What Do People Do To Get Out Of The Failure Zone?

This kind of question always reminds me of a young man named Jack.

Jack wasn’t what anyone would consider the brightest bulb in the chandelier.

He got used to the bitter taste of not being good enough from a very young age.

He failed his primary school exams twice.

When he moved to Middle School, he failed three more times.

Applying to college was no different.

He applied 10 times to Harvard. Failed every single time.

He failed two more times before finally being accepted at Hangzhou Teachers University.

After graduating, he tried to get a job.

He applied to be a police officer.

“No, you’re no good.”

He was the only one out of 5 applicants to get rejected.

And that’s not even the worst part.

When KFC came to his country, he applied to get a job there.

Twenty-three people were accepted out of the 24 that applied.

Jack wasn’t.

Eventually, he landed a job as an English teacher at Hangzhou Dianzi University, with a salary of 12$ a month.

In 1995, Jack had just started a translation business when he got a call to go to Seattle as an interpreter for a trade delegation. It was then that he was first introduced to the Internet.

Computers were pretty rare in China at the time. Jack had never even touched a keyboard before that.

He did a couple of searches and found out that there was no data about China.

It was then that he decided to do something with this Internet. He went back home and borrowed 2.000$ to set up a tech company.

Some ups and downs there.

He was offered a joint venture with China Telecom but ended up resigning from his position due to a complete lack of control over the business.

In 1999, he gathered 18 people in his apartment and spoke to them for two hours about this vision he had about an e-commerce company.

Everyone put their money on the table. That got him $60,000 to start again.

He called the company Alibaba.

He went on to make a bunch of other mistakes which almost killed Alibaba back in the early 2000s.

Each of those mistakes taught him something. Just like all his many, many failures before that.

Jack Ma is now one of the richest men in China. Alibaba is worth over $95B.

So that’s what entrepreneurs do when they fail.

They learn, get back up and go at it again.

And again.

And again.

For as long as it takes.

I’ll wrap this up with a few words from Jack: “If you don’t give up, you still have a chance. Giving up is the greatest failure.”

Thanks for reading.