find out during a moral failure. Plenty of fathers find out at a divorce filing. The script gets read aloud and the author’s name is not theirs.
Awareness is the beginning of authority.
You cannot rewrite a script you cannot see.
And here is where it gets sharper, because the authoring problem is accelerating. Joe Liemandt’s Alpha School uses AI tutors to deliver two hours of personalized academic instruction per day, replacing traditional classroom teachers with adaptive systems that learn each child’s patterns faster than any human could. The academic results are real. The deeper question is not pedagogical. It is formational. Pope Leo XIV has warned repeatedly about the limits of artificial intelligence and the danger of letting machine systems substitute for human formation, and he is not being sentimental. He is pointing at the architecture problem. When a child’s core beliefs, emotional patterns, and self-understanding are shaped daily by a system optimized for engagement and outcome rather than virtue and truth, the script is being written before the child can read.
This is not a future problem. Your children are already being formed by recommendation engines, content algorithms, and AI companions that respond more consistently than any parent does. So are you. The feed you scroll has been writing your beliefs about scarcity, status, and self-worth for years now, and the author is not you.
Scripture treats this exact problem as foundational. Paul writes in Romans 12:2 that the renewal of the mind is the mechanism of transformation, which means the unrenewed mind is running on inherited code. Ephesians 4:22-24 frames the work as putting off the old self that was being corrupted by deceitful desires and putting on the new self created to be like God in righteousness. Notice that both passages assume an authoring process is already underway. The question is not whether you will be formed. You will be. The question is whose hand is on the pen.
That is what the work actually is. It is not motivation. It is not optimization. It is the slow, deliberate exposure of every inherited belief, attachment, and reaction pattern that you have been calling your personality, and the conscious choice of what to keep and what to put down. Chung did it against an empire. Brockman had it forced on him by a boardroom. Your children will have to do it against systems most adults do not understand. You do not get to skip it.
If you have never sat down and honestly diagnosed whose script you are running, that is the place to start. The Self-Assessment at selfrevolutions.com/self-awareness-quiz is built to surface exactly that, the patterns underneath the performance, the beliefs underneath the behavior, the author underneath the script. It will not flatter you. It is not designed to.
Whose handwriting is on the life you are calling your own?
