Today, we are so overwhelmed with information that we struggle to decide what information to prioritise. Take social media, where people typically only show their best side. Comparing yourself with someone posting the top 0.5 per cent of their life and career can make you feel miserable and unfulfilled in your work, relationship or family. It can even make you feel trapped if you have many responsibilities that you can’t walk away from.

Thanks to the challenges I’ve faced, I’ve developed various frameworks to resolve them. The most important of which is what I call CIP, which means “Clarity is Power”: the more specific your goal, the easier it is to achieve. Define your goal, then your audience: are you achieving this goal for yourself, your friends, or your customers? If it’s your customers, which specific group of customers? And finally, having a timeline is crucial. Make it as specific as possible (such as 12pm on 15 February, for example). This encourages everyone involved to apply the best of themselves to meet this deadline. If you keep dragging things on so things can be “perfect”, your team will become stressed because they no longer have certainty and control of the situation.

It’s also important to differentiate between an activity and a goal. It’s easy to become fixated on an event’s logistics, for example. But following a CIP framework and having defined goals (such as generating 50,000 ROI or 10 strong leads, for example) can reduce stress and entirely change how you approach the event.

I believe the secret to living is giving and that’s why I founded Creative Cloud Community, a social enterprise which connects creative talents and businesses. Since 2016, I’ve also invested part of Acestar’s profits into the Adobe Certified Associate Championship Malaysia, which has run for eight years and has sent young talents to compete in the finals in the USA for the World Championship. These initiatives can offer a professional boost to Malaysia’s young creatives, who might otherwise struggle to find visibility and useful certification. I’m especially proud of one of our young female designers, who has gone on from winning the championship to becoming one of our highest-paid Adobe trainers. Creators will be very important in the future and helping them brand themselves properly will go a long way to their future success.

Many women also have multiple roles and responsibilities—we run companies, take care of our children and care for our parents. To compound the situation, being nurturing and detail-oriented can be a double-edged sword. Creating a successful business is impossible if we also want to take care of everyone all the time, which is ultimately futile. Because we are detail-oriented, we can get bogged down trying to get everything perfect, which can slow business growth.

My success ultimately came from staying laser-focused on my goal. This is partly because I don’t have tertiary education and so am not distracted by a lot of learned rules about running a successful business. When I launched my company, I only had one simple goal—to break even. So if my costs were $50,000, I made sure that every month I earned the same in profit. 

When I broke even in my first year, I then used the same simple logic to figure out how much I’d need to make to earn a target profit. When you’re so focused on achieving what you want, it’s only a matter of time before you achieve it. But many startups want overnight success and many fail because of their lack of focus. Keep yourself accountable day by day, month by month, at least in the early days. Start with one thing at a time, clearly define what you want to achieve, focus on that and you are likely to succeed. Don’t get distracted by people saying you should do this and that. I’ve listened to so much advice – it can be useful but also very disruptive.

I came from difficult circumstances and never intended to become an entrepreneur, much less a successful one. To get where I am today, I focused on working step by step, overcoming challenges each day as they arose. Life is too short to play small if you can play big. And I truly believe that if I can do it, so can you.

This piece is part of a collaboration between Tatler Asia and Young Presidents’ Organisation (YPO), a global leadership community of chief executives, which counts more than thirty thousand members from 142 countries among its members.

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