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Joe Zhou is Xinfu’s Special Advisor in China, and co-author of “Dream Company, Dream Leadership, Dream Life” – a book featuring interviews with 100 of China’s leading private entrepreneurs and MNC and SOE leaders. He is the former CEO of Bond Education, one of the largest private education groups in China focusing on tutoring middle and primary school students. He is also an active social philanthropist in supporting handicapped children’s education and serves on Zhou Chunya’s Five Color Foundation Board.
Absolutely incredible. Many thanks for your honesty, vulnerability, strength and leadership.Sally Harrison
Viewing adversity as an opportunity and changing one's life and the lives around. Really inspiring.Veronica Catarino
The most beautiful, meaningful part of my week. Thank you. I look forward to what's next!Catherine Zergos
In this episode of Intersections, Prof. Hitendra Wadhwa has a conversation with Joe Zhou on the topic “Using Adversity to Make You Better, Not Bitter”.
How can we survive — and thrive — in times of crisis? What will help us rebound adversity?
The episode “Using Adversity to Make You Better, Not Bitter” offers key insights on:
Hello, everyone. A warm welcome to all of you at the inaugural webcast Intersections. This will be a weekly dialogue wherein, at mass, we will meet with our impacts. In other words, our aspiration here will be to allow you and me, all of us, to recognize that there are beautiful things that we can engage with and experience and aspire to in life and leadership. They begin from within. But then they also flow into the window, into the space beyond us. It is the harmonization of this inner space and this outer space that makes us whole that makes us live a life well-lived. And that makes us complete and successful leaders. I call it Intersections because our aspiration here is to be at the intersection, at the intersection of eternal truths and breakthroughs, the science of purpose and prophets of east and west of the inner and the outer of me.
When we are at that intersection, those boundaries dissolve and when the boundaries dissolve, we can reach our fullest potential. Wonderful to have all of you with us. We will be talking on this topic of adversity. My goal is to help you explore this conversation in a way that will both go deep within and make you connect with these kinds of aspirations and journeys you have made yourself. As well as learn some formal ideas and thoughts. Then we can pick from, learn from and grow from them. I want to use a catalyst to help us get there. And that is Joe Zhou. He's an incredible, very dear friend, an incredible human being, and a role model in so many ways.
I want to introduce Joe to you and bring him into the picture as well. So Joe is a person of indefatigable energy and incredible talent, among the many hats that he has been wearing, is as a wheelchair marathon runner, as a social activist, really someone who has at his heart the betterment of humanity, both at the collective level as well as at the individual level for each person. He was born and raised in China. He moved to the United States to pursue higher studies at some point in a luminous professional career, which I'm going to ask him to give you a little bit of a window into. He and I share an alma mater, the Sloan School at MIT. And along the way, he's done incredible things, very diverse things, including being the founder of the Gobi Desert Expedition Army Leadership Development Academy, being a senior adviser to the Shenzhen Municipal Handicapped People Association, a chief mentor of the Beijing Shinji exploring culture development company.
I have had the privilege of knowing Joe for a few years, as he has been a very treasured and honored guest in my personal leadership class at Columbia. The first time was when he flew into Hong Kong to talk to executive MBA students and the global executive MBA program at Hong Kong University. And he's one of the most inspiring people I've had the honor and privilege of knowing. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Joe. It is just such a joy for me to share your energy and spirit with this beautiful community that we are building here in my webcast. Thank you for giving us the honor of joining us for this very first webcast.
Hi, everyone. Good morning. Thank you to the whole class and Hitendra for inviting me to speak to the class. It is always a great pleasure to talk to you and everybody else in the class. And I feel humbled to have this opportunity to talk to such a wonderful cohort. Thank you very much for this privileged opportunity.
Thank you, Joe. You are, in so many ways, an ideal person for us to have this conversation with. Since we are talking on this topic, which I know has been such a significant part of your life's path. So I'm going to start from the early beginnings of your academic and professional journey. What was it like? As a young professional in the years before you came to the United States? Can you talk a little bit about that chapter of your life?
