FBC – 246 – Advice from a 39 billion dollar man

Advice from a 39 billion dollar man.

Today, I want to tell you about pieces of advice that Jack Ma (the founder of Alibaba who's worth 36 billion dollars) gave to a bunch of 25 year olds.

His words are very dear to me for the reasons that you will discover by listening to this episode.

I was watching a video earlier of Jack Ma, who is the founder of Alibaba. Some advice that he was giving to the audience for like twenty five year olds. And I was amazed at what he said, because that's exactly what I said in one of my podcasts, because that's exactly what I lived. And yeah, I just think just think it was pretty cool.

So basically he was he was telling the people in the audience that they do have time. OK. So if you're twenty five you still have time to get stuff done. You don't have to go and rush it or anything. You're just twenty five. Just work hard and learn. So one thing you have to do is learn.

This is how you actually get up the ladder. I mean at some point you will actually have enough knowledge to go and start your own stuff. But what he said that actually matches my story. And if you've been following me for a while, then you will recognize this. So basically, he said that when you work in so-called corporate, it's not a bad thing. You will learn some stuff in corporate.

He was saying everybody wants to work in a big company. Right. And it's good because you’re doing things that you will learn when you're working in this big company. So what he means is that once you get to these big companies, everything is already laid out in a process.

You are assigned to a task and this task only. And that's all you do. OK. So you are able to specialize and not be bothered by other stuff. Right. And then you will learn something that's very, very useful which is “processes”.

Me, I'm not a process oriented guy, by definition, I actually hated processes. I was like, oh, man, this is so rigid. But thankfully, I worked in really, really big companies and I learned processes and what these processes do. They help you set up a system, but a system is just a series of processes. Right.

And I am here today because I was able to work in these big, big companies, understand how processes are created, how they're laid out and how are they there passed down to your staff. So big corporates are very, very useful for this. I'm very grateful that I got to work in corporate.

You don't maybe don't realize it yet, but it will help you. You know, I don't like hearing people saying, oh, man, I do this. My job is completely pointless. It's useless knowledge. Yes. It might seem pointless. One day it will come in handy.

So that's good. So people want to work in big corporation. But here's the thing. In big corporations, you kind of end up being a cog in a big machine and you end up feeling this way because you are very specialized in a role and you very often don't have the visibility on the whole workflow, everything that's happening. Right.

Advice from a 39 billion dollar man

You don't know that your work is affecting Bob in accounting in Massachusetts, for example, and you are in the Beijing office. And what Jack Ma said is something I've told you. You learn a lot from the boss that you have at the time. And me, I told you about my boss, Joanne Warner.

She is one the people who made me who I am. I think she taught me how to care about my team and how to fight for my team. What mattered was my team, where they wanted to go in life, regardless if it was in this company or the next company. So how to care for my team and how to engage with the team as well.

You know, to do stuff to create a positive environment for people to work so that people are happy to come to work. And I could see the difference.

So yeah, now that I hear someone who's as successful as him, who made like 40 billion dollars or something. And someone who tells you, well, you should do this, you should do that. I can see my life in there. And it's actually pretty, pretty cool. So I'm very happy about this.

So, you know, if you have a chance to go if you're working in like a big corporation and stuff, I really think everybody should have a chance to work in that environment to see the difference and to help become more skilful and have this 360 degree view of everything that's happening. It's it will definitely, definitely help you.