How many lives have you impacted? Ask Embrace Innovations CEO and TED Fellow Jane Chen, and she’d modestly respond with an estimate of more than 150,000.

After reading a fateful newspaper story about the AIDS epidemic in China, this former big-business consultant resolved to make a meaningful impact globally. Gaining experience through the Clinton Foundation and other nonprofits, Chen ultimately created a low-cost, low-energy portable warmer (which keep infants at their optimal temperature) that would give premature babies in developing countries the chance to survive. Over the next five years, she hopes to help in saving the lives of one million babies across the globe by using profits from her new Little Lotus baby products—stylish swaddles, sleeping bags, and blankets—to fund even more infant warmers for poverty-stricken areas. Little Lotus uses a Tom's shoes model: for every product purchased, a baby is helped in a developing country with the Embrace infant warmer.

Clinique created its Smart™ Custom-Repair Eye Treatment and Smart™ Custom-Repair Serum for busy, thoughtful women such as Chen, who are looking for simple, powerful tools to transform their complexions as they change the world. Because progress begins with self-empowerment, we asked Chen to tell us about the smartest decision she ever made that would change countless lives, beginning with her own.