HOW to Transform FAILURE into SUCCESS | Jack Ma's Story in 16 Minutes

I remember 9 years ago when I started Alipay, people said, "Jack, don't touch the financing sector because it's illegal, you may be imprisoned." I call myself like a blind man riding on the back of the blind tigers. Those experts riding horses, they all fell. We survived. We have a lot of heroes, but China movies, heroes always dead. The American movie hero never die. If all the heroes die, who want to be the hero?

He's a Chinese business magnate who's the founder of Alibaba. He's the first mainline Chinese entrepreneur to appear on the COVID of Forbes. After graduation, he applied for 30 different jobs, got rejected by all of them, and also got rejected by Harvard University 10 times. He's Jack Ma, and here's my take on his top 10 rules for success, volume 2. And as always, guys, if you hear a message that Jack has that really resonates with you, please leave it in the comments below, put quotes around it so other people could be inspired as well. Enjoy.

Ma made it into college on his third try and became an English teacher with no computing or engineering background. He's an unlikely tech titan, but he says he was captivated by the internet from the moment he first saw it in 1995 when he came He came to the US as a translator.

I never touched keyboard before. I never using computer before. And I say, what is internet? He said, Jack, you know, search whatever you want on the internet. I said, how can I search? What does search mean? He said, just type. I said, I don't want to type. Computer is so expensive in China. I don't want to destroy it. He said, it's not a bomb, just type. So I typed the first word called beer. At that time, very slow. Come out the American beer, Japan beer, and the German beer, but no China beer. So I was curious and I typed China. No China, no data. Came back to Hangzhou with $1 in my pocket, scared, worried, and I came back and I said, I want to do something called internet. We are not a company that normally China calls. We call ourselves a company running a platform, a company that is running an ecosystem. We are almost everywhere. People say, Jack, you know, you are in the B2B and B2C and you're calling C2B on finance and online payment, logistics, cloud computing. You are everywhere. Not because we're greedy, not because we want to do it, because we have to do it. If we cannot, if we do not do it, China e-commerce in the years will collapse. I remember 9 years ago when I started Alipay. People say, Jack, don't touch the financing sector because it's illegal, you may be in prison. And I, we told ourselves if we don't do it, the China e-commerce will always like a chat room. Everybody say it's a good thing and I don't pay, you don't get the things. So I say, well, put me in the prison. Let's make sure that Alipay, the payment solution, works. And people say the payment solution is such a stupid idea. It's an escrow service. I pay you, hold the money, and you get the things. You pay the money, if you don't get the things you want, return the money. They said it's a stupid product. And I say, as long as it solves the problem, I like stupid things, you know. Let's make stupid things smart. Keep on improving every day. When I started business, it's so difficult. To be a small business owner in China. It took me 5 months to borrow $500 and still fail. No chance. And it is, it is, and I have no any idea about how to run a business. And when I go to register a company called Internet, the registering officer said, no, there's no such a word Internet in the dictionary. How can you register an Internet? So he said, you have to register another name. I said, "What's the name?" He said, "Computer consulting firm." And I have no idea about what is computer. So my first company is "Han Tze Hoop Computer Consulting Firm." It was tough without knowing anything about technology, without knowing anything about computer. In the past 15 years, been working, I call myself like a blind man riding on the back of the blind tigers. Those experts riding horses, they all fell. We survived because we worry about the future. We believe the future. We change ourselves. We never complain the others. Every 5 years we have a review for our strategy. Now, our strategy is always look at the 30 years and 10 years. Every strategic decisions we make, we have to ask one question: this decision we made solve society problem because we believe the bigger social problem you solve, the more successful you are. So if we do this, cannot solve any social problems, we don't do it. Second, is this project is going to be successful in 10 years? If it's going to be successful in 10 years, let's do it. If it's going to be successful in 1 year or 1 month, now I'm going to say Forget about it, because why you can be successful in one year or one month? So we all have to put— and 5 years ago we had a big debate about 10 years later, 20 years, what are the things this China society, the world, want? So we say happiness and health, 2H strategy, the happiness and health. We believe Hollywood, you know, the movie industry bring people happy because Today, nobody's happy. Rich people not happy, poor people not happy. At least when I watch movie, I feel happy about it. So I think we should partner with Hollywood, especially like a lot of— we have a different way of living in China. The movie, we have a lot of heroes. But China movies, heroes always dead. The American movie hero never die. If all the heroes die, who want to be the hero? So my movie, I want to make the hero live. So this is, I think, we should learn a lot. And it's only about 2 years. So we have another 8 years to go. I want to make our company that it's not e-commerce. It's something that giving people inspirations. Giving people— because I learned a lot. For example, I always say that my favorite movie Forrest Gump. You know, life's tough. This is what I learned and that inspired me. That is why when people call me crazy, stupid in the past 17 years, you're crazy, you're doing something that will never work, you're stupid, how can you do that model, Amazon this model, eBay this model, why Alibaba this model? I told myself Forrest Gump said go ahead, never care about what the other people. And the other thing Forrest Gump said, Nobody make money out of the catching whales. People make money by catching shrimps. So we serve small business.

Fair enough.

When we started the e-commerce, nobody believed that China would have e-commerce because people believe on the guanxi, face-to-face, and all kinds of network in traditional ways. There's no trust system in China.

He had to overcome centuries of tradition by showing Chinese buyers and sellers that they could trust Alibaba with their money in this new virtual world. He did it by guaranteeing the transactions and creating his own payment system, an escrow account where Alibaba holds the buyer's money until the goods are delivered.

