Jack Ma, from a poor English teacher to a global billionaire.

Thanks to nine years of self-studying English, Jack Ma earned $12 a month as a teacher and discovered 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. Throughout his childhood, his family was very poor and constantly struggled to make ends meet.

A string of failures from school days 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 or taller,” he recounted in Alibaba, a book by Liu Shiying and Martha Avery. However, Jack Ma also had hobbies like any other child. He enjoyed digging for crickets and playing cricket fighting, and could distinguish the size and types of crickets just by their chirps.

Jack MaHe wasn't a good student, and almost didn't even make it to secondary school. "I failed the important elementary school exam twice, failed the secondary school entrance exam three times, and failed the university entrance exam twice," he once said.

Jack Ma was very poor at math during his school years but had a talent for foreign languages. (Photo: Business Insider)

According to Entrepreneur magazine, he scored only 1/120 in math on his university entrance exam. This score, which is less than 1%, wasn't due to a lack of preparation. In fact, Jack Ma was very poor at math, even though Alibaba, the company he founded, is one of China's most valuable technology companies.

Upon graduating from university, he didn't know what to do, so he applied for jobs everywhere, even a police officer position. In his motivational talks, he never hesitated to mention being rejected by Harvard University 10 times, having job opportunities turned down by 30 companies, and being the only one out of 24 people rejected during an interview for a sales position at KFC because his appearance didn't meet the requirements.

“My cousin and I lined up for two hours to become waiters at a four-star hotel in the city. It was an incredibly hot day. My cousin's score was much lower than mine, but he was chosen while I was rejected,” he added.

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

Becoming a teacher through nine years of self-study of a foreign language.

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

For nine consecutive years, rain or snow, Jack Ma always woke up early and cycled 40 minutes each morning to the city's main hotel. By giving free tours to foreign tourists, Jack Ma honed his English speaking skills. His nickname, "Jack," comes from an American tourist he helped whose father and husband both shared that name.

“I am 100% made in China. I have never had a single day of training outside of China. When people talk to me, they say: Jack, how do you speak English so well? How is it that sometimes you speak so poorly?”He's like a Westerner, isn't he?

"I think it's because of those nine years. Western tourists helped broaden my horizons because everything they told me was very different from what I learned from school and my parents," the Alibaba boss said at the World Economic Forum 201.6.

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

Without money or connections, the only way to help...Jack MaProgress was achieved through education. Failing the university entrance exam twice didn't defeat him. Through diligent studying, Jack Ma finally passed the test a third time, becoming a student at Hangzhou Normal University. During his time there, he was elected student president of the university and later president of the city's student union. He earned a bachelor's degree in English in 1988.

When hired as a teacher of English and international business at Hangzhou Danzi University, although he only earned 100-120 yuan (12-15 USD) per month, Professor Jack Ma...He is very close to the students and loves his job.

In an interview with 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 people in China. His life became more complicated when he embarked on running the e-commerce giant Alibaba.

"The money I have today is a responsibility. It's the trust people have placed in me," he said.

English can change lives.

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 began to understand their success stories.

During a trip to the US as an interpreter, he contacted a Chinese friend living in Seattle. While visiting his friend's home, he encountered a computer for the first time. At that time, personal computers were virtually nonexistent in China.

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

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

From humble beginnings, Jack Ma became a billionaire with global influence. Photo: Alizila

The business idea came from Jack Ma discovering he had no results for Chinese beer when typing on an umbrella.online searchHe created China Pages, a website listing Chinese businesses and products, attracting a flood of emails from around the world seeking partnerships. To expand and secure additional funding, Jack Ma decided to partner with a government-owned company. However, due to a lack of experience and vision, Jack Ma failed.

Alibaba was founded in 1999 when Jack Ma gathered 17 friends to develop an e-commerce market idea. This venture led to a series of failures, including rejection of investment from Silicon Valley on the grounds that the idea was "unprofitable and unsustainable." The company generated no revenue for its first three years and faced bankruptcy within 18 months, businesses became skeptical about the online market, and internal company conflicts arose.

Despite these difficulties, the diminutive man made history. Constantly piecing together the fragments, he propelled Alibaba forward, challenging giants like eBay. In five years, Jack Ma "wiped out" eBay from China, and with the help of...Jerry Yang -The founder of Yahoo! expanded Alibaba into international markets.

Jack Ma is currently one of the world's richest people, the owner of one of the largest e-commerce companies on the planet. In 2009 and 2014, Jack Ma was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. He has also appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine.

“The lesson I learned from those 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're small, you have to focus intensely and rely on your brain, not your strength,” this philosophy of his has become a guiding principle for many young people.

According to VNE