Mel Lim has helped the survivors in Shyne San Diego Business Incubator believe in themselves as leaders. She has a true passion for helping others see that some of life's hardest times are full of valuable lessons. By sharing her authentic self, Mel is able to connect, inspire and motivate women to achieve their wildest dreams.

Once again, thank you for affirming and providing practical know-how for people who want to succeed through their artistic skills and craftsmanship with integrity in this otherwise wasteful age of built-in obsolescence and culture of fickleness. You are playing the role today of the Victorian arts entrepreneur, William Morris, but you are providing a path for the challenges of our own time. We have many talented people in our region who would rather live a stable modest existence by finding a living producing things of lasting quality, rather than going against their own values for the sake of profit and producing disposable, ephemeral work. The culture will come around once again to believe in things that can become an aesthetic legacy to pass on. For one thing, we cannot continue to waste the resources of the Earth as we are now doing -- or our future generations will have nothing to work with! I also appreciated that you were a clear and engaging speaker and very receptive and on target with audience questions. Thanks for the great respect you showed all of us.

Truly inspired by the Mel power! Mel’s speech was particularly inspiring to all the females in this modern age of gender equality. Her positive and energetic charisma has influenced and will continue to impact many of us. As a role model, Mel has demonstrated what constitutes a life worth living.

I really appreciated your story, and I am so grateful to you for sharing it with me. I feel there is a universal story—and it’s always the same. It’s about a person—someone like you and me—waking up one day and saying, ‘I want something more. I believe I can do something meaningful/important/different. But I must move—go somewhere I’ve never been before to realize this potential, to fill this hunger. And so we go to a new place. And we work hard. And we eat bitterness and endure sleeplessness, hunger, and discouragement, performing with no net, hanging on tightly to our vision of something more. Every single day trying to decide what to keep from our old life and what to abandon. Making painful choices. Making a way out of no way at all. Then success. Then how much of my story do I want to tell and to whom because it is a precious story of building a life out of one’s own imagination. And the wisdom that comes from struggle. We don’t want anyone learning the wrong lessons or making the wrong assumptions. Our story is our own personal treasure, and it is the one thing we don’t owe the world. We choose when and how we make a gift of our story and our wisdom.