How To Be Successful: A Case Study Of Cristiano Ronaldo

Football simply means kicking a ball with the foot. It is a game of two opposing teams comprising eleven players on each side. A group of other players are also in waiting outside the line, for an opportunity to play if any player injured or need replacement by the coach. A standard football game is decided after ninety minutes of play.

Football today is one of the most popular sports in the world. Little wonder why it has become an envious profession the world over.

Today, millions of people earn their living directly and indirectly from football. In the recent time football remains one of the highest paying sports in the world. This account for the lavish display of wealth by many professional footballers around the world.

His Birth

Born on February 5 1995, as Cristiano Ronaldo Dos Santos Aveiro in Funchal, Madeira, Portugal. The young Portuguese started is football playing career at the age of 7 in 1992 when he first pitched his tent with a local club,  Andorinha, in Portugal.  Ever since he has not had reason to look back in a career that has brought him laurels, fame and wealth.

Today, Ronaldo can proudly boast of 3 FIFA World Player of the year awards, 4 European Golden Shoe Awards, Best Poruguese Player of all time and several others.

This article is not to promote the arrogance and pride of Ronaldo, as it has been reported by many, or the fact that he is the current highest paid footballer in the world but to inspire readers to embrace hard work as a lifestyle, a lifestyle that is paying well for CRonaldo.

My love for football has not made me a fanatic yet but I could still relate with the fact that Ronaldo has proved to be the best in his trade. I may not be aware of his arrogance, and be ignorant of the fact that he is proud, but I can testify about his love and passion for his chosen game. Ronaldo is always a game changer any time any day. Any attempt to ignore him is to your own peril.

His Strength

In my opinion, Ronaldo is not doing anything new to achieve his success only that his consistency, growth, discipline and commitment toward the game are unequal.

Consistency

In a sport where people lose their relevance as they age Ronaldo has proved his critics wrong as he maintains consistency in the game over the years. One would have expected that after many years of play he should have tune down his consistency level. After 24 years actively in the sport Ronaldo still remain in the first eleven of his club and country, playing ninety minutes matches.

Growth

This is another quality that sets him apart from his peers in the game. He started playing at the age of 7 in 1992, and up untill now  his skills for the game keeps increasing. I know of players who were in the FIFA under 20 Youth Championship with Lionel Messi in 2008, as at today they have retired from the game due to lack of growth eight years after.

Discipline

Well disciplined, Ronaldo would not joke with his fitness as that matter much in the game. For many years he had kept his body at less than 3% body fat of supermodel. Ronaldo devout enough time to training and sleep and  does not allow one to hinder another.

Commitment
Commitment in my view is a language of suicide. An ability to do anything to advance a course or action. In Ronaldo you will find commitment at the highest level. Ronaldo think , talk and live football. Ronaldo and football are inseparable.

Summary

The secret of Ronaldo’s success could be summarizing to mean ‘hard work. Being the highest paid sport man in the world does not come cheap for CR7. When asked about his secret at a time Ronaldo shocked his audience when all he uttered was ‘hard work’.

His story reminds us that hard work pay.” There is dignity in labour,” It is a story of ordinary man doing extraordinary things through the principle of hard work. It is wrong to believe hard work is hard life.

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From Accident To The Ivory Tower: The Story Of Lisa Falzone’s $500 Million Company

The story of Lisa is an interesting one for all to learn from. It is a story of, “every disappointment is a blessing.” It is a story of hard work and determination to never allow any disappointment prevent her reaching her goal in life. Lisa was determine never to let go of her dream to injury sustained from a mere domestic accident.
Right now, Lisa Falzone is on the brink of something big. Six years ago, she was laid up, flat on her back after slipping a disk while moving a couch. Falzone was 25 at the time, a recent graduate of Stanford University, with big dreams but little time to pursue them.
"It was actually pretty lucky," Falzone told Mashable about the injury. "I had always wanted to start a company, but finding time to focus while working for someone else was difficult."

The company she would end up co-founding thanks to her injury, Revel Systems, is now one of the most successful new players in the point-of-sale market, competing with the likes of Square and ShopKeep for a global market value around $42 Billion.

