Stories
Fundamentally this is a community that uses Stories to inspire other and show what can be accomplished if you break free of paradigms and put some effort into change things. In this section you will find examples of a couple of stories that I have found inspiring and useful. You can see more examples and some more incredible illustrations in my recently published book "Good Things Happen Every Day" which is available on Amazon.
So what if you get rejected
If you don’t know who Jack Ma is, you need to do some research. There are few people more extraordinary alive today. The founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma is best known for starting one of the world’s most valuable companies. But he should be known for having been rejected.
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By his own admission, he has been rejected 40 or 50 times at the very least. He got rejected in school: he did not get accepted into high school until the fourth try, and Harvard rejected him 10 times. I mean 10 times--think about going through the process 10 times and still not being accepted. He was rejected at KFC (out of 24 applicants he was the only one that was rejected), at the police (only candidate out of 4 to be rejected) and when applying for many jobs. I mean he even got rejected when trying to raise $5 million US dollars of capital in the early 2000s (now the company is worth about $200 Billion USD). Yet Jack Ma teaches us a key lesson about success--the value of perseverance.
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Jack Ma did not learn English in school or any other traditional way. He learned English because he spent 9 years giving tourists free tours of his hometown. Every morning he would show up at the fanciest hotel in Hangzhou and give tours until he eventually learned English. Over time, he would make pen pals and friends. In fact, it was one of those pen pals who gave him his English name, Jack, after her father and her husband.
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It is easy to romanticize about starting a business, but think about this--for the first three years, Ali Baba had no revenue. It’s not just that it didn’t make a profit--it didn’t have any revenue! It is said that once during those years, when Jack Ma was at a restaurant, the waiter arrived with a note that said “Hey Mr. Ma, I am your customer at Alibaba Group and I make a lot of money using your website. I know you don’t make money, so I paid the bill for you.”
Back then (and probably even now) people said Alibaba’s business model was crazy! But to really build Alibaba (an online retailer), you had to create trust first. In the beginning, banks didn’t even want to take their money; they said escrow accounts were illegal in China. You have to realize that this was an entrepreneur, proposing a business model that did not exist, that had no government backing, and existed in this new environment (the internet) that was truly mystifying to people in China back then.
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But if Jack had let himself be stymied by the challenge, we would not be talking about him today. One day after listening to a conference in Davos about leadership, he called his team and said, “we have to create a payment system and we have to do it right. If somebody has to go to prison, Jack will go to prison, but if you do it wrong and somebody steals that money, you will go to prison”. Needless to say, it worked, and today AliPay is used by more than 800M people in China.
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There’s an important lesson to learn from Jack. Whenever he pitched his idea and investors told him he was crazy, he would always reply:
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“Crazy is good, after all we are crazy, but we are not stupid.”
Today Alibaba handles 80% of all online transactions in China, lists nearly a billion products, and holds the record for highest sales in one day ($14.3 billion US dollars on Singles Day, the Chinese version of Valentine’s). So take it from Jack and his favorite movie character, Forest Gump. Never give up, people may think you are dumb, but if you know what you are doing, nothing can stop you.
Do what you love
At precisely 5 pm each workday, an inspector of roads for the Public Works Department of Chandigarh, India, would climb onto his bicycle. But he wouldn’t head home. He would head towards the Shivalik Hills, braving the mosquitos, along a road that started out in good condition and then turned bumpy until it disappeared completely. Any sensible person might ask: Who would go there? And why?
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Well, for 17 years, Nek Chand went there to do what he loved, to create sculptures out of scraps. He would go there to add one more rock, one more piece of broken glass. He had never been taught about art, sculpture or architecture; yet, with his passion and dedication, he created the “Rock Garden of Chandigarh,” a place so wonderful that 12 million people have visited it since it was revealed to the public.
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Etched with winding paths and dotted with waterfalls, the complex is full of sculptures, from depictions of traditional village life (dancers, musicians, snake charmers) to representations of gods and goddesses. The small complex grew from a humble hut at the edge of the river, to an intricate “kingdom” covering 13 acres. And then the government came to clear the forest.
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At that point, Nek Chand faced losing everything; the land belonged to the government and even his presence there was illegal. He thought that, at the very least, he would lose his job. Yet city officials were so enchanted by what they found, and so disarmed by the modesty and authenticity of its creator, that they decided to encourage him. They appointed him sub-divisional engineer and put 50 laborers at his disposal--and the project flourished! Eventually, it began drawing 5,000 visitors a day, second (in India) only to the Taj Mahal.
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With time, honors poured in; exhibitions of Nek Chand’s work were held in London and New York. Yet he hadn’t done it for the fame or the money--he did it because he loved how the stones, the trees and the water spoke to him, how they asked him to set them free. Many people in this world have built cities; but Nek Chand, a road inspector, created out of rubbish a magic world.
