A Few Tips From A Billionaire. (21)
I just came across this awesome article from the ex-CEO of Alibaba, Jack Ma. He breaks things down in very absorbable points.
http://vulcanpost.com/5407/billionai...-and-business/
Jack Ma: The mistake I regretted the most
In 2001, I made a mistake. I told 18 of my fellow comrades whom embarked on the entrepreneurship journey with me that the highest positions they could go was a managerial role. To fill all our Vice President and Senior Executive positions, we would have to hire from external parties.
Years later, those I hired were gone, but those whom I doubted their abilities became Vice Presidents or Directors.
I believe in two principles: Your attitude is more important than your capabilities. Similarly, your decision is more important than your capabilities!
Jack Ma: You cannot unify everyone’s thoughts, but you can unify everyone through a common goal.
- Don’t even trust that you are able to unify what everyone is thinking; it is impossible.
- 30% of all people will never believe you. Do not allow your colleagues and employees to work for you. Instead, let them work for a common goal.
- It is a lot easier to unite the company under a common goal rather than uniting the company around a particular person.
Jack Ma: What does a leader have that an employee doesn’t?
A leader should never compare his technical skills with his employee’s. Your employee should have superior technical skills than you. If he doesn’t, it means you have hired the wrong person.
What, then, makes the leader stands out?
- A leader should be a visionary and have more foresight than an employee.
- A leader should have higher grit and tenacity, and be able to endure what the employees can’t.
- A leader should have higher endurance and ability to accept and embrace failure.
- The quality of a good leader therefore is his vision, tenacity, and his capability.
Jack Ma: Don’t be involved in politics
One should always understand that money and political power can never go hand in hand. Once you are in politics, don’t ever think about money anymore. Once you are running a business, don’t ever think of being involved in politics.
When money meets political power, it is similar to a match meeting an explosive- waiting to go off.
Jack Ma: The 4 main questions the young generation must ponder on
What is failure: Giving up is the greatest failure.
What is resilience: Once you have been through hardships, grievances and disappointments, only then will you understand what is resilience.
What your duties are: To be more diligent, hardworking, and ambitious than others.
Only fools use their mouth to speak. A smart man uses his brain, and a wise man uses his heart.
jack ma serious
Jack Ma: We are born to live and experience life.
I always tell myself that we are born here not to work, but to enjoy life. We are here to make things better for one another, and not to work. If you are spending your whole life working, you will certainly regret it.
No matter how successful you are in your career, you must always remember that we are here to live. If you keep yourself busy working, you will surely regret it.
Jack Ma on competing and competition
- Those that compete aggressively with one another are the foolish ones.
- If you view everyone as your enemies, everyone around you will be your enemies.
- When you are competing with one another, don’t bring hatred along. Hatred will take you down.
- Competition is similar to playing a board of chess. If you lose, we can always have another round. Both players should never fight.
- A real businessman or entrepreneur has no enemies. Once he understand this, the sky’s the limit.
Jack Ma: Don’t make complaining and whining a habit
If you complain or whine once in a while, it is not a big deal.
However, if it becomes habitual, it will be similar to drinking: the more you drink, the stronger the thirst. On the path to success, you will notice that the successful ones are not whiners, nor do they complain often.
The world will not remember what you say, but it will certainly not forget what you have done.
Jack Ma’s advice to entrepreneurs
- The opportunities that everyone cannot see are the real opportunities.
- Always let your employees come to work with a smile.
- Customers should be number 1, Employees number 2, and then only your Shareholders come at number 3.
- Adopt and change before any major trends or changes.
- Forget the money; Forget about earning money.
- Rather than having small smart tricks to get by, focus on holding on and persevering.
- Your attitude determines your altitude.
Jack Ma on entrepreneurship
- A great opportunity is often hard to be explained clearly; things that can be explained clearly are often not the best opportunities.
- You should find someone who has complementary skills to start a company with. You shouldn’t necessarily look for someone successful. Find the right people, not the best people.
- The most unreliable thing in this world is human relationships.
- “Free” is the most expensive word.
- Today is cruel, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be beautiful.
Jack Ma: The 4 don’ts of entrepreneurship
- The scariest things about starting up is the inability to see, to be snobbish, to be unable to understand what is going on, as well as to be unable to keep up with pace.
