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Jack Ma’s Ultimate Advice for Students & Young People – HOW TO SUCCEED IN LIFE

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Before he built a $50 billion empire, Jack Ma got rejected by KFC.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2018, Alibaba’s executive chairman didn’t talk about market caps or IPO valuations. He talked about failure — his own, in exhausting detail — and laid out a decade-by-decade roadmap for young people trying to figure out what to do with their lives. Coming from a man who failed China’s college entrance exam multiple times and got turned down for more than 30 jobs before founding Alibaba in 1999, the advice carries weight most commencement speeches don’t.

• Ma failed the gaokao repeatedly before finally getting into Hangzhou Teacher’s Institute, and after graduating in 1988 he was rejected from over 30 jobs — including the police force.
• When KFC opened its first Hangzhou location, 24 people applied and 23 got hired; Ma was the only one turned down.
• His public advice broke life into decade-by-decade phases: learn in your 20s under a good boss, decide on entrepreneurship in your 30s, stick to your strengths in your 40s, and mentor the next generation in your 50s.

The Résumé of Rejection

Ma’s biography reads like a catalogue of no’s before it becomes a story of Alibaba. He needed multiple attempts just to clear the gaokao, China’s brutal national college entrance exam, before he finally landed a spot at Hangzhou Teacher’s Institute. Graduation in 1988 didn’t open doors — it slammed more than 30 of them, one after another, as employer after employer passed him over.

The detail Ma tells most often is the KFC story. When the fast-food chain opened its first restaurant in Hangzhou, 24 locals applied for jobs there. Twenty-three were hired. Ma was the lone reject. He was turned down by the police as well. It’s the kind of resume most people would bury; Ma has spent years turning it into the centerpiece of his pitch to students.

The Decade-by-Decade Blueprint

Ma’s framework for young people, delivered in speeches to university students and reiterated at Davos, breaks a career into distinct phases rather than one continuous climb. Before 20, he says, the only job is to be a good student and rack up experience. From 20 to 30, join a small company instead of chasing a big name — the priority is finding a good boss worth learning from, not a prestigious logo for your resume.

From 30 to 40, Ma says it’s time to get honest about whether you actually want to build something of your own, and to commit if the answer is yes. In your 40s, stop chasing unfamiliar opportunities and focus only on what you’re genuinely good at. In your 50s, the job shifts to investing in and trusting younger people to take over. Past 60, he says, spend the time with your grandchildren.

EQ Over IQ

Ma’s central argument to students is that the business world rewards resilience and emotional intelligence far more than raw intellect. He tells young people to normalize failure rather than fear it, and to study why companies collapse instead of obsessing over why they succeed — the lessons in the wreckage, he argues, are more instructive.

Twenty-four people applied for jobs at Hangzhou’s first KFC. Twenty-three got hired. Jack Ma didn’t.

That framing runs through his broader philosophy, which he’s discussed at length in university halls and business forums alike — resilience and EQ, not test scores, are what get people through the stretch where everything is going wrong. For more on how public figures unpack their own turning points and setbacks, InfoSearched’s Ideas coverage tracks similar breakdowns of advice from major names, while the World News section covers the Davos circuit where Ma delivered these remarks.

Ma was in his mid-50s when he gave this advice at Davos — right in the window he says should be spent training the next generation rather than chasing new markets himself. Alibaba’s succession plan, which he announced would eventually hand the chairmanship to CEO Daniel Zhang, is Ma putting his own fifties rule into practice.