"I Want to DO Something Called INTERNET!" - Jack Ma - #Entspresso

Good morning, Believe Nation! It's Evan. My one word is believe. I believe in you, and I want to see that awesome thing that you have inside you explode out into the universe to have a major impact. So to help you on your journey, today's message is just go for it. Over to you, Jack Ma.

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 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 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 German beer, but no China beer. So I was curious, and I type 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.

Jack's story reminds me of Howard Schultz, who started Starbucks, and he was on his trip, family vacation to Milan in Italy, and he saw how Italians loved the coffee shops. It was their third home. They hung out there. They spent a lot of time there. And he looked to North America and saw the Dunkin' Donuts of the world, where it's like in and out. Cheap coffee, just grab it and go. And he wanted to create that atmosphere, take it from Italy and bring it back to North America, just like Jack did for the internet. And so, like, what happens when you have this idea? When you have this great idea that you've come up with, or you've modeled success somewhere else and said, "It works here, I want to bring it here." Like, what happens to you when you have these ideas? Do you execute on them? Do you try them? Do you go for it? Do you do it? Do you get answers? Or you just kind of sit on it? 'Cause what a lot of people do is they sit on it. A lot of people, they brainstorm and you come up with tons of ideas in your head and that's great and that's really fulfilling and it gets the endorphins going. You start imagining the future world and this great future business. But you have to actually do something about it, right? And it doesn't mean you have to quit your job. I'm not saying go all in, quit your job, you know, take out a huge mortgage or a huge loan and bet your entire future on this one thing working out. I don't think you need to do that. But I do think you need to do something. I do think you need to take some kind of action because whenever you have an idea, you also have to recognize that there's a limited window of time to make that happen. It's not gonna be around for you forever. You have a limited amount of time to make that opportunity happen before that window shuts closed or somebody else goes and does it. And so when you find that thing that you know you wanna try, that you know you wanna do, that you think is gonna really work, you have to go for it. You've gotta do it. You've gotta jump through the window before it closes on you because the alternative is you live the rest of your life with regret. I look at my YouTube channel as an example. We are hitting it hard right now. Right now is my window. I'm having a fantastic window right now. Right, it's not to be bold or boastful or building myself up, like, this is my moment right now. You know, I was on YouTube a while ago, I don't know when I started, 8, 9 years ago, something like that, maybe less, and I had some videos and I tested and I tried and it was okay and I slowly got more and more committed to it, and then I saw the opening. Like, this is, this is the moment right now. It just combines everything that works well for me versus other opportunities, other platforms out there, right? Video. I love video. Being able to DJ content from different celebrities and entrepreneurs and famous faces. Being able to be an expert in the YouTube space and be able to teach some of these thought leaders in business about YouTube and, and form a lot of collaborations and partnerships to use their content to make the top tens. It's, it's just a moment in time for me right now where things are hitting it really hard. I have the opportunity to do really, really, really, really, really well, and so it's my responsibility to do so. If I don't, then I'm letting myself down, I'm letting you guys down. I have nobody else to blame. Somebody else, if I stop doing this, somebody else, you know, would pick up the mantle and go out and do it, and they would go off and have a big impact, I can't sit back and say, "That guy stole my idea and crushed it," which happens so often. Like, you have an idea, you don't do anything with it, somebody else takes the idea without talking to you, they just go out and do it on their own, and then say, "That guy made millions off of my idea." Well, no, like, that was their idea. You just didn't do anything about it. You gotta take that action. And so right now is my window to do this. YouTube may not be around forever. It won't. You know, will YouTube still be like this in 5 years, in 10 years? Maybe, maybe not. So I've got this window that fits really, really, really well for me right now, and so I have to jump through it as fast as I can with the resources that I have to get as much out of it and to give as much into it as well. And so you're going to have these moments where you have absolute clarity, like, this is what I want to do. You can have a lot of moments where you have no idea what to do. Right? When you don't know what to do, then you've got to experiment and try things and say yes. Like, you won't figure out what you want to do by sitting on the couch all day. You got to get out and say yes and try things, and most of those things won't work, and that's okay. You're experimenting. So that's where you are. Just keep saying yes, keep experimenting, try things at least once until you find a thing that you want to go do again and do again and do again and do again. But if you're at that moment where you know what you want to do, you found that clarity, you've done all the testing, this is the path for you, you have that figured out, recognize that that will not be available to you forever. You've got to do something right now to hone in on those skills and go and execute, because for life reasons or market conditions or a whole bunch of other reasons, that window will eventually close down on you, whether it's in 5 weeks, 5 months, 5 years. It's gonna close down on you. And so if you have that moment of clarity, you owe it to yourself, you owe it to your family, you owe it to your community, you owe it to the world to run as fast as you can with the resources that you have, with the resourcefulness that you have inside you, to take that idea from inside you and gift it to the world. Because otherwise you'll regret it for the rest of your life. So the question of the day today is, I'm curious, do you have that clarity? Do you know the path, like this is what you wanna do and get it accomplished? Or are you still wandering? Are you still trying to figure it out? Either one is fine because on your trajectory in life you'll go through both phases of uncertainty and certainty. So I'm just curious, where are you right now? Certainty? I know what I want to do exactly. Or uncertainty? I'm still trying to figure things out. Leave it down in the comments below. I'm really curious to find out. I also want to give a quick shout out to Stanley Tham. Stanley, 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. Thank you guys again for watching. I hope you have an amazing day. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of inspresso. I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going. And it was, you regularly say that failure propels you. Are there any instances in your past truly where you couldn't get over it and why?

