We were lucky to catch up with Sadie Le recently and have shared our conversation below.
Sadie, so glad you were able to set aside some time for us today. We’ve always admired not just your journey and success, but also the seemingly high levels of self-discipline that you seem to have mastered and so maybe we can start by chatting about how you developed it or where it comes from?
Growing up in Pleiku — a mountainous city in the Central Highlands of Vietnam — I used to think that with these limited resources, I would never be able to achieve great things like kids from big cities. However, education pulled me out of that mindset. During the COVID-19 pandemic, online learning left me plenty of free time to pursue something — and the thing I chose was language.
English used to be my weak point. I remember the baffled feeling of doing the final test in grade 4 with no idea whatsoever. To this day, everything I remember about that class is Katy Perry’s Roar. But back to the story — I was blessed with a laptop to search and learn, and that just changed everything. For the first time in my life, I felt a sense of self-control when I could ask my parents to buy books for me to learn and read.
I started with an English book and studied straight for 3 months without skipping a day. Then came a row of books on different subjects: astronomy, detective stories, manga, biology — you name it. After that period, I realized that with consistency, I could actually do anything. That mindset, derived from an internal experience, has reinforced my self-discipline — from a confused 8th grader to a freshman today.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I am currently a freshman at Fulbright University Vietnam. I would love to call myself an explorer, as I am now on a journey of diving into different fields. But I do have a major goal — to build a better world through innovation.
In the past few years, I have been most active in the healthcare sector. From being the Vice-president for the Vietnam Team HBV — fighting the illiteracy of Hepatitis Virus in Vietnam with teenagers around the country — to helping peers with mental health problems through outreach and management skills at mercuri.world.
Recently, I made a promise to extend my mission on mental health with mercuri.world by co-founding an NGO dedicated to Vietnamese children. Our main mission is to help them be mentally literate and stable. It’s still growing with the first products, and I haven’t told anyone at mercuri.world about it yet — but I hope everything will work out.
Apart from that, at my liberal arts university, I expose myself to STEM subjects like Computer Science, Data Analysis, and Engineering in the first term. The journey has been so fun with many new insights — and stress too — but midterms have passed, and I wish for smoother sailing in the later half, hahaha.
Business and startups are also subjects of my interest. My FOMO spirit just keeps me applying to anything I see. I currently work as a Business Development member at CanLab Community, where I balance profit and social impact — offering top-of-the-line mentorship at the most reasonable price. We actually had a quite successful zero-budget campaign this summer, though the activity has kind of slowed down now.
I’m also interning at a mature business where they want our team to help them revive their operations under heavy taxes. I also applied to a solar company but unfortunately haven’t heard back from them (yet).
You might wonder how I can manage it all — but actually, I’m always on the edge with everything. But trust me, a clear calendar and effective working habits will help you pull through anything.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Three qualities I think are most important are responsibility, resilience, and kindness. You will not go far alone, so you need to have that kindness to be tolerant with others. The kindness can also come from your urge to build a better operation system so team member can also balance their private life with extracurricular activities and academic work.
And also the resilience to not give up after storms of setbacks. You need that to cope with rejections, failure and even somethings that not really your faults.
But above all, you need responsibility, especially in the early stages, to show that you are trustworthy and capable of more. If you want to strive forward and have more opportunities, responsibility is the most valuable asset, in my opinion.
For me, I always tell myself to keep chasing and jumping on opportunities — you never know if you can do it unless you try.
Do you think it’s better to go all in on our strengths or to try to be more well-rounded by investing effort on improving areas you aren’t as strong in?
As a free spirit, I would opt for trying to be more well-rounded by investing effort in improving areas I’m not strong in. I, myself, am diving into many things that seem unrelated. Some I’m good at, some I’m average at, and some I really struggle with.
But the thing is, in this unpredictable world, you have limited time and resources to develop yourself. For me, putting all my eggs in one basket is just too risky — and my FOMO is real too.
When I work in the business field at CanLab, I have to link my experience in health-related projects — the people, the structure, and the ethics. That ability to transfer what I learn from one thing to another is the most important for me, as it allows me to explore many fields I might never have known while making full use of my previous experiences and strengths.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://sites.google.com/view/lethihaiha/latest-news
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sadienohatie/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chi.lam.sadie/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/le-thi-hai-ha/
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
