Don’t Change your Rabbit

Pretty weird name for a topic right? You will understand why I chose this at the end of the blog.

Let’s get started, the two ingredients for success are the power of focus and the power of persistence. Jack Ma is a living testimonial for it. How many of you know about Jack Ma? For the benefit of others let me tell all of you about Jack Ma. Jack is a Chinese business magnate, investor and a politician. He is the co-founder and the former executive chairman of Alibaba group. Jack was an English teacher in Beijing. His proficiency in the language was helpful for China when it comes to trade delegations and opportunities. Jack saw two phenomena one the Chinese businessmen and the second the emerging of internet. He believed that the internet had the potential to take China’s business to the next step. With that in mind Jack and 18 of his friends sharing the same goal worked together. Thus was born Alibaba.com on April 4th 1999.

Jack’s advice was “Believe in your dream and believe in yourself. Do it because you want to not because other people want to you do it. Don’t give up your dream, do whatever you can to make sure you get closer to your dream every-day. Learn quickly and learn from others the tactics and skills but don’t change your dream”. Jack once illustrated the importance of focus during one of his speech. He said “if there are 9 rabbits running around and you want to catch one focus only on the one you chose. If you try to catch them all you may end up with none. If the rabbit you are trying to catch proves elusive change your tactics but not the rabbit. There are a lot of opportunities; you cannot catch them all at once. Get one first then catch the others”. Relating to what Jack said, in our lives, lots of us tempted by multiple opportunities try to grab them all and end up with none. The challenge for all of us is not choosing which rabbit but not to get distracted by other rabbits and lose our focus. Our inability to catch a rabbit pushes us quickly sometimes too quickly to change rabbits. We lack persistence and we give up too soon.