Jack Ma Points Out the Essential Mindset Shift You Need to Become Rich

You have to learn to recognize opportunities.

Becoming rich is something that fascinates more and more people. Every day I read more and more stories on Medium about how to get rich. On sites like Reddit or Quora, questions about the best way to become rich are recurrent.

Every person who asks these types of questions seems to be hoping for a miracle recipe to get what everyone dreams of wealth.

If a miracle recipe existed, it would be a long time ago that everyone would know it. So you have to stop believing in such a recipe, which is only a utopia. On the other hand, there are common traits that emerge when you look closely at the careers of successful entrepreneurs today.

Rather than trying to follow exactly the same path as others who have been successful, you need to focus on the general mindset that allowed them to succeed, then building your own path to wealth.

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Do You Know Jack Ma?

I guess you all know Jack Ma. If you don’t know him yet, let me introduce him to you quickly.

Jack Ma was born in China in 1964 into a humble family. At that time, communist China gave people little hope of individual success. The collective always took precedence over the individual.

So Jack Ma was leaving with a major handicap if you compare his starting position with those of successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who were born in a country that values the role of entrepreneurs like nowhere else.

Despite his initial condition, Jack Ma had dreams. He decided to go on to college to earn a bachelor’s degree in English.

Subsequently, Jack Ma suffered multiple rejections. He was even turned down when he applied to work as a waiter in one of the first Chinese KFC.

Many would have chosen to give up their dreams. But Jack Ma was different from the majority.

Jack Ma is a persistent and resilient person who didn’t accept his dreams to be shattered by society. He continued his efforts, and finally had an epiphany in 1995 when he accompanied a Chinese delegation to the United States for visiting Silicon Valley and for seeing how startups work.

During this trip, Jack Ma was a mere translator, but he was amazed at the potential of the Internet. He immediately thought he had to seize the opportunity.

Upon his return, he founded China Pages, one of the first websites in China. Then, in 1999, Jack Ma founded Alibaba, which over time would become China’s top merchant site. In 2020, Alibaba is with Amazon one of the two giants of online sales.

Today, Jack Ma is the richest man in China with a personal fortune exceeding 40 billion dollars.

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It’s All About Your Mindset

So when it comes to talking about the best way to get rich, Jack Ma knows a lot about it.

In an interview one day, he made the following comparison:

“If you put Bananas and Money in front of Monkeys, monkeys will choose Bananas because monkeys do not know that money can buy a lot of Bananas.”
— Jack Ma

Listening to Jack Ma, people who want to get rich are acting the wrong way. They simply act like that because they don’t really understand the mindset needed for getting rich.

So, like monkeys ignorant of the power of money who will choose bananas directly, most people will prefer a job to the opportunity to start their own business.

Jack Ma goes on to say:

“In reality, if you offer job and business to people, they would choose job because most people do not know that business can bring more money than wages.”
— Jack Ma

Clearly, the majority of people will favor a short-term vision rather than the long-term vision that could allow them to make a fortune. A majority of people will never get rich because of this mindset problem.

Your entire schooling has been aimed at teaching you to be perfect wage earners, but you will never have been taught to recognize the opportunities that could allow you to become rich.

By choosing to stay on the path set out by society, you will succeed in earning money, but only in exchange for your working time.

So you will never be able to become rich, as Warren Buffett explains so well:

“If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.”
— Warren Buffett

You’ll have to work for the rest of your life to get money.

The big change in mindset that you have to make is this: you have to understand that profit is better than a wage.

Jack Ma explains why:

“Profit is better than wages, for wages can make you a living but profits can bring you a fortune.”
— Jack Ma

A wage will allow you to live from day to day, but you will never be able to become rich and get the fortune you aspire to.

Conversely, this wealth is accessible to those who know how to recognize opportunities before they are seized by others. If you really want to become rich, you must therefore learn to see opportunities where others see problems.

All other people’s problems are opportunities that you can exploit to bring value to others, and why not become rich.

Changing your mindset from a mere consumer who is satisfied with a paid job to a producer who seizes opportunities is the path you need to follow if you want to become rich one day.

You can do it, provided you become a wise man. For the definition of a wise man, I invite you to stick to the Confucius definition:

“When a wise man points at the moon, an idiot looks at his finger”
— Confucius

So look at the moon, then try to get the moon.

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