Meet Selena Lee

We recently connected with Selena Lee and have shared our conversation below.

Selena , thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

That’s a really good question! Resilience is one of my strongest qualities. It’s one of the main reasons why I have been successful in my corporate career and in life. Personally, I think every great business professional, entrepreneur, or anybody for that matter, needs this quality in spades to get anywhere. Let’s be real. We all fail sometimes. It’s hard, but that should not define who we are. What matters is what we do after we fail, how we pick ourselves up, and how we carry on with the knowledge we learned from our mistakes.

I have always been one of those determined kids who believe the sky’s the limit in what an individual can achieve. I believe success depends on how hard someone works for it and how bad they want something. Growing up, I read a lot of books. I noticed that heroes and heroines in storybooks always seem to need to overcome setbacks to come out on top. There’s usually some suffering, some doubt, and yes, some failures. Books were my escape. I faced many challenges in my youth, and like my heroes, I persevered and grew stronger. Perhaps it was ingrained in me that you need to work hard to earn what you want in life. I knew that nothing would be handed to me on a silver platter. This mindset shaped my strong work ethic once I graduated from university and started my professional corporate life.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I’m an advertising and media executive and I spent two decades working at top global agencies creating award winning campaigns and getting my clients’ message out in the most effective media possible. I excel at creating media first campaigns and at crafting compelling stories for brands and movie or TV releases. I’ve helped top technology and retail brands as well as worked with both 20th Century Fox (now a part of Disney) and Paramount Pictures Global for both theatrical and home media streaming releases. It was a very fast paced lifestyle that required a lot of creativity, dedication, time commitment, patience and tenacity. Life got really crazy sometimes being in this industry! I love the adrenalin rush and thrive in doing what I love.

A few years ago, I decided to take a break from my corporate career to try my hands at being an entrepreneur. I wanted to do something different. I am already successful in my career, but I’ve always wondered what it would be like to start a business from scratch. I’m both a dreamer and a doer, so Instead of wondering, I took the plunge and quit my executive job to become an entrepreneur. Back then, I had also just become a mom to twins. Being a new mom and the global citizen that I am, I wanted to create something cool for kids that didn’t yet exist in Los Angeles—an inspirational language studio where kids can learn foreign languages in an organic way. I knew that American kids need to learn foreign languages differently from kids in Asia or Europe who were born into dual or multilingual environments. American kids do not have the environment to learn these languages naturally. My goal was to create a space where they could do that. With this in mind, MandarinArts was born. Since its launch, we have taught hundreds of kids in Los Angeles to love learning foreign languages. With our success, we launched a second location in Los Angeles this year. My dream is for more kids to have the opportunity to learn second languages and to thrive doing so. I hope any parent in LA who dreams of raising multilingual kids will head straight to MandarinArts.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

They will need to have tenacity, a strong work ethic, and the ability to bounce back from failures stronger than ever. In other words, resilience. If you work on having these three qualities, I think you can overcome anything in life.

How can folks who want to work with you connect?

I enjoy meeting like-minded people to share ideas with, and I am open to connecting with anyone who has business ideas or ventures they want to discuss that I could help with. Reach out to me via my LinkedIn profile! Caveat – I get tons of unwanted sales solicitations and that’s something I do not enjoy! Please only reach out if you are genuine about collaborations and partnerships.

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Selena Lee

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