Yes, of course. I graduated in 1986. Immediately after I graduated from my college, I was offered work at the central government in China. I was an assistant of foreign investment in the Ministry for Machinery and Electronics Industries in the US. So the biggest part of my responsibility was to navigate foreign investors, mainly for investors like Microsoft, like AT&T and IBM. At the time in the 1980s, China was a centrally planned economy. So foreign investors couldn't just step into China and set up any partnership with the one they want to. They would have to get approval from the government. So my role was as a matchmaker to direct the foreign investors to the right potential Chinese partners, mainly national or state-owned enterprises. I worked in that position for about six and a half years before coming to the United States and initially studying at Carnegie Mellon and Sloan in MIT. I wanted to leave China because of the Tiananmen Square event in June 1989, because I was living in Beijing at the time, witnessing everything happening in the Square and where I live. It's just a few blocks away.
My dream was to follow my career working for the central government, and I wanted to grow up to be a senior government official, hopefully, in my late forties, early fifties, to become a minister, a good one, and to lead people into a prosperous society and enjoy life. However, what happened in Tiananmen Square shattered my dream. I was just someone losing his purpose in life because I let all my purpose be to work very hard and contribute to my country's betterment. All of a sudden, I realized this was probably not the government that I wanted to work for. And I was very miserable, as probably a lot of people around me. It was like the feeling of when you are deeply in love with someone for years, for six and half years and you find that this person is not worthy of your love. So I worked very hard to eventually get out of the country and study at Carnegie Mellon.
After I graduated from Carnegie Mellon, I worked for a precision machining company in the United States as a chief representative in China. Later on, I founded my own consulting company, helping large multinational companies, including GE and United Technologies Incorporated as a supply market consultant. So I set up my own consulting company in 1999. Before that, I did not even dream of being an entrepreneur. I thought my only talent was to work for the government. But after I came to the United States working for the US government, a US manufacturing company in China, and I had a better understanding of the business and market and the industry, my potential as an entrepreneur developed. So I went to MIT to become an entrepreneur. Before I graduated from my MBA program, I was in the middle of the first round of funding for about six million dollars and had just founded my first Internet company. And six months later, after I graduated from MIT, everything seemed to be very well moving. But all of a sudden, something changed. And basically, my life trajectory changed as well.
I think I want to pause there, even though there's an incredible next chapter that is going to come in the next part of your story because the moment that you're talking about is a moment that I relate to very well, not just from my life, but, having the privilege of teaching successful and intelligent and ambitious, young talent at the business school at Columbia. That's the moment they're in where they have had a certain hunger and a specific path and a particular set of challenges, but also opportunities that have ultimately gotten them into Columbia. In a sense, the world is our oyster at that moment. When you're going to a top business school in a leading global economy, you assume that the future will be like lying in a bed of roses. Of course, we realize there are going to be challenges and hard work to be done. But we're hoping for a smooth ascension into positions of higher authority, power and success. And I'm just imagining that that's how you must have felt in that zest coming out of Sloan.
So half a year after I graduated from Sloan, I was traveling in China and one night, I suddenly felt extreme back pain and numbness in my toes, the left leg, and then my right lap. Then I fell asleep. Four o'clock in the morning, I was awakened by a terrible, devastating, sharp pain in my back and found I could not stand up. I didn't know what had happened and I was terrified. And then I found I was not able to stand up again. I was probably in Shanghai at that time, staying in a hotel and then I was rushed to hospital.
The doctor did not know what was going on with me. They only found the numbness of paralysis. And the sensation of my body seems to be inched up from the tip of my toe along my legs and eventually end up on my chest. And so, for eight hours, I just experienced the horrible feeling of death crawling up from my toe into my chest. So the doctor did not know what was going on. They told me that there was nothing they could do. So eventually, through the doctor's help, I was rushed back to Boston and got off the airplanes. The ambulance picked me up and sent me to the medical center.
So when I was in the medical center, I felt that the sword of Damocles was dropping down. I experienced horrible days and nights, not being able to sleep, extremely anxious, extremely depressed. Horrible burning sensations, as if my whole body was put on the barbecue. My neurologist told me he'd get me chemotherapy because he found the white blood cells were attacking my nerve cells within my spinal cord. And so he tried a three-year one. But that wiped a lot of cells through chemotherapy. They drew blood out from the brain, which then went through a centrifugal machine, separating the plasma from the rest of the blood, and then put it back in the artificial plastic plasma and some blood back into my body again. I was devastated at that time.
