Description: The reading notes of Son Woong-jung, the father who perfectly built Son Heung-min's football life — a story that runs right through the center of it all! In March 2023, Coach Son Woong-jung returned to Korea from England, bringing with him six notebooks of reading notes he had kept over the years. He had never once shown these notebooks to anyone in his family, not even to Son Heung-min himself. Since he never intended for anyone to see them, he humbly calls them unremarkable — but within the time he poured into these notebooks lies the wisdom he gained from questions he faced head-on, insights that taught him to see hardship not as a stumbling block but as a stepping stone. For Son Woong-jung, reading was an attempt to find the sentences he desperately needed at any given moment, and to use that insight as a foundation for viewing his current circumstances from a different angle. It was an effort to see far, see deep, and see wide by borrowing the wisdom of books and their authors, in pursuit of the question: how do I live well in this world? That is why Son Woong-jung says that copying passages into his notebooks was the process by which his body came to understand what he had read and written. It wasn't just writing on paper, he says — it was like writing on his own body. When Coach Son finds a good book, he reads it at least three times. He uses a black pen for the first reading, a blue pen for the second, and a red pen for the third, transcribing passages into his notebook each time. He underlines sentences to memorize, marks idioms or words to take to heart with stars, and jots down notes on things to study further — reading and transcribing with a fighter's intensity. Since a book's contents fade from memory if you don't write them down, he chose to keep records rather than rely on memory alone. The contents span history, notable figures, general knowledge, classics, English, Chinese characters, and sports — Son Woong-jung's own personal form of "study," created by focusing on what he truly needs right now, discarding what is unnecessary, and building something new. That study begins from the basic principle that "you have to open your own eyes first." Life is a process of pursuing values rather than success — a daily struggle to become a better person. "Winning or losing aside, I want people to say these kids play the game a little differently. Of course it's nice to win a match, but for me, it's about the quality of play first. You can play better and still lose. You can concede ten goals — that's fine. Why? Because my goal is this: even if we concede ten goals now, or twenty, later we'll bring it down to fifteen, then ten, then five, then two, then one — and along the way, I want to paint the kind of football I truly want to play, in my own colors. If I have one lifelong dream, that's it. I will never play reckless, win-at-all-costs football. I want to play football with dignity intact. Setting everything else aside, there's one phrase I really want to hear: 'Wow, that's beautiful football.'" — from "Coach" Football, where the same situation never repeats itself, can be seen as a miniature version of life. You must quickly recognize the ever-changing spatial situation moment to moment and make split-second decisions about how to play. Just as on the field, where you must keep thinking and judging while physically clashing with your opponent, in life too we must overcome mistakes, failures, and trial and error in real time, shaping something of our own along the way. Because no one is perfect or complete, Coach Son Woong-jung encourages us to keep cleaning, keep reflecting, keep exercising, and keep reading. For those who want to live truly like a human being, even if just for one day — of course there's no single right answer in life, but since we only get to live once, wouldn't it be worth considering how to live not just like everyone else, not without thought, but truly and properly as a person should? This book may offer readers a gift of time to reflect on just that (from "Contemplation"). The idea that "if you want to gain little, you can sacrifice little, but if you want to gain much, you must sacrifice much" (from "Basics") prompts us to look back at what we are holding onto and unwilling to let go of, and to ask what values should truly take priority in our lives right now. "My bed is placed right in the middle of the room. That way, I can clean both sides of it. When I leave it like that, there's just enough space between the bed and the wall for my body to lie down — and honestly, it looks just like a coffin. I lie down there once a day. And then..."