Jack Ma, the mavrick entrepreneur who founded the Chinese eCommerce company Alibaba has a great rags to riches story to tell.
Alibaba has been labelled to be more successful than Walmart and other off line retail giants. Jack Ma is the richest Chinese by networth – USD 40.5 billion as per 2017 data.
Below are 15 Quotes from Jack Ma
1) “The opportunities that everyone cannot see are the real opportunities.”
2) “Opportunity lies in the place where the complaints are.”
3) “When you are small, you have to be very focused and rely on your brain, not your strength.”
4) “Today is cruel. Tomorrow is crueller. And the day after tomorrow is beautiful.”
5) “Never ever compete on prices, instead compete on services and innovation.”
6) “The very important thing you should have is patience.”
7) There’s an examination for young people to go to university. I failed it three times. I failed a lot. So I applied to 30 different jobs and got rejected. I went for a job with the police; they said, ‘You’re no good.’ I even went to KFC when it came to my city. Twenty-four people went for the job. Twenty-three were accepted.
8) “Intelligent people need a fool to lead them. When the team’s all a bunch of scientists, it is best to have a peasant lead the way. His way of thinking is different. It’s easier to win if you have people seeing things from different perspectives.”
9) “Hire the person best suited to the job, not the most talented. This can be a very painful lesson. There’s no point putting in a Boeing jet engine when you need to run a tractor.”
10) “Spending money is much more difficult than making money.”
11) “I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name.”
12) “I got my story, my dream, from America. The hero I had is Forrest Gump… I like that guy. I’ve been watching that movie about 10 times. Every time I get frustrated, I watch the movie. I watched the movie before I came here again to New York. I watched the movie again telling me that no matter whatever changed, you are you.”
13) Chinese people, young people, they don’t go shopping a lot in department stores. All department store guys hate me. They say business is bad because of Jack.
14) I like to play cards. I’m not very good, because I don’t want to calculate, I just play by instinct. But I’ve learned a lot of business philosophy by playing poker.
15) You American people worry too much about the China economy. Every time you think China is a problem, we get better, but when you have a high expectation for China, China is always a problem.