And the only feeling that I had was that I wanted to die. I didn't want to live like this. Try to imagine yourself in a burning barbecue pit. And how would you feel? So I am almost completely paralyzed from my neck, and the only parts of my body that can move are my neck, eyes, and thoughts. I needed three things. Number one, my wife got me a voice-activated tape recorder, and I recorded everything I remembered. Since my children were only two or three years old, I was recording my voice. I wanted to leave it as a legacy to my two children. That was the first thing. The second thing was that I called my parents. I lied to them and told them I was going to research Scandinavia and I would not be able to return home within at least three or four to six years and told them I loved them very much, but I would have to say goodbye to them. After I had done the three things, I was waiting to die. The doctor had already given me the largest possible doses of sleeping drugs. But I was not able to sleep at the time.
I began to ask myself. I'm only 36 years old. What is the purpose for me to come into this world and have I lived a meaningful life? Where would I go after I die? I was very devastated by the horrible burning sensation of pain. Everything in Carnegie Mellon and my college at MIT was not enough to help me find a way to kill myself because I was completely paralyzed and unable to move. But eventually, a group of Christians came to my work to see me, and they prayed for me and it felt as if my anxiety, my heart, seemed to be discharged. That night, while waiting to die, I was talking to someone in heaven. It's the being called God. So I was talking to him. I said, you are genuinely there and watching me. I don't believe that you should be so cruel to watch me get tortured. And if you can do me a favor for the sake of my aging parents and my two little kids, give me a chance to live for another three to five years. I would do whatever I could to try and live a meaningful life, even though I didn't know what precisely a meaningful life was.
I fell into a coma for about two days and nights. I was awakened by a doctor and the nurse trying to wake me up with a needle. I awakened with great excitement, knowing that I was still alive, but also with great disappointment, knowing that I would be paralyzed and in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. The good thing was that my prognosis recessed from my neck to my chest. It's funny. I remember when I was talking to the almighty one in the air. I said, if you feel I am not worthy of being healed up 100 percent, I'll be happy enough if I may just be able to sit in a wheelchair and do some consulting work and earn enough money to help my family. That's all. When I woke up, I felt very disappointed, and I told myself I wish I could have prayed for a complete 100 percent recovery. So that brought me into a different stage of my life.
What I see happening in these kinds of fears is that you were in that state of despair in the first phase, almost to the point where you wished to die. And then something really powerful happened as a transformation, as a connection with what I'd like to call your inner core, that space within where you feel a deep sense of connection with something higher than yourself. That core reassured you, spoke to you. Something beautiful also happened in allowing you at least some amount of your abilities to come back right in your body. So I see you moving into the data, into a place where there's a little more acceptance of what has happened, a state of grace from where you can now start to choose to live again and decide to do the best you can with what you have. Can you talk a bit about going from that place of the breakthrough, the acceptance, to a place where it has truly been transformational for you?
Coming back to life is not easy because I would have to live a completely different life than before I was paralyzed. I have a lot of hobbies. Skiing in the ballroom, dancing on the ice, I even got a championship in one of the ballroom dancing contests. All of a sudden, I end up in a wheelchair and not able to manage my mind. I was in that situation for about six months or so, still wanting to die until one day I was reminded by what was in my mind: you promised that you're going to live a meaningful life. What is that meaningful life you want? I realized that that's one thing that is very true to me. Whenever I focus so much on my loss, pain, and suffering, I feel devastated. Eventually, I found I was falling. I fell in love with education. So I talked to a mighty business school. Eventually, I got an opportunity to join MIT's Sloan School of Management to help introduce this concept of education program in China. I was told I might have to join Harvard Business School and assist the Harvard Business School in setting up a hover center in China, based in Shanghai.