That success has led Falzone to consider taking Revel public. The company has already achieved a valuation of $500 million and raised more than $100 million. If Revel stays on track, Falzone could become the first woman to take a company from start to $1 billion IPO.
That's the kind of thing Falzone could only dream about back in 2010. Falzone had graduated from Stanford three years before, where she had been a competitive swimmer. While moving from an apartment in Menlo Park to Palo Alto, she felt a pain when she tried to pick up her sofa. Falzone had herniated a disk.
The injury left her bedridden for the better part of a year. Falzone seized the opportunity to come up with a business venture. She toyed with a variety of ideas, but nine or so months into her recovery, between physical therapy sessions, she began to consider the concept that eventually would become Revel Systems.
"When [I] found the idea of Revel, I really was just so excited and had so much passion," Falzone says. "I knew it was a huge idea."
Falzone teamed up with Chris Ciabarra, who she connected with via a blog she was keeping at the time, and the two hatched a plan. They wanted to create a point-of-sale system that would work with the iPad, which had just come out, to replace the archaic systems (like the bulky credit card machines at your grocery store) that were, and often still are, the norm. 
"[We wanted] to help people start their businesses and grow them," says Ciabarra.
The injury lingers (she's unable to stand or sit for more than a few hours at a time), a painful reminder of the time that ended up becoming her springboard to success.  

Hip to not be Square

Revel's business is relatively simple. At its core, the company provides an easy way for customers to pay businesses — a service that is commonly known as "point-of-sale."
Revel replaces credit card swipe machines with an iPad-based system, as do many of its competitors. 
Today, the company has 20,000 active POS terminals, employs more than 400 people and works with massive companies like Goodwill and Ben & Jerry’s, and you can find Revel systems at events like the SuperBowl. 
Lisa far right at a recent conference
Revel is most often compared to Square, the payments company led by Jack Dorsey, who is also CEO of Twitter. Falzone doesn't much care for the juxtaposition. She points to Revel's features that provide businesses with data about their company as well as a way to integrate inventory reports and purchase orders to differentiate the companies.
There's also the matter of how Revel makes money. Square takes a percentage of each purchase. Revel charges a flat monthly fee of $100 along with an upfront charge for the terminal."Square gets their money from payments, we make money just from software. I feel like it’s comparing apples and oranges," Falzone said.

That sweet Wafel money

Wafels & Dinges, founded in 2007 as a single food truck, is the brainchild of Rossanna Figuera and her husband Thomas Degeest — and a loyal Revel user."We are very data driven, very numbers driven," Figuera tells Mashable of their choice to use Revel. Figuera once worked at JP Morgan before she was a head hunter for Wall Street. "It was very important for us to have numbers and data built in."
Today, Wafels & Dinges has 11 locations (including a brick and mortar store), expansion made easier by the data provided by Revel Systems, Figuera said. But Wafels & Dinges is just one of many companies that utilize Revel Systems’ software and hardware. Those around Falzone say the company's success couldn't have happened without their CEO's willpower.

“She’s not somebody that tries, she's somebody that does,” her cofounder Ciabarra says.

One story Falzone likes to tell occurred in 2010, when she convinced a man at a coffee shop to invest in her new company. Falzone was working out of Cido, a café in Saucelito, California. The then 25-year-old was making calls to investors. She was trying to raise funding to build the company's first prototype, and she wasn't getting far.  “I was desperate,” Falzone says. “But you can never act like you’re desperate. The game of raising funds is similar to dating,” she jokes.
Falzone says a man sitting at the next table over overheard her, and the two got to talking. She says that the man had a daughter who wanted to be an entrepreneur. (Falzone declined to name the man or connect him with Mashable, citing a confidentiality agreement.)
"He really liked my enthusiasm and passion, and was willing to do whatever it took to make this dream a reality," Falzone says. The two parted ways that day, but she followed up, and eventually persuaded him to take a chance on her, and she says he wrote her a check for $28,000.

