10 Ways To WIN When Rejected: Jack Ma

Good morning, Believe Nation. My name is Evan Carmichael. My one word is believe, and I believe that entrepreneurs will solve all of the major problems of the world. So today's message is get used to rejection. Over to you, Jack Ma. I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going. I wake up every morning.

When I graduate from universities, and before I, you know, for 3 years I tried to fail in the university. So I applied jobs for 30 times, got rejected. I went for a police, they said, "No, you're not good." I went to even the KFC, when KFC come to China, come to my city. You applied? 24 people went for the job. 23 people accepted. I was the only one guy. And we went for police, 5 people, 4 of them accepted. I was the only guy that I receive it. So to me, Being turned down, rejected. Oh, by the way, I told you that I would— I applied for Harvard for 10 times, rejected. I know if you reject, I just don't want to say that.

They're sorry now.

10 times you wrote them and said, I'd like to come to Harvard. Yeah. And then I told myself, someday I should go teach there, Bobby.

So I never applied to KFC or Harvard or got rejected from those places. But I think rejection is part of life as an entrepreneur. You are going to get rejected over and over and over and over again. It's just part of being an entrepreneur and being a business. The first thing you put out won't be very good. People will hate on it. People give some constructive criticism as well. People will say no because they don't know you, trust you, like you. And so you won't get those first deals. It takes a lot of time to build up a business and make it successful. And even when you've gotten to that point where you're feeling happy and you're bringing on a team and building the business, you're still gonna get rejected constantly. It's just part of life as an entrepreneur. And so if you can't handle that, it's gonna be a really hard road for you to be an entrepreneur. I think the way to get through rejection, there's two ways to do it. One is to use rejection as fuel. Kinda like what Jack Ma did. Like, I got rejected 10 times by Harvard, one day I'm gonna go teach there, right? One day I'm gonna go speak there. To use that as fuel, it's like, you turn me down, I'm gonna show you I'm gonna beat it. I'm gonna come back and be the teacher there, right? You turn me down for this deal, I'm gonna go get a deal 10 times as big. Right? So that's one. You can use rejection as fuel to help you go off and do something bigger and motivation to, I'm gonna prove them wrong. The second way is just to forget about it. Just get used to it. That's more what I do. I don't really use rejection as fuel. It doesn't really bother me when somebody turns me down or when a new series doesn't work. I was trying to think when I was preparing for this video, what's a recent rejection that I have? 'Cause there's been so many, but none really stick out as being super memorable. The one that I came up with was, I tried a new series on the weekend a while ago about the best of Kickstarter. And it was a new series that I was testing of showing different Kickstarter ideas that I thought might be helpful for you. And that video didn't do as well as I would've liked, didn't do as well as other videos. And we're probably gonna kill that series. But that's okay, like I've killed tons of series. It happens all the time on the channel, and I couldn't even tell you all the series that I've killed because they didn't perform. You guys rejected them. It's okay, I just move past it. And so, either one, you have two strategies to go for. Use the rejection as fuel to say, "I'm gonna show you how wrong you are," and prove it to them. Or just forget about it, get used to it, it's gonna happen, it's just part of the game, and you move on and just think about the next thing that you can go off and build. Use either one of those strategies, but don't get stuck in the rejection. I think that's the most important part. If you get stuck and you're sitting at home or in your office like, "It's never gonna work, he said no," and you just sit there and you don't take any kind of action, that's where it really hurts you. So the question of the day today is, I'm curious, how do you deal with rejection? Do you use it as fuel? Do you just forget about it and move on? Do you do something else that I haven't heard of yet? Let me know, leave it down in the comments. I'm really excited to find out. I also wanna give a quick shout out to Caleb Ottman. Caleb, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word. It really, really means a lot to me, and I hope you're enjoying the read. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. And I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of Nespresso.

I wake up every morning, Nespresso keep me going.

Let me tell you, rejection is the big kahuna in all entrepreneurship. Okay, show me somebody who could take a hit and I'll show you a good entrepreneur. I don't know if I made that up, but I think I did. But it's all in how well you get back up. And you know what I have found, by the way? Because if you think about it, great salespeople make a couple million dollars a year selling apartments in New York City, which my great salespeople do. Uh, great entrepreneurs. All the business comes from them. They manage their own business. They hire staff. They're entrepreneurs. And you know what I found is the only difference between the superstars making the millions a year and the person who's barely getting by? The only difference— not contacts, not how hard they work. Some people work just as hard and don't make any money. It's how long they feel sorry for themselves once they get hit. Some people could take a hit and milk it for 2 weeks. They're at their desk, they look like they're working, but they're not working. Mentally, they're not there. The great salespeople take the hit and then they jump right back up as though they've been hurt just as much as the next guy, but they work right through it and keep going. Let me tell you, if you have that skill, you should be an entrepreneur because you will be paid well for it. The single best thing I do, more than anything else I can do in building businesses for myself and these other people, well, just speaking for myself, is I fail well. If I fall on my face, let me tell you, nobody's better at pretending I'm not, thinking of a quick cover-up, trying to keep moving. And you want to know, in that act itself of getting back up fast, you always stumble onto something good. And you want to know One other thing, this is, I'm not a religious person 'cause I was raised so goddamn religious I don't wanna ever think about it again. But I do believe once you put your mind on going forward on anything, there's almost like a battle cry that goes out in the universe and the world rallies around you. You're right. It just comes to your fore again and again. So to have that kind of good faith that I'm just getting back up even if I'm gonna get slammed. Life is fair in its own weird way in that way in building businesses. You will be swept up by some lucky chance. It happened to me every time I got back up.

A little while later, I wrote a book called The Shining, and it was my third book, and I got contractual rights to write the first draft screenplay for that. And I did do that, and I found out later that Stanley Kubrick, who had got the rights through Warner Brothers, had already determined that he and a lady named Diane Johnson were going to do the screenplay for The Shining. So they basically— my screenplay went in and they said, no, this won't do. And then they went on to what they really wanted to do, which was fine. I wasn't angry or upset. You, you're not after a while. You get thousands of rejection slips before you break through. You kind of get used to that, and it's just part of the game. But the thing is, you learn, you learn little by little.

You know, um, Yes, the answer is yes. You always get a lot of rejection. Anytime you're gonna put something new into the world, there's a million people who will tell you how they've done it better before, or how that's already been done, or how it's not gonna work. And you have to look at those as motivators. Just like if you're going into acting, you can't look at auditioning as a way of getting a job. You have to look at auditioning as the job, because that's what you're gonna spend the majority of your time doing. And if you love it, getting the job is gravy. So, sure. The trickiest thing is continuing to work. And I was very lucky with Heights that I had Tommy Kail because I had someone who wasn't me saying, "Bring in something Friday. Bring in something on Friday. This is good. This part feels weird. Bring in another song on Friday." Every week for 8 years.