The whole idea is to help Harvard University, particularly the Harvard Business School, was to promote exceptional education and case research and the faculty immersion program, as well as an MBA field trip. After that, I fell deeply in love with education and wanted to go further into humanities education. After 2008, the financial crisis, I began to question why the super-intelligent people in Wall Street could not do the right thing.
After working for Harvard Business School for about six at MIT and Harvard Business School for almost ten years also, I stepped down from the position of director-general of Harvard Business School and moved into private education. I wanted to encourage and inspire teenagers to overcome the adversities they feel they experience. So I thought I should do something different to prove that they could do better than me. So in May 2013, I went to the Gobi Desert and, together with some volunteers, finished 120 kilometers, crossing within three days and four nights.
If you don't mind me interrupting, I have to say that this is so incredible. I consider it an accomplishment if I can, without losing my breath, run from the edge of the Columbia campus to the classroom. Here you are, crossing the Gobi Desert in a wheelchair. I mean, it's incredible.
I can do half the Gobi Desert crossing only once a year and I lead a group of forty to seventy teenagers. But I realized I would have to do something that I can do regularly, say once a month and that's when I switched to marathons.
When I tried my first marathon, November 7th, 2014, Essence, which is very challenging, was probably regarded as one of the top ten most challenging marathons because it runs from a village by the sea up to Essence. I didn't believe that I would be able to finish it at all. However, with the encouragement of other people, I eventually finished it in 7 hours. When you focus on the adversity at hand, you can sometimes achieve things you never deemed possible. So ever since I ran my first marathon. I integrate every running marathon I participate in with charity fundraising and extra leadership development. I have encouraged probably over 4000 people across China and other places in the world and to follow me to a marathon so far. The doctor does not allow me to run anymore. I'm trying to run one last marathon. And one Ironman contest each year kept me energized. And the reason I do that is to inspire youngsters and teach them about adversity.
Joe, when you say 4000 people that have been inspired, do you mean 4000 people who were just sitting, not doing much exercise when they could have? Or are these people on wheelchairs who never imagined that they would be in a position to even think about running marathons? Are you referring to that community?
Most of them are healthy people and there are about 100 people in wheelchairs. After I did my first marathon, the TV channels reported on me, and many articles were written about me. So I got invited to do a lot of team-building talks in a variety of different companies. I was also asked to do three talks in China. I did them to inspire other people. A lot of people came to me after I taught my talks. One or two followed me to join my volunteer team to learn to fundraise. I also founded the first wheelchair club in China, bringing over 100 wheelchair runners from across China to different races.
One thing I find remarkable about you is that sometimes we tend to set these kinds of broad goals for ourselves. We are aspirational. We want to affect the lives of all of these people in society and humanity. We tend to get so caught up in that larger goal that we don't have a mindful awareness of what's right in front of us. And it takes energy to focus on the needs of the people right around you. You are someone who transcends both this qualitative and quantitative aspect of life because you've done all of these incredible things at that macro level. But I've also seen you live and in person. You weave magic with the people right around you. I've seen you do that with my daughter. I've seen you do that with my students.
So, guys, for all of you, you need to know that when Joe came and spoke to my students, they were tremendously inspired by him. After the talk, they were lining up. And it was incredible because Joe had not had anything to eat. He'd just flown into Hong Kong for this conversation for two hours. He'd been speaking continually with them. But he was just oozing with spirit and energy. I think he just went on for an hour or more. And then I've seen you do that.
The same in my daughter. When you heard that she was about to go to college, the way you were seeking not just to inspire her but guide her. You gave her just so many creative ideas on how to make that journey forward. I mean, it's just the capacity to give that you have is incredible. Let me ask you one question. What keeps you thinking? What is the source of your energy?
Thank you. I feel like I'm doing something that makes me feel like I belong. I am very bothered when I see people arguing about anxiety or seeing their sickness as interruptions, especially young people who face the issue of life or death. If I could give a little advice, I would tell them: you can do much better than me. I see an extension of me in them. Even though I can not do many things physically, as long as I give my heart to these people, helping them be their better selves, I will be happy, and I don't think this is labor. I feel that the energy seems to be coming from somewhere. I believe there's a strong connection between God and me. So I see myself as an ambassador of compassion. When I see someone who needs my help, I will do whatever I can to help.
