China’s richest man is Jack Ma, the founder of the Internet giant Alibaba Group. He was invited to share his story with young entrepreneurs at the 45th World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos-Klosters and his insights are truly worthwhile for all of us.
It sounds unbelievable, but 100,000,000 buyers are visiting Alibaba.com every day. The company created 14,000,000 jobs in China (directly and indirectly) in the past 15 years. Each day, over 60,000,000 transactions are processed through Alibaba’s payment system. The Alibaba Group grew from 18 people (working in Jack Ma’s apartment) to 30,000 people.
The founder of Alibaba.com tells the story of how he was rejected by various institutions when he was young, concluding the everyone should get used to rejection and use it as fuel. Ma says that early rejections in his life only strengthened his resolve to succeed.
“People reject us even today.”
Jack Ma applied for a job within the Chinese Police in his hometown. He was the only one to get rejected, all other candidates were accepted. He even applied for a job at KFC when it first open in China, and once again he was the only one to be rejected, everybody else getting the job. “I went to KFC; 24 people went for the interview, 23 got accepted. I was the only one rejected,” he said.
He applied to Harvard 10 times, and 10 times he was rejected. “I told myself, someday I will go there to teach.”
Ma told young entrepreneurs that Alibaba gets rejected even today, after its record IPO. He learned to embrace rejection and he teaches his employees to strive for greatness.
Guiding tourists to learn English
He became interested in the English language, but China had no books or teachers to help him learn it, so he became a free tourist guide so he could learn the language from Westerners visiting China.
“When I was 12 years old, I got interested in learning English. I rode my bike for 40 minutes every morning, rain or snow, for eight years to a hotel near the city of Hangzhou’s West Lake district, about 100 miles southwest of Shanghai. China was opening up, and a lot of foreign tourists went there. I showed them around as a free guide and practiced my English. Those eight years deeply changed me. I started to become more globalized than most Chinese. What I learned from my teachers and books was different from what the foreign visitors told us.” (Source)
Jack Ma is seen as a controversial figure by some Western opinion leaders, but his story of becoming the richest man in China is one that can inspire all of us, teaching us that we should start where we are, using what we have, just like he did.
If you’d like to find out more about Jack Ma and his business success, see his talk here.
