This is a true rags-to-riches story of a man who redefines the path of success. The man who failed his college entrance exam twice and went through a series of rejection is now one of the richest men in Asia. Isn’t this unbelievable?
Yes, we are talking about Jack Ma, the Executive Chairman and founder of Alibaba Group, China’s leading Internet business entity. His e-commerce company, Alibaba, attracts more than 100 million shoppers a day. Ma is worth an estimated $30 billion which also makes him the richest man in the Republic of China.
Born to traditional musician-storyteller parents, Ma grew up at a time when Communism was at the peak in the country, and his family didn’t have much money when he was young. Because of the weak economic condition of the family, Ma struggled a lot even to attend school. You will be shocked to know that today’s genius had twice failed in his primary school examinations and three times in middle school.
But this was not the end of his failures. After completing the high school education, he applied for higher education but again failed to crack the entrance examinations. Although, he had successfully completed his graduation with a Bachelors degree in English. After graduation in 1988, he applied for 30 different jobs and got rejected by all of them. After much struggle, he finally got a job as a teacher at a local university earning a modest equivalent of ₹800 a month.
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I even went to KFC when it came to my city. Twenty-four people went for the job. Twenty-three were accepted. I was the only guy. -Ma told the Bloomberg in an interview.
Ma was good in English translation and got a chance to visit the US in 1995 as a translator and was introduced to the internet. After an extensive research, Ma realized that the Internet had something great to offer to the world.
In April 1995, he along his wife, started their first company with USD 20,000 that created websites for small companies. Within just three years, he managed to earn a profit of USD 800,000. This turned out to be a turning point in his life. Motivated from the initial success, he decided to expand the business in other sectors and thus Alibaba Group was born.
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Today, Alibaba is dealing with 100-million buyers every day and has created over 40 million jobs for people all around the world – directly, and indirectly. Not only this, Alibaba group now has diversified into nine major subsidiaries – including Alipay and Alibaba Cloud Computing.
This is all about the success story of a man who strongly believed that “Giving up is the biggest failure in life”. He is the living proof that no series of failures can keep someone from achieving their dreams. His classic rags-to-riches story is highly inspirational!
