[INTERVIEW] CEO Director Kim Hak-young

Etone Plastic Surgery opened on June 26, 2023. Why did Kim Hak-young, the CEO director of Etone Plastic Surgery, create Etone Plastic Surgery? And what beautiful scenes does Hak-young Kim as a person, not Dr. Hak-young Kim, imagine in life, and what kind of beautiful longing does he have? Furthermore, we briefly talked about what kind of beauty Etone pursues and what kind of life the employees working here would be happy to lead.

Q. Nice to meet you. How are you feeling ahead of this interview?

How do I feel? (laughs) I always feel good. Ever since opening the hospital, I’ve been happy all the time.

Q. I understand you’ve been very busy since opening. Unlike a general interview, I’d like to ask about ‘Hak-young Kim the person’ rather than ‘Dr. Hak-young Kim.’ I’m curious about what your usual day looks like. In particular, what do you do after work or on your days off?

I usually wake up around 6 a.m. Then I stretch for about 10 minutes, and either run about 4–5 km or swim 1 km. I change my morning routine depending on how tired I am that day and what time I woke up.

Around 8 a.m., I go to work, and I try to leave around 7–8 p.m. After work, I do PT. I warm up with 10 minutes of stretching, do 60 minutes of weights, and about 15 minutes of cool-down running, so I exercise for about an hour and a half in total. After that, I usually eat dinner, and if I’m feeling okay, I do paperwork and other tasks. If I just can’t take it, I usually just go to sleep.

Q. You spend a lot of time exercising! It seems like you’ve been working out hard lately... Is there a reason for that? I’m also curious what you find fun about exercise.

Honestly, it’s survival exercise. (laughs) And on the other hand, our hospital plans to run a wellness clinic in the future, so I’m also experimenting on my own body in advance. I’ve liked exercise since I was young. I did kendo for about seven years, and I played tennis and golf too. When I was in college, I liked sports enough to try pretty much any sport at least once, but I literally just liked sports—I wasn’t interested in building my body through weight training. Then in 2017, I collapsed from overwork. That was when I realized, ‘I’m not the same as before…’ I had a lot of operations, but my body couldn’t keep up, so I started exercising seriously. At first, I started with swimming and running. When I was busy, I rested... and when I wasn’t busy, I started again... that was how I exercised. I think it’s only been about two years since I really started exercising consistently.

About two years ago, I went through something personally difficult. I was emotionally very exhausted, so I chose exercise to overcome the mental stress. Since then, I’ve kept up with cardio, and I’ve done weights with a trainer about two or three times a week. After opening Etone Plastic Surgery, I felt the intensity wasn’t enough, so now I train every day.

The ultimate goal of exercise is to maintain health through exercise and, through a clear mind, make clear thoughts and sound decisions.

Q. As someone who has just started exercising, I can relate to that. Let me ask about the past this time. This is actually the question I’m most curious about: how did you end up entering Seoul National University College of Medicine?

I’m not sure if I can summarize it simply. (laughs) The reason I went to medical school was... during middle and high school, I really liked math and science. Then I debated whether to go to engineering or medical school, and I thought the act of treating patients as a doctor would be fun. It was probably around my senior year of high school. I was having a meal with my father, and he asked me what field I was going to choose. So I said I was going to medical school, and he worried a lot. He said, “You’re not the kind of kid who’s so devoted to philanthropy that you’d be suited for medical school. Wouldn’t it be better for you to go to business school or economics and work in banking or venture capital?” I liked economics too, but at that time math and science were so interesting that I wanted to go to medical school rather than a liberal arts college. So I ended up entering medical school. Getting into Seoul National University College of Medicine wasn’t that difficult for me. (laughs)

Q. What? It’s hard to agree that getting into Seoul National University College of Medicine was easy. What was college life like after entering Seoul National University College of Medicine?

College life was always fun. And before I graduated, I wanted to go into neurosurgery. I thought it was cool to handle the brain and nerves. When I was a fourth-year student, I studied neurosurgery and plastic surgery, and around then I realized neurosurgery probably wouldn’t suit me. To put it simply, neurosurgery is similar to using an ear pick-like tool to remove one sesame seed or one bean inside the skull. You have to keep digging all day, gently and slowly. Watching that process made me wonder, can I keep doing this? I find it hard to keep doing the same thing over and over. Usually, the dynamic situations happen when a patient’s condition worsens in the intensive care unit, but I didn’t think that would be such a happy thing either. But then, during my plastic surgery rotations, I observed Professor Baek Rong-min, who was the department head at Bundang Seoul National University Hospital at the time, performing surgery... and it felt like magic. They were magical surgeries that created something out of nothing. I thought it was so fascinating, and after that I decided I should go into plastic surgery. It’s a long story with a lot of twists and turns, so it’s hard to shorten.

Q. Sometimes I feel nostalgic about college life. Are there any scenes from your college days that you occasionally feel nostalgic about?

The time I spent in college was so enjoyable. The classes were interesting, and I also did a lot of part-time work. So I made a lot of money too. Programming, photography, design, translation, and so on... I’d try anything that looked fun, study it, and if I thought it could lead to a business, I’d tell people around me, get the work, and work as a freelancer. I think I kept doing things like that throughout college. During internship and residency, I found plastic surgery so interesting as a doctor that I kept learning new surgeries and took on a broader range of responsibilities. Every step of the process was enjoyable.

Q. Medical school takes quite a long time before you can become a board-certified specialist. Even after two premedical years and four years of medical school, you still have to go through internship and residency. What was that period like for you?

