When Alibaba founder and CEO Jack Ma was a young adult, he applied to over 30 jobs and got rejected by all of them. Today, the 53-year-old’s e-commerce company is valued at $519 billion, although Ma didn’t start achieving career success until his 30s.
“In life, it’s not how much we achieved, it’s how much we’ve gone through the tough days and mistakes,” Ma recently said to a group of young leaders invited to the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. “If you want to be successful, learn from the other people’s mistakes, don’t learn from the successful stories.”
As an alum of the Young Global Leaders network, Ma shed light on what the room of young adults should focus on within the next 30 years.
“When you are 20 to 30 years old, you should follow a good boss [and] join a good company to learn how to do things properly,” Ma said.