- If you do not know where your competitor is, or overconfident and snobbish about your competitor, or are unable to comprehend how your competitor became a real threat, you will surely fall behind him. Don’t be the “they” in this idiom: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
- Even if your competitor is still small in size or weak, you should take him seriously and treat him as a giant. Likewise, even if your competitor is massive in size, you shouldn’t regard yourself as a weakling.
Jack Ma on starting your own company
What starting your company means: you will lose your stable income, your right to apply for a leave of absence, and your right to get a bonus.
However, it also means your income will no longer be limited, you will use your time more effectively, and you will no longer need to beg for favours from people anymore.
If you have a different mindset, you will have a different outcome: if you make different choices from your peers, your life will then be different from your peers.
Jack Ma on opportunities
If there are over 90% of the crowd saying “Yes” to approving a proposal, I will surely dispose the proposal into the bin. The reason is simple: if there are so many people who thinks that the proposal is good, surely there will be many people who would have been working on it, and the opportunity no longer belongs to us.
Had a proper read this morning, really sick tips thanks for the share man love these knowledge bombs
Originally Posted by Mr Green
Along these lines both of Felix Dennis's books "How To Get Rich" and "The Narrow Road" are excellent, and entertaining as hell, especially his advice about "acting big and thinking small," based on his personal experience of having 14 mistresses on the payroll all at once. Ah, Felix, you will be missed....
Agree this is fascinating:
If there are over 90% of the crowd saying “Yes” to approving a proposal, I will surely dispose the proposal into the bin. The reason is simple: if there are so many people who thinks that the proposal is good, surely there will be many people who would have been working on it, and the opportunity no longer belongs to us.
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...TART-A-STARTUP!
Interesting he says the same kind of thing here: http://paulgraham.com/founders.html
Intelligence does matter a lot of course. It seems like the type that matters most is imagination. It's not so important to be able to solve predefined problems quickly as to be able to come up with surprising new ideas. In the startup world, most good ideas seem bad initially. If they were obviously good, someone would already be doing them. So you need the kind of intelligence that produces ideas with just the right level of craziness.
Airbnb is that kind of idea. In fact, when we funded Airbnb, we thought it was too crazy. We couldn't believe large numbers of people would want to stay in other people's places. We funded them because we liked the founders so much. As soon as we heard they'd been supporting themselves by selling Obama and McCain branded breakfast cereal, they were in. And it turned out the idea was on the right side of crazy after all.
@solaris - interesting resonance there with the traditional affiliate marketer experience of
"fuck it, this campaign idea won't work, but I'll just slap it up anyway. Mash Photoshop together - upload - fudge something resembling a landing page - I'm off to the pub"
...
"HOLY CRAP HOW MUCH REVENUE?"
It's the ones that you don't think will work that often blow everything else out of the water.
(I've had a similar experience artistically recently - it really is universal. There's at least one very famous series of novels which started, according to legend, because their author was challenged to write the biggest pile of crap he could and see if he could get it published...)
Jack Ma is a truly impressive individual.
If you just saw him for the first time, you would just see a tiny, skinny, and (by most standards) quite unattractive looking man. He does not look like a person that most individual would associate with business success ... or even success in life.
And yet, his sheer willpower, perseverance, and work ethic are legendary. And the results have been staggering.
Alibaba's IPO several weeks ago was not only large ...
it was THE largest IPO ever, in the entire history of human capitalism.
cmdeal I am not saying you wrong, but you forgot to mention his luck, which is big factor here..
in any extreme company success luck is a big factor..
Originally Posted by delash
This follow up article is a great read...
Jack Ma says if you're poor at 35 you deserve it.
Jack Ma: People lose out in life because of these 4 reasons:
- Being myopic to opportunity
- Looking down on opportunities
- Lacking understanding
- Failing to act quickly enough
- You are poor, because you have no ambition.
Ambition is living a life of great ideals; a magnificent goal in life that must be realized.
You are poor because you do not have the desire to become successful.
You are poor because you lack foresight.
You are poor because you cannot overcome your cowardice.
You are poor because you lack the courage and determination.
With ambition you can overcome all inferiority and maximise your potential!
With ambition you can persevere, continuously learn new things and strive for perfection.
With ambition you can defy all odds, and create miracles when others daren’t.
No matter how poor your family is, do not doubt your own abilities and lose sight of your ambition.
When your family deems you worthless, no one will pity you.
When your parents do not have money to pay the medical bills, no one will pity you.