Joe, can I strike a deal with you? I think there are several questions. There are going to be so many more from our friends. Can I ask you to come back to this webcast in a couple of weeks? And what we will do is for those who are going to be new to your story, we will share some information in advance so that we do not start at the same place we started today. Still, we start from where we are ending this, which is that we begin taking questions from the audience, knowing that they already know what you have shared in this webcast.
I'd also love to share a few more pictures from your life with them to make this more visual, some of the beautiful, colorful contributions you are in. Given where we are on time and something that I want to help the audience formalize from your story, I propose that I give you a minute. Would you just like to share any kind of final advice that you have on this topic, rebounding from adversity for today and then inviting all of you to do our friends in the audience to come back for Joe Zhou. All right. We're going to do that in a couple of weeks.
Okay, thank you very much. And no one has a deep understanding of what adversity truly means. You can see adversity as resistance against you and what you want. Or, you take what I call a bird's eye view from a top-down perspective. You may realize that adversity can serve as a blessing. So, number one, change your attitude. Number two, pursue a charitable goal.
To be continued because this is just a chapter in a beautiful book that you are helping us write together. I want to thank you on behalf of all of us for making this moment happen.
Always looking forward to speaking to you and other people in the class and we assume next time.
Wonderful. We will certainly be looking forward to having you back with us very soon. All right, so I know that this story that we are leaving is half complete. There are so many dimensions of Joe, and many of the questions that you're asking here are very thought-provoking as well. And I didn't want to rush through just one or two of them. I wanted to create even more space seeing how it was going.
So let's go a little bit into the science of adversity. Now, here is what I want to offer to you from science. So there is research that psychologists have done where they ask you about your life. People do not just release a list of chronological events. I was born here, and then I went to school here, then I did this. What they do is they start to share stories. In other words, we human beings are oriented to share stories, to be able to look at our memories of the past and process events of the present in the form of stories. The research also shows that there tend to be, roughly speaking, two kinds of storytellers. Some tend to look at moments in their lives and just respond to them with a too bad it happened this way.
You also get these storytellers who may have gone through something really tough. But the way they tell the stories has an air of positivity about it. So the story might be something about a real struggle. For example, a person might go through a divorce. Then they'll say that because of that divorce, they had to spend a lot more time just by themselves for the next few years. And because of that, they started to discover certain things about themselves, which I never allowed myself to do because an intimate partner always surrounded them. They're always looking for something redemptive, some kind of trigger for growth that that event led to. If each of us is a storyteller, then the question I might ask us is, who is the author of your life story? Is it time? Is it the circumstances? The economy went this way and the boss came, said this when I was assigned to a certain project, or I was just born here and then this happened? Or is it you who is wielding the pen for authoring the story of your life? If you look at your account in the right way, there is so much evidence here that despite crazy conditions out there, we can choose to alter our own life stories. And so here's a little bit of analytical treatment to this question about how we are the authors of our own life stories.
If you think about the story of your life, there is a sudden meaning that you give those facts and then at the present moment, you have a choice to make about how you respond to any of the things that are happening around you, what actions and attitudes you want to bring to bear. So those are the three ingredients of a story. Now, if you look at the facts, you might think, well, wait for a second, Hitendra, the facts in my life are set in stone. I was born here. I didn't choose which family I was going to be born into. I didn't decide where my parents sent me to school. I didn't choose my gender or color of skin, or I didn't choose coronavirus to come in 2020.
These things happen. Well, let me tell you this. In one piece of research, they took a bunch of people, showed them a video of two cars that came and collided with each other. And afterward, these people were asked what speed these two cars were driving when they came in contact with each other and people gave a certain speed based on their memory. And then some people were asked a different question: what was the speed at which these two cars traveled when they crashed into each other? They gave a speed estimate and the speed estimate was much faster than the first group's speed estimate.
