10 Rules to BOOST Your Game! | Jack Ma

Don't hate your competitors. Respect your competitors.

Having competitors is a good thing.

When I'm on a movie set, I think everybody is just as important as I am.

Rise and shine, it's Enspresso time. Good morning, Believe Nation, it's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I believe you have an amazing gift inside you that I want to see explode out onto the world. So grab your coffee and sip on today's message: Respect your competitors. Over to you, Jack Ma.

I wake up every morning.

Espresso keeps me going.

I wake up every morning.

Who's your most dangerous competitor? Is it Amazon or is it Tencent? Well, people always think, compare us with Amazon. Amazon is a great company. I respect, I've been seeing them from tiny to that big, and I think they will continue to grow. But we are different. We, the Amazon is an e-commerce company. We are not e-commerce company. We enable other people to do e-commerce. We want to making sure everybody can be Amazon. So are you saying Tencent is the greater— oh, Tencent is, of course, they are great company. And you know, it's, it's not easy to be that size within only such less than 20 years, so innovative and so creative and so different on social technology. And they're based in Shenzhen and they're almost everywhere in China. But respect, of course we compete, but compete does not mean I have to hate them. Don't hate your competitors. Respect your competitors. Learn from him. But, you know, Pony and I, we've been doing the charity together, the Nature Conservancy, and protected the— but we compete each other. But when we compete each other, we should respect each other. I respect him. I respect Tencent.

Having competitors is a good thing. They force you to up your game. They force you to get better, to get stronger, and they prevent you from getting fat and slow and lazy and lethargic. Competition is a great thing. The Yankees need the Red Sox. Coke needs Pepsi. NASA needs SpaceX. We need our competition. Nobody wants to run a race against 3-year-olds. When you do, you're gonna win every time, and it's not gonna be a challenge for you. You want to grow, you want to get better. I looked at my YouTube channel, and last year I was in a race to try to get to 1 million subscribers. My goal for the end of the year was to hit 1 million subscribers And when I realized I was going to get that, I was looking at my biggest competition was Gary Vaynerchuk at the time. And I was excited to see who's going to hit a million first. Now, he probably didn't really care, but for me, I liked it. I liked the back-to-back. I liked seeing who was ahead. I liked having somebody pushing me to do more. And when he took a break in the summer and he just handed it to his team and his channel tanked a little bit, I was a little sad because there was no competition because I knew I was going to beat him to a million. And now it's exciting again because he's bringing up his game. He's getting better. He's growing faster. And now I have to up my game to get even better and get, get higher and get faster and above. I love what Gary's doing. I'm a huge fan of his channel. I'm not in YouTube or doing what I do only to beat Gary Vaynerchuk. That is not my goal. I'm making videos because I love it, and I love what he's doing for the entrepreneur community and everybody else who's making videos. To help you guys too. But having people who are close to you or having people who are ahead of you, they push you to be stronger and to do more and to go just that little bit extra. The other day I had a subscriber write into me to say, "Hey Evan, I love your content. I haven't been on your channel for a while and it's all your fault because you introduced me to Tom Bilyeu from Impact Theory and I've been going down a rabbit hole just consuming all of his content." I tweeted that out to Tom because if I'm gonna lose a subscriber, I'm glad it's going to him. And now Tom is still behind on the growth for his channel compared to ours, but he's catching up, and I love it. Like, I want Tom to get better. I want Tom to get better because it'll push me to do more, and it's a great win for the entrepreneur community, for all of you guys. He has great content. And so you need to respect your competitors. I think it's important. I think if you understand that, yes, you want to beat them, but that they are making you be a better version of you, it really, really helps drive drive progress. So if we look at this business, Toronto Dance Salsa, we're the biggest school in Canada. We're probably bigger than all the other schools in the country combined, at least in this area for sure combined. And so I don't look at our competitors as competitors, right? I don't look at what the other salsa schools are doing in the area and saying, look what they're doing, because we're just so much further ahead of them. So we need to have somebody pushing us. So I look at who we compete against really is going to be the movie theaters, is going to be the bars, is going to be the Pitbull concert. It's the entertainment dollar. And so I look at what those guys are doing and say, I'm competing with Starbucks. I'm competing with famous players. I'm competing with the movie theaters. That's who I'm competing with. And so it's this competition now that's striving for us to get better. Again, competition is not the reason why we do this. We teach salsa because we love it, because we try to create that sense of community here, because people come in without friends and with low self-esteem, and they come out with an entire new group of friends with confidence huge smiles, and you see that have a ripple effect out to the entire life. That's why we do it. But the competition helps you just sharpen that knife a little bit more, gives you that extra push, extra oomph, so that you can be the best version of yourself possible. Now I've got some really special bonus clips for you, but before getting to that, my question of the day is: who is the competitor that you respect the most and have learned the most from? Leave it down in the comments below. I'm really curious find out. Thank you guys so much for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. Enjoy the bonus clips, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso.

I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going.

But then I was in the Die Hard office one day, and there's this sign on the wall that I adhere to vehemently now that said, "Be careful of the toes you step on today, for they could be connected to the ass you'll have to kiss tomorrow." And believe me, there have been PAs and other people, like, when I'm on a movie set, I think everybody is just as important as I am, or I treat them that way. So I know PAs' names, I talk to them, I speak to them every day, I speak to the gaffers, I speak to the grips. I speak to all these people. And over the years, I've gotten jobs, and the producer will show up, and he'll be like, "You don't remember me, but I was a PA on so-and-so, and you were so nice to me that, you know, when I was doing this movie, I couldn't help but think, you know, that you would be the perfect—" And that shit works out, you know. Or they become writers, or they become directors, you know. But it's a collaborative effort. I mean, we're almost the least important element of any film. 'Cause if motherfuckers ain't putting the lights up right, or the sound man mic is jacked up, it don't mean shit about what you're doing, 'cause nobody can see you or hear you. You know? So they can fix that in the mix, you know? But everything else has gotta work.

We have learned a lot from every one of our competitors. There is no doubt at all, and we respect them. One of the articles of faith I would say that emphasis is never ever underestimate your competitors. Always respect them, learn what you can from them, and that's the way you can beat them.

I think to respect your opposition, your teammates, is really important. I can understand everyone is out here to win. Not everyone can be winners. But you can definitely win everyone's hearts. You can, you can win some games, you can lose some games. In my career, I haven't won all the games, but something which sport teaches you is when there is failure, when you're faced with challenges, sport teaches you to get back on your feet again and and compete harder in the right spirit. And that's what my message to you would be. Compete hard, but play in the right spirit and respect your sport above all.

So let me give you the one word secret to happiness. One word. This is all you need to be happy.

The most important word ever. If you had to think of one word that's most important to you or that sums you up or that would be kind of like a little beacon, Hey, Believe Nation!

If you want to know what the most important one word is for Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk, Oprah Winfrey, will.i.am, and Howard Schultz, I have a very special secret video for you. Check the description for details.