When you are beaten by your competitors, no one will pity you.
When your loved ones abandon you, no one will pity you.
When you have not accomplished anything by the time you are 35, no one will pity you.
Go big, or go home. Otherwise, you’re wasting your youth.
Love these. Also liked this one by Business Insider: "How Jack Ma Went From Being A Poor School Teacher To Turning Alibaba Into A $160 Billion Behemoth" - http://businessinsider.com/the-story...alibaba-2014-9
Originally Posted by cmdeal
"Get Lucky" - http://avc.com/2014/08/get-lucky
"Market timing is a skill, not luck" - http://altgate.com/blog/2008/12/mark...-not-luck.html
Originally Posted by delash
I'd be willing to bet if you polled the forum's most successful people and those that are not, that there's really only one thing that separates the wheat from the chaff.
Originally Posted by timtetra
You can be very successfull without any luck, just focus enough time on a specific niche..
You can make millions in the internet without masive luck, for sure.
But for extreme success, like google, facebook and alibaba - luck played big role...
Its very hard to create number 1 company in a category, you can tons of money, extremly talented people and still the odds are against you..
Originally Posted by delash
There is no period in the world we live in where someone somewhere is not maximizing the use of his timing on earth and creating massive wealth. You can say that JD Rockefeller was lucky because he was born in the period of the industrial revolution, you can say Thomas Edison was lucky the light bulb hadn't been invented yet, you could say that Andrew Carnegie was lucky that steel wasn't already a huge thing before he was around, you could say that Henry Ford was lucky that cars didn't exist yet...
You can say that Microsoft is lucky because GUI operating systems weren't brought to the masses yet, you can say that Apple was lucky that no one else's music player caught on before the ipod, that they were lucky they created a smartphone like the iPhone that caught on so immensely, that they created a tablet that would create an entire industry. You could say that Google was lucky that altavista and askjeeves etc sucked so much that their search engine based on outbound/inbound links worked so well...
But my guess is that the more success stories of business history you study, the more you'll see that it had very little to do with "luck" and more with seeing a drastic need the world needed but wasn't being fulfilled yet.
Just like with AM, you will have people complaining about how lucky the "wild wild west" days of mobile were, and back in the easy days of mobile you would have people complaining about how lucky the people who were slinging Acai rebills had it, and those people can think about the great days of unregulated an 1 cent click FB days, then early adwords days, then straight traffic arbitrage days in the early 2000's, etc etc.
In every period, there are people who are going to decide to make their own "luck", and then proceed to fail massively on the way to massive success -- and then there will be everyone else.
Since Richard Branson's in Tim's infographic above, it's worth mentioning a minor fact about Mr Branson:
He has been involved at a senior level in over 700 failing companies, according to his biography from a few years ago.
It's probably more than 1,000 now.
You can increase your success rate, but you'll find it very hard to get it to 100% in anything particularly challenging. However you can effectively increase it massively by Launching More Shit.
Or to paraphrase Thomas Edison, "I have not failed to create an electric lightbulb. I have simply found 1,000 ways that it won't work."
He patented the first commercially practical electric bulb some months after saying that.
Originally Posted by timtetra
Now lets say you have the best work ethics and tons of resources,
Still your chances to create huge successful company like google/micorsoft are small, so small so if you will be able to crearte one during our short time on this palnet I consider you lucky.
Still you think you can? I will be the first one to take my hat off if can create 350 Billion dollars company before you die.
Originally Posted by timtetra
Its depend on you and not who you born or in which family you born, its totally in your hands.
Originally Posted by timtetra
Why? because after choosing the right problem it was mainly depend on him whether or not he is going to solve it
While creating extreme companies you depend so much on external forces that you out of your control..
Please don't compare earning millions from 1 fb clicks to create a 350 billion dollars company, just don't.
Damn those are some GOOD life points. I really like the breakdown of it all
@delash - agreed, there are definitely easier and harder tasks. Even given the best philosophy, outlook, and approach in the world, creating an Alibaba or Facebook requires good fortune too.
Originally Posted by caurmen
It's the EXACT same thing as launching 10 campaigns and giving up on AM vs launching 100 campaigns and you'll usually get atleast 1 working 1 in that 100.
I love failing.
Awesome post. Feeling motivated daily
{quote]I love failing.[/quote]
Me too.
MOAR DATAZ!
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