Nobody Is Coming – Do It Alone (No Excuses) | Jack Ma Motivation

Hello everyone. Today, I want to tell you something that most people do not know about me. When I was young, I failed. Not once, not twice, many times. I applied to 30 different jobs after university. Every single one said no. I applied to Harvard 10 times. 10 times, they said no. When KFC came to my city, 24 people applied. 23 got the job. I was the one they did not choose. I remember standing outside that KFC, watching the other people walking for their first day of work and thinking that even a fast food restaurant did not want me. That feeling is very difficult to describe. It is not just sadness. It is the kind of quiet, heavy feeling that makes you start to believe that maybe the world is trying to tell you something. Maybe you are just not someone things work out for. For a long time after that, I waited. I waited for someone to see me differently. I waited for someone to give me a chance. I waited for the right opportunity, the right timing, and the right person to believe in me. And while I waited, nothing changed. Because nothing was going to change. Not until I understood something very simple and very hard at the same time. Nobody was coming. No one was going to wake me up and hand me a different life. No one was going to look at me and say, Jack, we were wrong about you. Here is your opportunity. That moment was never going to arrive. And the day I truly understood that, something changed inside me. Not because it was good news, but because it was honest news. And honest news, even when it hurts, gives you something to work with. I was sitting at a table with a piece of paper and I wrote down one question. If I start tomorrow with exactly what I have right now, what is the smallest possible thing I can actually do? Not the plan. Not the vision. Not what it would look like in five years. Just tomorrow. Just one thing. And I wrote down an answer. It was small. It felt almost embarrassingly small compared to everything I wanted to build. But it was real. It was something I could actually do with what I had. And the next morning, I did it. Not perfectly. Not confidently. But I did it. And that one small action was more important than every big idea I had been carrying around for years. Because it was the first real thing. And real things, no matter how small, have a completely different weight than ideas. Ideas float. Real things are solid. You can build on them. The moment you do the first real thing, even a very small one, you stop being a person who is thinking about starting and become a person who has already started. That change is enormous even when it looks small from the outside. Now I want to talk to you about what I learned. Not the short version. The real version. Because I have said take responsibility many times in many speeches. And I have watched people nod their heads and then go home and do exactly what they were doing before. Hearing something and living it differently are two completely different things. So let me try to explain it honestly in a way that might actually change something for you today. When I say nobody is coming, I do not mean you will never receive help. I received help. I found good people along the way. I had team members who believed in the vision. I had moments of luck and good timing. But here is what I understood clearly. None of those things could replace the central decision. The decision to begin. The decision to continue. The decision to take what I had and build with it, even when what I had was very small. That decision belonged only to me. No one else could make it for me. And until I made it, all the help in the world would not have moved my life forward. Because help can open a door. But you are the one who has to walk through it. Responsibility is not about being alone. I want to be clear about this. You can have people who love you. People who support you. People who want good things for you. And you should treasure those people deeply. But even with all of that support, you are still the only person who can do the specific work of becoming who you need to become. Nobody can study for you. Nobody can practice for you. Nobody can build your discipline for you. Nobody can decide to keep going on the hard days for you. Those things have to come from inside. And when they do not come from inside, every resource on the outside stays mostly unused. This is something I saw many times when building Alibaba. We had people with great talent who were waiting for the perfect moment to fully commit. Waiting until the business was more stable. Waiting until the direction was clearer. Waiting until they felt more confident. And while they waited, the people next to them who were less talented but more committed moved forward. Not because commitment is magic. But commitment is the thing that turns what you have inside you into something real in the world. Without it, everything you are capable of just sits there, unused, like a book that was never opened. Let me say something that I think about often. Because it captures this idea in a way that is very difficult to argue with. You cannot hire someone to do your push-ups for you. Think about that carefully. If you want a strong body, you have to do the exercise yourself. No amount of money can change that. No friend, no connection, no relationship can change that. You have to show up and you have to do the work. And the strength that comes from it belongs only to you. Because you were the one who built it. Life works exactly the same way. There are certain things that cannot be given to another person and cannot be taken from them either. Your daily choices, your habits, your effort. When no one is watching, nobody can learn a new skill for you. Nobody can build your confidence for you. Nobody can fight your fear for you. These things must be done by you, inside you, through repeated action over time. And this is not bad news. This is actually one of the most important truths I know. Because it means that everything you build through your own effort is truly yours. Nobody gave it to you. Nobody can take it away. You earned it. And that kind of deep knowing that you built