Nope.

I mean, but by the way, by the way, that's the same answer for everybody in this room. That's what humans are good at. We all fail. We've all failed. Like, there are, my parents haven't been killed, my child, I mean, there's people that have their children die. Like, could you imagine? Like, shit, I deal, like listen, unfortunately or fortunately, depends on how one wants to look at it, I'm a pretty optimistic guy. I lost 3 of my 4 grandparents before I was really, before I knew them. 2 before I was born and 1 very early on. So, you know, it's easy for me to be happy. I have my shit in the right order. The health and well-being of my family. And there's nothing even remotely close to that. Not even remotely. People have gotten through much worse. This is why I'm trying to recall our grandparents and our great-grandparents. People were persecuted and killed. I just, we do not have real headaches. You know, I don't know why I have this highly emotional and then completely unemotional part of me, but I mix them together to create the balance, and that's what works for me. So of course there's nothing that I couldn't get up from. Like every other human ever besides somebody who now lives in some weird cave that we don't know about. You know what I mean?

I do.

We are strong as shit. We're just being sold that we're not because there's a lot of money, a lot of money in telling us that we're not pretty enough, thin enough, smart enough, good enough. Fuck that. I want to tell you you're the fucking best. Go do shit.

I was raised to think that there was— I couldn't do anything. Don't get your hopes up, okay? I remember one day, I remember one time I was asked in front of my mother, you know, what I might wanna be. I said, "Gee, I really like sports. Maybe I could be a sports announcer." She goes, "You're not special. You're not gonna be a sports announcer." You know, she wanted me to be a mailman, really. That was her dream. Yeah, she wanted me to take the civil service test and become a mailman, 'cause you know, you get the security and you always have a paycheck and a pension. So being a comedian didn't occur to me. Then I got out of college and my friend's wife kept saying, "You know, you're funny. Why aren't you doing stand-up comedy?" Because I was floundering. So I went to watch a night of comedy, and as I'm watching it, I'm going, Jesus, I thought, you know what, I think I could do this. And in the middle of the show, I walk up to Bud Friedman, who's the manager of the club, the owner of the club, and I say, "I'd like to go on." Yeah, like how insane is that? I wanna go on, I have nothing, okay? I've never been on a stage. I wanna go on. Thank God, he said, "Who are you?" No, of course not, you can't go on. You gotta audition. I go, okay. So then I wrote some material and I started trying to do it.

None of this could possibly have happened without Ariel Reichman and without his basic abhorrence of conventional wisdom. In many respects, he and you both share an extraordinary common concept, and that is neither one of you knew what you couldn't do. And by virtue of not knowing what you can't do, you just try and do it. And that's what entrepreneurship is all about.

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 Is there 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.