Internship and residency were very exhausting and hard, but it was also a time that was enjoyable and taught me a lot. I came home maybe once a month. Even then, it was just to do piled-up laundry... I couldn’t really rest properly. Staying up all night for three days straight was common too. Still, it was a time when I learned a lot while working nonstop. One thing I’m confident about is that during my internship and residency, I observed and participated in an enormous number of surgeries. That has become the foundation for the way I work now. Before I knew it, I had become a specialist.

Q. I get tired even after sleeping 7–8 hours a day... I jokingly said I couldn’t do it even if someone told me to become a doctor, and I feel that again. After going through such a busy period, you became a plastic surgeon. What was it like when you first became a plastic surgeon? And how have you continued your career since then?

In the past, I thought that because I worked hard, because I was great, and because I was smart, I would never fail, never fail exams, and do everything I wanted. I was very arrogant. (laughs) Looking back now, I think I was very blessed and extremely lucky. I could have chosen somewhere other than medical school, but at that point I was almost drawn into choosing medicine, and at the time of graduating from medical school, I was again drawn into choosing plastic surgery. Until I became board-certified, I received generous support and guidance from many good professors and senior doctors. After becoming board-certified, I was able to serve my military duty as the head of the plastic surgery department at a provincial hospital for three years, and after that position ended, I worked at a senior doctor’s hospital on a good salary and was able to encounter a wide variety of work. I think life has come to me as if someone laid stepping stones in front of me and showed me the way.

Q. So that’s how you got here. Etone Plastic Surgery opened at the end of June. Opening a hospital, unlike having someone lay stepping stones for you, seems to require real determination. How did you end up opening Etone Plastic Surgery? And how has it been since the opening?

I was so happy after opening. Actually, before creating Etone, I had built and operated another hospital. At that time, it was opened as a partnership, so there were many partner doctors. There were four partner doctors, and we tried to run the hospital by joining forces, but when we actually did it, there were many problematic points. Designing the hospital and building the system also turned out differently from what I had imagined. What I felt were the problems back then, I listed them again, improved them, and created the current Etone Plastic Surgery. Compared with before, everything—from the workflow to the hospital hardware—has been upgraded, so it can’t help but feel good and enjoyable. More than anything, I can now truly say everything I think exactly as it is, and I’m working together with doctors who share the same views, so that’s the happiest part.

Q. Then how do you want to run Etone going forward?

The core values we think of are: ‘customers who come to meet us become happy after meeting us,’ ‘the employees who work with us become happy by working with us,’ and ‘we ourselves find fulfillment and happiness through this work.’ So I plan to keep operating in line with those values. To do that, good medical care has to be the foundation. For that, systems, equipment, and such need to be well established, and the hospital needs to be somewhat large in scale. To maintain a hospital of that scale, you need more people who work hard. So we’re still preparing to bring in good doctors, and the goal is to bring in doctors with both skill and character, work together happily, and live that way. And then, until we reach what we consider the top level in this field, we’ll work hard; after that, I want to gradually step back and train younger doctors.

Q. Let me ask a philosophical question this time. We named Etone’s brand magazine d’Arc. d’Arc aims to be a magazine that delves deeply into ‘beauty.’ What is ‘beauty’ as seen by a plastic surgeon, and what is ‘beauty’ as seen by Hak-young Kim as a person?

What I think as a plastic surgeon is... personally, I like beautiful things. I think all plastic surgeons do too. Since I want the space where I work to be beautiful, I also pay attention to things like interior design. I want the space I exist in to be efficient and beautiful. When I see patients, I try to follow ‘metaphor’ more than my personal preferences. By metaphor, I mean the things related to the basic aesthetics humans have felt since the Greek and Roman eras—things like proportion, angles, and length. Those apply to humans, animals, and nature alike. If you are a board-certified plastic surgeon, you should fundamentally know those metaphors through study. Beyond that, trends also continue to be published in papers. For example, there are studies measuring, in millimeters, what characteristics the bodies of Koreans in the 2010s and 2020s have. I try to fully consider and account for those objective aspects when seeing patients.

Personally, I think ‘beauty’ means having one’s own individuality. If everyone is exactly the same, that wouldn’t be interesting. I think having individuality is very important.

Q. For the last question, let me ask you as an employee asking the CEO. A wide variety of people work at Etone. As the CEO director, how would you like the employees to work, and what do you hope they feel here?

Human life ultimately seeks happiness on a basic level, and more broadly, it is about completing oneself. Once basic needs and happiness are satisfied, you start asking questions like why I should live, what I am living for, and how I will live and die. So what I want to give my employees first is this: since they’ve entered the hospital industry, I want them to find their own sector within the hospital and become someone with strong capabilities in that sector. First, once you become someone who can do your job well, you can find happiness and continue building yourself.

Excluding sleeping time, we spend about half of our waking hours at the company. If coming to work is only a means to earn money, wouldn’t that be a painful life? If it’s the same work, doesn’t it become enjoyable when you think about how to do it more happily and how to do it better somehow? I’m trying to teach and put in effort so that people can become better at anything, enjoy it more, and approach work that way. While working here, I hope they take away the joy of work and the desire to do it well.

[After the interview]

It was a time to hear how Hak-young Kim, not as a doctor and not as a representative, but as an individual, has lived and how he came to the position he is in now. It almost felt like looking into the life of a senior who came before us. In particular, I couldn’t help but nod at his final remark about having a charm of one’s own.

In the word for beauty, the meaning of ‘areum’ is said to be ‘me.’ The beauty we pursue is ultimately the path toward being true to ourselves, isn’t it? If the director’s ‘areum’ is surgery and seeing patients, then what word and what sentence would our ‘areum’ be? With that rather practical question he mentioned, we wrap up the interview.

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