Jack Ma, from poor English teacher to world billionaire

Thanks to nine years of self-studying English, Jack Ma earns $12 a month as a teacher and finds great opportunities.

Jack Ma, whose birth name is Ma Yun, was born on October 15, 1964, in Hangzhou, southeastern China. He has an older brother and a younger sister. During his childhood, his family was very poor and struggled to make ends meet.

A series of failures from school to graduation

According to Business Insider, Jack Ma was skinny as a child and often fought with his classmates. “I was never afraid of opponents who were bigger than me,” he recounted in Alibaba, a book by Liu Shiying and Martha Avery. However, Jack Ma also had hobbies like any other child. He loved digging for crickets and playing cricket fights, and could distinguish the size and type of crickets just by their chirping.

Jack MaHe was not a good student and almost failed to even make it to secondary school. “I failed the important primary school exam twice, the secondary school entrance exam three times, and failed the university entrance exam twice,” he once said.

Jack Ma was very bad at math when he was in school but had a talent for foreign languages. Photo: Business Insider

Entrepreneur reported that he scored only 1/120 in math on his college entrance exam. This 1% lower score was not due to lack of revision. In fact, Jack Ma is very bad at math, even though Alibaba, which he founded, is the most valuable technology company in China.

When he first graduated from college, he didn’t know what to do, so he applied for many jobs, even a position as a police officer. In his inspirational talks, he never hesitated to mention being rejected from Harvard University 10 times, being rejected from 30 companies for job opportunities, and being the only one out of 24 people who were rejected for a sales position at KFC because of his appearance.

“My cousin and I queued for two hours to become waiters at a four-star hotel in the city. It was a very hot day. My cousin’s score was much lower than mine, but he was selected and I was rejected,” he added.

Even later, when running the company, he experienced many failures, to the point of calling Alibaba "1,001 mistakes".”.

Becoming a teacher after nine years of self-study of foreign languages

After US President Nixon visited Hangzhou in 1972, Jack Ma's hometown became a tourist attraction. At the age of 12 or 13, he began to love English, but at that time there were no suitable books or places to study.

For nine years, rain or snow, Jack Ma woke up early and cycled 40 minutes to the city’s main hotel every morning. He gave free tours to foreign tourists, honing his English skills. His nickname “Jack” came from an American tourist he helped whose father and husband both took the name.

“I am 100% Chinese. I have never had a day of education outside of China. When people talk to me, they say: Jack, how can you speak English like that? Why do you sometimes talk like that?like western people?

I think it was those nine years. Western tourists opened my mind because everything they told me was very different from what I learned from school and my parents,” Alibaba boss said at the World Economic Forum 2016.

He experienced numerous failures in his youth. Photo: Vulcan Post

Without money or connections, the only way to helpJack MaGetting ahead is through education. Failing the university entrance exam twice did not defeat him. After studying hard, Jack Ma finally passed the third test and became a student at Hangzhou Normal University. During his time there, he was elected as the university's student president and later the city's student union president. He received his bachelor's degree in English in 1988.

When he was hired as an English and international trade teacher at Hangzhou Danzi University, although he only earned 100-120 yuan (12-15 USD) per month, teacher Ma Yunvery close to students and love his job.

Speaking to the Economics Club of New York in 2015, Jack Ma said he was happier being a poor teacher than facing the responsibilities of a business tycoon, one of the richest men in China. His life became more complicated when he started running the e-commerce group Alibaba.

“The money I have today is a responsibility. It is the trust people put in me,” he said.

English changes life

According to Eyerys, Jack Ma’s fluency in English helped him start his own translation company. Working with some of the first American and foreign companies in China, he became aware of their success stories.

During his time in the United States as an interpreter, he contacted a Chinese friend who was living in Seattle. While staying at his friend’s house, he encountered a computer for the first time. At that time, personal computers were almost non-existent in China.

“I was scared, because very few companies in China had computers. It was considered very high-tech and very expensive. My friend had to say: Jack, it’s not a bomb, just touch it wherever you want. I had never touched a keyboard before. That’s why I call myself the blind man riding the blind tiger,” he shared in an interview.

Fascinated by computers and the Internet, Jack Ma asked his friend to create a website for his translation company, which officially went online in 1995.

From a low starting point, Jack Ma became a billionaire with influence around the world. Photo: Alizila

The business idea came from Jack Ma discovering that there were no results for Chinese beer when he typed it in the search box.search onlineHe created China Pages, a website listing Chinese businesses and products, attracting a flood of emails from around the world looking for partnerships. To expand and gain more funding, Jack Ma decided to partner with a government company. However, due to lack of experience and vision, Jack Ma failed.

Alibaba was founded in 1999 when Jack Ma gathered 17 friends to develop an idea for an e-commerce marketplace. This venture led to another series of failures when Silicon Valley rejected his investment on the grounds that the idea was “unprofitable and unsustainable”. The company did not generate revenue for the first three years and faced bankruptcy within 18 months, businesses were skeptical about the online marketplace, internal company conflicts…

Despite these difficulties, the little man made history. Relentlessly picking up the pieces, he pushed Alibaba forward, challenging big businesses like eBay. In five years, Jack Ma “erased” eBay from China, and with the help ofJerry Yang -founder of Yahoo!, expanding Alibaba into international markets.

Jack Ma is now one of the richest people in the world, the boss of one of the largest e-commerce companies on the planet. In 2009 and 2014, Jack Ma was voted one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. He has also appeared on the front page of Forbes magazine.

“The lesson I learned from the dark days at Alibaba is that you have to create value, innovation and vision for your team. If you don’t give up, you still have a chance. Giving up is the biggest failure. When you are small, you have to focus your mind and rely on your brain, not your strength,” his philosophy has become a guiding principle for many young people.

According to VNE