After receiving flak for stating that it is "increasingly hard to find motivated young people to work”, entrepreneur Tjin Lee said she has learnt to "see both sides" of the issue and was glad to have sparked a conversation about work ethic. 

She also felt that her post had been "greatly misunderstood" to mean that she was promoting hard work at the expense of work-life balance, though she said she could have been clearer about her intentions and meaning behind the post, the 48-year-old said.

Her earlier post on Instagram had attracted criticism. She wrote about a “worrying” trend of people expressing on social media that they would “rather be on holiday than in the office” or that they just want to “lie on a bed of moss with my lover and read art and poetry, and not hustle nor work hard”.

Ms Lee told TODAY in a phone interview that her post did not claim that work-life balance and hard work are incompatible. Both are by no means mutually exclusive, she said.

She intended to convey a simple message: That one had to work hard to achieve their dreams.