something with your own hands, through your own effort, is something no failure and no rejection can ever remove from you. Now I want to talk about excuses. Because this is where most conversations about success go wrong. And I want to be more honest about this than most people are. People who give advice usually talk about excuses as if they are a sign of weakness or laziness. As if the person making excuses simply does not want it badly enough. And sometimes that is true. But most of the time excuses are something different. They are a sign of fear. Specifically, the fear that you might try with everything you have and still not be enough. That is a very different thing from not wanting to try. Think about that fear for a moment. It is not a small fear. It is actually one of the heaviest fears a person can carry. Because as long as you have an excuse, you also have a kind of protection. If you never fully try, you never have to find out what happens when you do. And that not knowing feels safer than the alternative. I understand this fear because I felt it. When I was thinking about starting Alibaba, I had many real reasons not to. I had no money. I had no technical background. Nobody in China was building what I wanted to build. The internet was new and most people did not trust it for business. Every excuse was completely real. Every reason to wait was a genuine reason. But I also began to understand that the excuses were doing something else at the same time. They were keeping me from ever finding out what I was actually capable of. And that not finding out felt like a much bigger loss than any failure could ever be. Let me give you an example that might be closer to your own life. Imagine someone who wants to improve their English. They want to speak more confidently. They want to be able to have real conversations. But every day, there is a reason to wait. I am too busy right now. I will start properly when work is less stressful. I do not have the right materials yet. My pronunciation is too bad to practice with people. I need to study grammar more before I try to speak. Every single one of those reasons might be completely true. And yet, every single one of them is also keeping that person from the only thing that would actually improve their English. Using it. The moment they stop using those reasons to wait and start treating them as small problems to solve, everything changes. Too busy? Find 10 minutes. Bad pronunciation? Practice alone first. Not enough materials? Use what is available right now. The excuses were real, but they were also getting in the way. And here is what I want you to understand about excuses. They do not protect you from failure. They protect you from finding out. And the things you never find out about yourself are the most expensive in your life. More expensive than any business failure. More expensive than any rejection. Because you carry them forever as questions you never answered. No excuse is worth that price. I also want to talk about the difference between motivation and discipline. Because most people build their daily effort on the wrong foundation and then wonder why they keep stopping. Most people wait for motivation before they begin. They wait to feel ready. They wait to feel excited. They wait for the right energy to arrive. And sometimes motivation does come. You read something inspiring. You hear a story that moves you and you feel that sudden burst of energy and certainty that yes, now is the time. Now I will do it. But motivation never stays. It comes and goes like the weather. Some days it is there and some days it completely disappears. And if you only work when you feel motivated, you will not work consistently enough to build anything that takes real time and real effort to build. Discipline is completely different from motivation. Discipline is not a feeling at all. It is a decision you make in advance and then follow through on, regardless of how you feel in the moment. On the days in Alibaba, when I was tired, when I was worried about money, when the progress was invisible and the doubt was very loud, I did not feel motivated to work. But I showed up anyway, not because I felt like it, because I had made a decision and I was keeping it. And over time, that consistent showing up builds something that motivation alone could never have built. Here is a simple way to think about this difference. Motivation gets you started. Discipline keeps you going. And it is the keeping going that matters most. Anyone can start something when they feel inspired. The real question is what you do on the days when the inspiration is completely gone and the work is still sitting there waiting. Because those days happen every week, sometimes every day. And the person who does the work on those days is the person who eventually builds something real. Dreams and discipline are not the same thing. And I have seen this clearly throughout my life. I have met many people with very big dreams and very little discipline. And I have met people with smaller, quieter dreams and a very strong daily practice. Almost always the second group builds more, not because their dreams were better, but because dreams without daily action stay dreams. After the dream comes the daily work of making it real. And that daily work is usually not exciting. It is usually not inspiring. It is simply necessary. Make the call you do not want to make. Send the message you keep putting off. Practice the skill for 30 minutes even when you do not feel like it. Do the small specific thing that needs to be done today, not tomorrow. Today is what you have. Tomorrow is a promise you have not kept yet. Now let me tell you about the hardest part. Not the beginning when the energy is high and the direction feels clear. The hardest part is the middle. The months and years when you are working hard and nothing seems to be moving. When you feel like you are doing everything right and the results are not coming. When the people around you are questioning your decisions and you yourself are not completely sure if you are building something real or just refusing to accept that it is not working. I know this period very well. The early years of