Truth, Beauty, Love: Jhoon Rhee’s Case That Trust Is the Business Model

At the center of Jhoon Rhee’s philosophy is TBL: Truth, Beauty and Love. He argued that truthfulness makes a person’s heart beautiful, that beauty of heart draws love from others, and that being loved is what makes people happy. Its opposite, which he called DUH for Deceiving, Ugliness and Hatred, he blamed for almost every problem in society, because distrust forces people to waste their time and energy guarding against each other. Read as business advice, it says that trust is the asset a martial arts school actually sells, and that every deception costs more than it earns.

Disclosure: Grand Master Jhoon Rhee awarded the author his 1st Degree Black Belt in 1978 and his ranks through 6th Degree, and the author was head manager of the Jhoon Rhee Institute in 1980. Quotations from TRUTOPIA are brief and attributed.

Of everything in TRUTOPIA, this is the part most likely to make a hard-nosed owner roll their eyes. A chapter on Truth, Beauty and Love sounds like a poster in a yoga studio. Read it closely and it is something else: a cost analysis of dishonesty, written by a man who ran a profitable chain of schools for decades. This journal’s archive even carries an interview with him titled “The Way of Truth, Beauty, Love and Profits.” The last word was not an accident.

What is TBL in Jhoon Rhee’s philosophy?

Rhee started from what he called the universal purpose of life, which he said is happiness, and worked backward to three values he thought every person on earth could agree on. Truth comes first, because it is what makes a heart beautiful. Beauty comes second, because beauty, of face or of heart, is what people fall in love with. Love is third, because the happiest moments in life are shared with someone else.

He turned it into a recitation he had audiences say aloud, which opens “When I am truthful, my heart is beautiful” and ends with being happy. Then he had them say the reverse: deceiving makes the heart ugly, ugliness draws hatred, and hatred makes you unhappy. Good and evil, in his system, are defined by results. TBL is good because it leads to happiness. DUH is evil because it leads away from it. A child can follow that, which was the point: he believed a philosophy only college graduates can understand will never change anything.

Why did Rhee think deception was the root of every problem?

His argument is practical, not mystical. When a national leader deceives citizens, he wrote, people die in unjust wars and money is wasted. When business leaders deceive, shareholders and employees are hurt and whole economies can fail. When family members deceive each other, relationships break and feuds last generations.

The deeper cost is what distrust does to everyone else. In his words, distrust builds walls between people, and then we have to hire guards to watch the walls. He saw locks, audits, contracts and much of the apparatus of modern life as the price everyone pays because some people cheat. Time and energy, the most precious things a person has, go into protection instead of creation. His image for trust was cement in a brick wall or glue between two sheets of paper: without it, nothing holds together.

You do not have to accept his vision of a world without lawyers to see that the economics are right.

How does TBL apply to running a martial arts school?

A school sells something invisible to families who cannot judge it on the first visit. A parent cannot see, in an introductory lesson, whether your black belts are real, whether your contract is fair or whether you will still care about their child in month eleven. They are buying trust. Everything that builds trust lowers your cost of enrollment and raises your retention. Everything that spends it does the reverse.

Here is where I see owners spend trust without noticing:

• Prices that change between the website and the desk. Or fees that appear after the agreement is signed. I have argued for one fair price, with no nickel-and-diming, for exactly this reason.
• Promotions the student didn’t earn. Every family in the school knows when a belt was given rather than earned. I cover the standards question in Belt Factory or Black Belt School?
• Marketing claims you can’t support. “Best in the city” with nothing behind it reads, to an honest parent, as the first lie.
• Cancellation terms that only surface at cancellation. The family that feels trapped tells twenty others.
• Instructors who say one thing to the parent and another to the staff. Children notice before adults do.

And here is where trust compounds: telling a family honestly that their child is not ready to test yet, explaining the full cost before the first lesson, admitting a scheduling mistake before the parent finds it, and keeping every promise made at the front desk. None of that requires a philosophy. Rhee’s contribution was to insist that it is the philosophy.

What did Rhee mean by being “humanly perfect”?

This is the cleverest idea in the book. Rhee defined human perfection not as never making a mistake, which is impossible, but as never making a mistake knowingly. Under that definition, the only real failure is deceiving your own conscience. Do the things you know you should, and don’t do the things you know you shouldn’t, and you are, in his phrase, humanly perfect.

He built it into four daily affirmations, the second of which is that he was humanly perfect because he never made a mistake knowingly. It is a useful standard for an owner because it is achievable. You will misprice a program, hire the wrong instructor and pick the wrong location. Those are mistakes. Quietly overcharging a family you know can’t afford it, or promising a child a belt to keep a parent from canceling, are choices. Rhee would have said only the second kind can ruin you.

Did Rhee allow for any exceptions?

He did, and he was honest about it. He told the old Korean story of Shim Chung, a poor girl who begged rice for her blind father and, asked whether she had eaten, said yes when she hadn’t. He called it a beautiful lie. He also admitted telling his parents during the Korean War that a general would keep him safe at officer school as a taekwondo instructor, which was not true, to keep them from worrying. His line between the two kinds of untruth was self-interest. A lie told to spare someone else pain was not the deception he condemned; a lie told for your own gain was.

That is a workable rule for a school too. The test is not whether a statement is technically accurate but who it serves.