Dr. Wei-Shin Lai is the founder of SleepPhones. Over the years, she has helped thousands of individuals sleep better through her innovative products.
Three days ago, I spoke with her. During our conversation, she shares some words of advice on handling stress and achieving success as an entrepreneur, and furthermore what motivates her to keep pushing on.
Avoiding Anxiety And Burnout
Having practiced medicine for many years, Dr. Lai is no stranger to working long hours and dealing with high anxiety situations. The key to dealing with these situations she says, is not to avoid them but rather use them as a motivating factor. It’s all about perspective and approach. Continually learning and adapting your approaches to these situations makes you better suited to deal with whatever the future throws at you. In addition to this, learning to recognize and compartmentalize the situations that typically stress you out or induce feelings of anxiety will help in the development of future plans to deal with similar circumstances.
Achieving Success
To Dr. Lai, achieving success is all about creating an informative dialogue around her company’s products and the solutions they can offer. Reaching organizational expansion goals and revenue projections are certainly markers of successful business decision making, but when it comes to achieving personal success, the definition changes a bit. To her, success is being well-known enough to provide her company’s solutions to those who can benefit from them. For example, when she makes a speech somewhere, she doesn’t like to hear from the audience that they need her company’s products and that they wish they knew about them earlier. To combat this, her goal is to make sure she gets her message out to everyone who needs to know about it, even before they know they need it.
Source of motivation
Strikingly similar to how she was called to the medical profession, Dr. Lai attributes her motivation to her instinctual drive to help people and the opportunity to lead a team of fantastic individuals who all share the same goal of improving the lives of their customers. Her company’s products have not only changed the lives of millions of people across the globe, but have also drastically improved her own life, and she believes that’s something worth celebrating. Being able to continually help people by providing life changing solutions on a global scale proves that her customer-centric approach is not only effective but also sustainable in today’s increasingly e-commerce focused economy.
Continuous Growth
The identification and pursuit of new opportunities is critical for continued growth, success and survival. For Dr. Lai, this growth is largely focused on her company’s transition into software development in addition to the continued production of their core hardware products. The importance of diversification within her organization’s customer offerings cannot be overlooked and is pivotal to continued market success. This synergy cannot happen without proper strategic planning and forecasting however, and her ability to identify what the market needs early on and provide customer-centric solutions that work has allowed for the continued growth and success of her business.