Jack Ma was an avid reader of Mark Twain and used every opportunity to get better at English. Aged 12, he had an idea of how he could improve his English skills: Every morning at five o’clock he rode his bicycle for 40 minutes to an international hotel in his hometown and waited there for tourists. When he approached them, he proposed a deal. He would show them around the city as a travel guide and they would teach him English in return. Even in rain and snow, he waited outside the hotel day after day, morning after morning, year after year. One day he met an Australian family and soon became friends with them. They ended up inviting him to Australia, where he was impressed by the high standard of living that people enjoyed compared with China.

However, Jack Ma’s overall marks were so bad during highschool that universities turned him down, THREE times. Still, he persevered and eventually managed to get into Teachers’ College.

He even failed to be employed as a waiter by KFC.

In 1995, he founded Chinese Yellow Pages.

In an interview, an extremely skeptical BBC World reporter, evidently perturbed over the recent dot-com bubble burst, goes after Ma, asking him how he plans to ask actually make money through the internet.