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New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.

As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.

So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.

Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.

We registered for the New York gift show, which is the holy grail of trade shows.

And we thought that this is going to be the ticket to our success, but we were wrong.

It was a complete disaster.

Ramen PR is how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

I'm Guy Ross, and on today's show, the story of how Mayshe left China for America, used Campbell soup cans to make candles and turned that into a multi-million dollar company.

So almost everything about the way Mayshe's life turned out is improbable.

The fact that she started a business that she makes candles that she even lives in America, none of this was supposed to happen.

And as she describes it, growing up in China in the 1970s was kind of like living in a movie without much color.

When we grow up, there was absolutely nothing. Everyone were the same thing. Everyone would be eating the same food. Everyone had the same small apartment.

Life was very happy in the sense that you don't have to be jealous of each other. You don't have to be wanting things you could not have.

In the 1970s, China was still a black box, closed off too much of the world.

But eventually, the government realized it needed better diplomats, people who spoke foreign languages well.

So around the time May turned 12, this is 1979. The government decided to open up some boarding schools to train that next generation of diplomats.

And Mayshe was one of the lucky few who got in.

So we learned western culture, American studies, Renaissance art, all in English.

And I knew more about Smithsonian and the locations of each art than many Americans. And this was the thing about learning a language.

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