Alibaba were not exciting from the outside. We were a small group of people working in an apartment with very little money, working very long hours and very few people believed in what we were doing. There were days when I did not know if we would still be operating the next month. There were moments when I sat alone and thought maybe everyone who doubted me was right. Maybe this really is not going to work. And I want to be honest with you. Those moments were not small. They were heavy. They were the kind of moments that test not just your plan but your identity. Because when nothing is working and no one believes in you, the question you are really asking yourself is who am I and do I have what this takes. That question does not have an easy answer when you are in the middle of it. But I learned something during those years that I believe is one of the most valuable things I can share with anyone who wants to build something in their life. Progress is almost never visible in the moment it is happening. What you do today will not show results today. It will show results six months from now, one year from now and sometimes five years from now. And the gap between the effort and the visible result is where most people stop. Not because they are not good enough but because they are human and humans need to see something to believe the work is real and during the invisible period there is almost nothing to see. What helped me in those years was changing what I measured. I stopped asking is this working because that question had no clear answer during the invisible period. Every time I asked it I had to honestly say I did not know and not knowing felt like failure even when it was not. So I changed the question. I started asking something much simpler. Did I do the work today? That question always had a clear answer yes or no and on the days when the answer was yes, I let that be enough for that day. Not forever, not until the results appeared, just for that one day and when enough of those days added up, the results eventually came. Not all at once, not dramatically, but they came. Think about a tree. When you plant a small seed in the ground, nothing happens above the surface for a long time. The ground looks empty, nothing moves. Someone walking past will see nothing at all. But under the soil, something very important is happening. Roots are spreading wider and going deeper, building a foundation strong enough to hold everything that will come later. Without that work underground, there is no tree. Without the invisible season, there is no visible result. Your life works exactly the same way. The period when nothing seems to be happening is often the period when the most important work is being done. Your discipline is forming. Your skills are getting stronger. Your understanding is getting deeper. Your character is becoming more solid and when the season finally changes, and it always changes, what comes up from the ground will be strong and lasting. Because of everything that happened underneath, out of sight, without any applause, without anyone watching. But this only happens if you stay. If you continue working during the days when there is no reward for working. If you trust that the invisible effort is real effort, even when you cannot see the evidence of it. This is the thing that separates the people who eventually build something real from the people who spend their lives waiting for the right moment. The right moment does not come before the work. The right moment comes because of the work. You do not wait for the season to change and then begin. You begin and the season changes because you did. I want to be practical with you now. Because I think trust the process is advice that sounds good but does not actually help you on a Tuesday evening when you are tired and the results are still not visible. And part of you genuinely wonders if you have been making mistakes for the past six months. So let me tell you specifically what I did during those years. The things that actually helped me keep going when the evidence for keeping going was very thin. The first thing was keeping a very simple record. Not a complicated system. Just a small notebook where every day I wrote one sentence about what I did. Not what I hoped to do. What I actually did. I called this person. I built this thing. I solved this problem. I learned this. Looking back at a week of those sentences, even in the slowest periods, showed me that things were actually happening. The record made the invisible work visible, at least to me. And seeing it, even in small amounts, was enough to keep going for one more day. The second thing was finding one person who was further along than I was and having a regular real conversation with them. Not to ask for help. Not to get advice. Just to be reminded that the place I was trying to reach actually existed. That someone had walked the path I was on and come out the other side. That is a different kind of encouragement from motivation. Motivation tells you that you can do it. A real person who has done it shows you that it is possible. Those are not the same thing. The third thing was learning to be suspicious of my own feelings during the invisible period. I learned that the feeling this is not working is almost always strongest just before something starts to work. Not because the universe is dramatic, but because growth that happens below the surface creates a kind of internal pressure before it breaks through. The hardest days were often the days just before a small breakthrough. And knowing that, or at least suspecting it, was enough to keep me going one more day when everything inside me was saying stop. I also want to say something about the people who told you no. The ones who rejected you, doubted you, and said you were not ready, or not talented, or not the right person for what you wanted to do. I had many of those people in my life and I think most people reading this do too. And I want to say something honest about them. Something that took me a long time to understand clearly. They were not always wrong. Some of the things they said about me were accurate. I was not technically skilled. I did not have a strong