‘No’ gives chance for fresh start

As I write this, Jack Ma, China’s richest man, will have come and gone. If you don’t know who Jack Ma is, then you’re an alien and have always lived in Mars.

I’ll be accommodating though, and tell you that he is the genius behind Alibaba, an e-commerce behemoth.

When I first read his story, I was so inspired, I almost wept — his parents were poor, and like many other children he grew up with, he did not have a real chance of extricating himself from the poverty that surrounded him.

And yet he did, through sheer will and refusing to back down no matter how many times the door was shut in his face. Mr Ma must be the only man alive to have been told “No” most times. 

It is written that his job applications were rejected a record 30 times — he could not even get a job with KFC, the fast food chain, when it launched in China.

He once said, during an interview, that out of the 24 people that turned up hoping to get hired by the food chain, he was the only one turned away.

Even the police force back in China did not want him. That’s not all; Harvard University rejected his application to study there 10 times.

CHANCE FOR INTROSPECTION

Reading all that, I could not help but marvel at this man’s resilience, which is nothing short of amazing. The fact is that we human beings take rejection badly.

We have such fragile egos, the word “No” just one “No”, is enough to crush some of us; we recoil from it as if it is a resounding slap, and we retreat to a dark corner to lick our wound and throw ourselves a year-long pity party.

By the time we sufficiently recover to try again, scores of opportunities will have passed us by while we’re busy mourning and feeling sorry for ourselves.

We sting easily, and yet it is not possible to get everything we want; that’s just the way life is. But since we refuse to acknowledge this, most of us read malice in every “No” we encounter and dismiss the ones that say it to us as “haters”.

I think it takes a really exceptional person to keep knocking at a door that wouldn’t open, and an even more exceptional one that does not give in to the bitterness that tends to accompany rejection. Had I been Mr Ma, I would have long faded to oblivion, given up after the third “No”.

What his story taught me is that being told “No” is a chance for introspection, a chance to search ourselves and pinpoint areas in our lives that we can improve on.

If a prospective employer, for instance, rejects your application, rather than take it as a sign of failure, ask yourself why you were told “No”. Could be how you expressed yourself, or perhaps your CV wasn’t impressive enough. Or perhaps…

This businessman’s story also taught me that being told “No” is not the end of the world, rather, a chance to start afresh. On a clean slate. A chance to re-invent myself. To do things differently, to try different things, to take different steps that will take me closer to my goal, my dream.

It also taught me, and I bet that you have heard this before, that your past does not necessarily have to determine your future. You also don’t have to settle for what life hands you.