Every day we finish more than, uh, 30 million transactions. And that means that you are buying things from somebody you have never seen. You are giving products to the person you have never met. And there are some guys you never know that he's going to take your products to that place, to that person. I want to tell the people that the trust is there because it's all about— it's all about the trust.

Who works harder, the people at eBay or the people at Alibaba?

Sometimes you have not only have to work hard, you have to work smart.

So would you say you work smarter than eBay?

I'd have to say yes, right? Well, so far. Yeah, so far. So far.

Okay.

Because I think, you know, we are pretty lucky people. And the people see you, yeah, you work very hard. True. In this world, there's so many people work very hard, but they're not that. I told my team when we IPO'd, I asked a lot of people sitting there, I say, you know, all of you guys, a lot of you guys millionaires and so rich, but 15 years ago, who are we? It's so difficult for us to hire people 15 years ago. People who are not that bad, I said people can walk, still walk on the street, we hire them. Because nobody believed internet, nobody believed internet. And they joined the company. Those people who believed they're smart, they were headhunted back to the other company. They set up their own company. Those people, nobody go to headhunting them, they stayed. Today they're big successful. Very key reasons we insist, we persist, we never give up. We believe the dreams together.

One of the things that's so fascinating to me is that Amazon and Jeff Bezos have pursued what might be described as a very asset-heavy model. They're buying airplanes. They want to own the entire supply chain from beginning to end. And Alibaba has effectively an asset-light business. It is very much, in terms of the retail piece of this, the opposite. You don't want to own the warehouses. You don't want to own the logistics companies. How do you think about that? Is Jeff Bezos right or are you right? And is there, is there going to be a meeting in the middle?

I hope both are right. And because the world can never have one model. If the world has only one correct model, the world is too boring, right? We need to have all kinds of models, and the people who do the model should believe in the model. And I believe what I do, right? The difference between Amazon and us: Amazon is more like an empire. Everything they should control themselves, buy and sell. And our philosophy is that we want to be an ecosystem. Our philosophy is to empower others to sell, empower others to, to service, empower— making sure the other people are more powerful than us, making sure with our technology, our innovation, our partners, our 10 million small business sellers, they can compete with Microsoft, IBM. Our philosophy is that we We think using internet technology, we can make every company become Amazon. I learned my English by myself when I was 12 years old. For whatever reason, I don't know, I just fell in love with the language. Every morning from 5 o'clock, I rode a bicycle about 40 minutes to the Hangzhou Hotel looking for foreign tourists to teach me English. I showed them around the city. They taught me English. My English is not perfect, but the things I learned so interesting because the things that the Americans, the foreign tourists, live in China, they told me are so different from the things I learned from my parents and my teachers. I was in the Cultural Revolution. Everything I taught so different. Since then, everything I learned, I've You have to think, use your own brain to think about just one more minute. When everything body say yes, wait for one minute. When everybody say no, wait for one minute. You think about it carefully because if you look at the world in a different way, you might do in a different way. In the future, you will not make money by the service you offer, you know, how good service you you do, it's going to be how efficient you are. And Alibaba, we are a company right now have 20, that's not including the financial group, we have 25 units, 25 different business units. Maybe in the future we might have 50, I don't know, right? We have that many units and we are almost everywhere. We control our headcounts by efficiency we have. We only have 24,000 people. I tell you a story. The thing I feel proud of, that 2 years ago we start to have a budgeting meeting and I ask my team, well, year 2012, if we want to double all the numbers we have, how many people we need? And people say, 7,800 new people. I said, no, no, no, check it again. And then they say 6,800 people. I said, no. And they, my people ask me, how many you want? I said, 200. They said, no, impossible, 200. My answer is that for years we discussed we should hire more people for future. I've heard this for 10 years. Now, let's just do the efficient thing. And I told all the management, if we have net income, net headcount over 200, even 1 people, we should have no bonus for whole year for year 2012. And then we started the plan. Year 2012, we net lose 1,000 people.

People.

All the number doubled. And I say, if we want to create more jobs for the others, let's keep our headcounts. Make sure— because right now we have over 500 million registered users on Taobao. No matter how many people we hire ourselves, we cannot be— always not enough people. So we can focus on technology, focusing on making Ensuring the platform's efficiency, focusing on everybody makes the difference in the platform. That will make the difference. People say, oh, this is an uncertain world. Every day is uncertain. The only certain day was yesterday. I'm not sure about that in the future I can dictate, I will be stupid. That's why I should retire early when I'm young. That is why I have A lot of things that I dream I want to do. I want to do philanthropy, I want to be a teacher, I want to go back to school, I want to do the environment. And the world is so wonderful. Why should be the CEO of Alibaba all the time? I'm coming to this world not to work. I want to come to this world to enjoy my life. I don't want to die in my office. I want to die on the beaches.

It's a wonderful message.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I made this video because Royal Driver asked me to do a volume 2 on Jack Ma. So if there's another entrepreneur you'd like it to do volume 2 on, leave in the comments. I'll see what I can do. I'm also curious to know what was the rule that you learned the most from today from Jack. What message did he have that really resonated with you that you're going to immediately apply to your life, your business somehow? Leave in the comments. I'm super curious to find out. I also want to give a quick shout out to Noah Sachs. Noah, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word, taking that picture, posting it up on Twitter. You have 5 books to down and 45 to go, so good luck on that streak. Bill Gates reads 50 books a year as well, so you are in good company. Thanks for the love, man. So thank you guys all again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.