What the future looks like

Fresh off a successful partnership with Indy 500, Revel is exploring how to expand, and Falzone and her team are looking to tap into consumers for more revenue. 
The company plans to explore on-demand delivery on college campuses and has been working on the international market — including Cuba, where it’s already begun to sell its products.
“They're dying for technology," Ciabarra told the AP. The company also plans to open offices in Canada in the Middle East in addition to their offices in the UK, Australia, Lithuania, Singapore, San Francisco, among others.
Spotted in #Poland! Businesses all around the world are looking to #RevelUp..
Falzone and Ciabarra plan to take the company public in the next two years. But there are still some kinks to iron out. Perhaps their biggest concern is avoiding the bumps in the road other large companies have come across when they became publicly traded.
“We don’t want to end up like many of the companies out there today that go public,” Ciabarra says. “They go up, and then they go crashing down."Dorsey’s Square did exactly this after its IPO. Square’s stock price fell below its IPO price just two months after the company went public. 

Women in business

But business isn’t all that’s on Falzone’s mind. She also deeply cares about gender equality in the business world and wants to encourage women to pursue careers in the tech industry. She launched a $10,000 scholarship called the Revel Scholars Program that is given to two girls each year with an interest in tech entrepreneurship. Falzone also mentors the recipients.“I think more women need to start companies. More women need to get into tech,” Falzone says. “I really want to push women to believe in themselves.”
However, Falzone doesn’t believe the road for women in the tech world is necessarily easy. “People aren’t used to women in leadership positions — they’ve never seen a woman take a startup from its founding to a billion dollar IPO,” Falzone says. 
And she’s right. Only 2 percent of Fortune 500 companies are led by women and they famously struggle to raise funding. “Investors likely to invest in things they’ve seen be successful before, and they’ve never seen that.”
Indeed, the club of women that run billion-dollar companies is an elite one. Mary Barr of General Motors, Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard and Indra Nooyi of Pepsico are among the few. “I love being the underdog. I like it when people doubt me,” Falzone says. “It fuels my success.”
The story of Lisa would inspire prospective business owners who have succumbed to one difficulty or another. Let this story inspire the champion in you and go on to achieve your dream in whatever you’ve set your eyes to do.
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How Much Money In The World?

Money as the bible says, 'answered all things' is a saying that is difficult to fault. Money is a unique part of life. Money makes life sweet and comfortable! Without it life could be frustrating and unenjoyable. A man without money is like a well without water. Life becomes tough and hard when there is a lack of money to resolve financial issues.


 Important things suffer for lack of fund. Many visions, ideas, education, inventions, marriages, children, families, communities and countries have suffered severe abandonment, hunger, epidemic, lack, illiteracy, famine and ignorance to mention but few as a result of insufficient or complete lack of money.

Think about this, all over the world, there is no place or community you get to where money is never a subject matter. Virtually everything that makes life good and enjoyable can be quantify with money. Money is good! It is a must have in this life.

Where is money?

The amazing thing about money is that it is everywhere. Money is everywhere in the world. Money is in everything you see on this earth. Whenever you see two or more people gather together money must be involve somehow in their activities. Go to the markets, airports, farms, boarders, schools, banks, bus terminus, seaports, hotels, temples, synagogues, shrines, governments, courts, political parties, NGOs, palaces, sports and the rest you will see money everywhere. There is money on the internet, beneath the earth, in the air, in your phones and computers. Think about this!

...everything is not money but there is money in every thing...

The essence of colonialism is money. The main reason for invading other peoples' land is to look for what will translate to money. Money make people emigrate from one country to another. Whether in Nigeria, Morocco, Germany, Australia, Canada or Brazil there is money everywhere. It is ignorance to think there is no money in a particular place or thing. 


  

'...it is the honour of kings to search out a matter.'

However, like King Solomon said, Money is a puzzle that needs resolve by finding. You must be ready to find out where the money is in everything you do or see around. Your first class degree is of no use if you cannot find money in it or through it. Simply put, Money must be found for you to own it. 


You just must look for it in everything - your passion, training, hobby, employment, environment, and this you do legally. That you have not made money in your course does not mean it is not there it only mean you have not found it. So, always look out for the money side of what you do.


To be continued...