Find the right people, not the best people.
Interpretation
It's more important to surround yourself with the right people who share your values than to only seek the most qualified individuals.
This quote by Jack Ma emphasizes the importance of building relationships with individuals who are a good fit for your vision and values rather than solely focusing on their qualifications or status. The right people contribute positively to our goals and provide support, while the best people in a technical sense may not always align with our ethos or help foster a productive environment.
In practice
In a leadership seminar, this quote can inspire attendees to prioritize team cohesion over individual performance.
Hong Kong people say Hong Kong needs to preserve its uniqueness. I say Hong Kong's uniqueness is in its diversity, its tolerance of difference cultures... China does not want to see Hong Kong in decline. I have full confidence in its future.
If we are a good team and know what we want to do, one of us can defeat tons of them.
It's not that other countries steal jobs from you guys. It's your strategy. Distribute the money and things in a proper way.
Helping doing business easier, we choose the name Alibaba because it is a global company. It is founded in China, but it was created for the world.
In the beginning I just wanted to survive. For the first three years, we made zero revenue. I remember many times when I was trying to pay up, the restaurant owner would say, 'Your bill was paid.' And there would be a note saying, 'Mr. Ma, I'm your customer on the Alibaba platform. I made a lot of money, and I know you don't, so I paid the bill.'
Even if your competitor is still small in size or weak, you should take him seriously and treat him as a giant. Likewise, even if your competitor is massive in size, you shouldn't regard yourself as a weakling.
I'm always wondering if he'll return. Sometimes I pray that he doesn't. And sometimes I hope he will. I wish on falling stars and eyelashes. Absence isn't solid the way death is. It's fluid, like language. And it hurts so much...so, so much.
American high school culture was impenetrable to me, and very cliquey: you had the Hispanics, the African Americans, the surfer guys and the goths and the immigrants. The jocks and the surfers got the girls. By the time I'd got to grips with it, I'd graduated.
Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.
A good test of a relationship is how a person responds to the word 'no.' Love respects 'no,' control does not.
It's not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you'd wonder how they'd get along if someone hadn't invented the hyphen
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
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