academic record. I had no business experience when I started. They were right about those facts. What they were wrong about was what those facts meant about my future. They thought the limitations I had at that moment were permanent. I came to understand that they were just the starting point. And a starting point is not a destination. Your starting point tells you where you begin. It does not tell you where you end up. Where you end up depends almost entirely on the direction you choose. From your starting point and how long and how consistently you walk in that direction. Today when I look back at all the rejections, I am genuinely grateful for them. Not because they felt good at the time, but because every no forced me to find my own way. Every closed door sent me down a different path. A path I would not have taken if the easier door had been open. And on those paths I found things I would never have found otherwise. The harbor rejection meant I stayed in China and saw an opportunity that people educated abroad might have missed. The job rejections meant I had to create my own work instead of fitting into someone else's structure. Rejection is not the end of the road. It is often the beginning of a road that is better suited to you even if you cannot see that yet. I want to talk now about something that happens after you make the decision to begin. Because this is where many people fall off and never talk about it honestly. You make the commitment. You stop waiting. You start working and then something goes wrong. A business does not work. A project fails. You try to learn a new skill and you are worse at it than you expected. You speak up and it does not go the way you hoped. You take a risk and the result is not what you planned. And now you have a new and different problem. Not the fear of trying. The reality of having tried and not succeeded. This is a very different kind of difficulty and it requires a different kind of strength. What I learned through multiple failures, not just the rejections before I started, but the real failures after I started, is that failing at something specific does not mean you are failing at the bigger journey. In the early years of building Alibaba, we made many specific mistakes. We built things that did not work. We made decisions that cost us time and money. We hired people who were not the right fit. We had strategies that seemed clear at the time but turned out to be wrong. Every one of those mistakes felt serious when it happened. But every one of them also taught us something that we could not have learned any other way. And the accumulation of those lessons, painful as they were, is a large part of what eventually made Alibaba work. The path to something good is very rarely a straight line. It is usually a series of attempts, adjustments, more attempts, more adjustments, and eventually something that works because you understood what did not work first. The question is not whether you will fail at specific things along the way. You will. The question is whether you will use those failures as information or as evidence that you should stop. The information says, that did not work. Now I know something I did not know before. Let me try differently. Evidence that you should stop says, that did not work. Which proves I was wrong to try. I should go back to waiting. The choice between those two responses is one of the most important choices you will make over and over in your life. Now let me bring everything together because I want to leave you with something real and practical that you can actually use starting tonight. Nobody is coming. I want to say this one more time, not as a discouraging idea but as a freeing one because it means your life is still entirely yours. The people who said no to you do not control your future. The situation you were born into does not control your future. The years you may have spent waiting do not control your future. The only thing that controls your future is what you choose to do starting now. Not in a big dramatic sudden way. In a small daily honest way. One decision today. One piece of work done. One excuse set aside. One moment when you did the thing instead of waiting to feel like doing it. Those moments added up over weeks and months and years become a life. A specific real earned life that you built yourself. Tonight before you sleep I want you to ask yourself one question. Just one. Did I do the work today? Not did things go well nor did anyone notice or praise me nor did I feel motivated or excited. Just this. Did I do the work? Yes or no. And what counts as work is very specific. If you are learning English did you practice speaking today even for 10 minutes even alone. If you are building a skill did you work on it today even when it felt slow and difficult. If you have a project or a goal did you take one concrete step toward it today even a small one. Yes or no. Tomorrow night ask the same question and the night after that do this every night for 30 days. What you will build is a record. Not a perfect record but an honest one and that honest record looked at over 30 days will tell you something about yourself that no test and no outside opinion ever could. Because it will be built from real days and real choices not from how you felt or what you hoped or what you told yourself you would do. From what you actually did. I started with almost nothing. No money. No connections. No technical knowledge. No experience and a long list of rejections to my name. Many people start with far more than I had and go much further than I have gone. The difference between the people who build something and the people who spend their lives waiting is not talent. It is not luck. It is not the right starting point. It is a decision. The decision to begin. The decision to keep going. The decision to stop waiting for someone else to come along and do what only you can do. Nobody is coming. That means it is you. It has always been you and it is not too late to start acting like it. Goodbye for now. Your progress doesn't end here. To continue advancing your English skills click on the next video or explore the additional video that we thoughtfully selected for you.