One group heard the question about when these two guys contacted each other and the other group heard the question as to when these two cars crashed into each other. Not just that, but then these two groups were also asked, was there any broken glass when these two cars contacted each other? The first group recollects no broken glass. The second group recollects broken glass in the actual video. There was no broken glass. Who knows how many of our memories are salient and accurate and if certain things are because of a certain mindset. But that was a terrible chapter in my life. That was a horrible thing that happened. Who knows if there are a few things there, like the broken glass that you made? I don't know. Then the other part, which is maybe we've exaggerated certain experiences and diminished certain other experiences, just like the speed of those cars based on the expectation we have, based on the kind of this relationship that we bring with adversity. When we're out of our comfort zones, where things are happening to us that we don't want to see happen or others have told us about, et cetera. Is it possible that we are recreating the facts in our mind and we just approached it differently in those moments? We would observe other facts and we would be paying attention to certain other things. So that's the facts part. But now, let's talk about the meaning around those facts.
You saw it in Joe's story, right? In his case, the initial meaning was, this is terrible. I'm going to keep this away from my parents. I don't want to let them know that I'm paralyzed here in America, et cetera. Then he went to a different place. The place he went to, he felt like, no, this does not have to be terrible. This could be me surrendering to the universe and asking my inner voice to guide me on what I am meant to do. How can this make me purposeful even under these new conditions? That's the meaning part, the meaning-making in each of us. Then he goes on this remarkable quest for meaning through which he can do. Thank you so much, Joe.
He's giving us an example of how to recognize that there's still a lot of talent and possibilities and purpose in me. It's to inspire the young generation to pursue their highest potential, to pursue education, to push them to what they can do. That becomes their meaning. That makes sense. And that's not starting to speak in response as well. Right now, you might say, whoa, wait for a second, this thing just happened to me and it was so horrible and so painful. I just don't see how I can respond to that. And if that's the case, well, then let me share the following story with you.
All right. This is the story of another dear guest of ours. Lighten up. Candace Lightner lost her daughter to drunk driving. And initially, she just despaired and was in a lot of pain. But she continued to live because her daughter would not come back, so you can't change that fact. But then she recognized there was a lot of looseness in American society at that time concerning drunk driving, law enforcement, the law, the legal system, etc. She noticed that even the judges and the policemen, the legislators, were driving drunk. It was a common thing back in the 70s and 80s. Right. And so she went on a path. She collected all these mothers who had had similar stories. She brought these mothers together and started this organization called Mothers Against Drunk Driving to get into state politics in California.
Ultimately, national politics in America changed the laws. The people's sensitivity around the country got Ronald Reagan to sign legislation around making driving under the influence of alcohol a crime that can put you in prison, which was not happening in her time until then and ultimately became this hero figure. If you think about it, her idea could have been that look. I will continue to live with the pain of my daughter's passing. Option B is that the pain doesn't go away. But along with the pain comes a little bit of comfort to me that because of my pain and the loss of my daughter, some things happened, so that today many mothers still have their daughters. Today, of course, driving has become much more of a safer thing in many parts of the world. For example, even in India, there's been an increasing amount of sensitivity inspired by some of these developments in more recent times.
So you take Joe and his response. And that's what I mean, the possibilities in each of us, right? I mean, you think of it that way. It's the same thing. Adversity is adversity. But there are three levels. From where we can respond, this level one, which is to feel it as pain and suffering, do you not accept it? Be patient or level three, which is to choose to say there is so much pain here. There is so much sense of loss here that I don't want this energy to go wasted. If my mind is concentrating and my heart is so heavy with this burden, I will make this burden stand for something. I'm going to take this energy and do something with it as long as I'm alive. Right. That's level three. So when you look at those of us who spoke a little while ago when I did the poll with you and you said that all five of those adversities I put in front of you.
Do you remember those adversities? Losing someone very close to you. Economic shock to the system. Twelve-month injury, mugging, et cetera. These were people who say all five of them are growth opportunities because it's not about what kind of adversity it is. It is what you choose to make of it right at that moment. I know many of you probably heard about this through my outreach to you. Some may have shared that or learned about it through word of mouth. If you haven't yet, I just wanted to invite you to sign up for my outreach, my newsletter, so that I can be more in touch with you in case this is something that you're drawn to. Thank you all. It's a great joy to be with all of you, and I look forward to seeing you again next time.
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