Tiger Woods VS. Jack Nicklaus

Tiger Woods is the number one ranked golfer in the world. He is also the highest-paid athlete in the world, at $65 million a year. And yet, neither of those two things really matter to him.

Tiger Woods

Jack Nicklaus

As a boy, Woods famously had a poster of Jack Nicklaus in his room. It served as a reminder of his goal in his golf career: To top Nicklaus’s record of 18 major championship wins. Much is made of the media attention given to Woods at the majors. Many fans think it is overkill. But his pursuit of Nicklaus’s mark is one of the most intriguing storylines in sports, and will remain so until he either breaks the record or retires from competitive golf having fallen short.

Jack Nicklaus

Woods finished the U.S. Open at Merion Golf Club in a tie for 32nd, 12 strokes back of the winner Justin Rose. That means Woods has now gone 20 straight majors without a win.

Woods—who won his 14th major at the 2008 U.S. Open—appeared to be on track to achieve his goal until 2009. That year will be the pivotal one when, 20 years from now, some biographer writes the definitive account of Woods’ life and golfing career. It was the day after Thanksgiving of that year when Woods had his infamous car wreck near his home, and his infidelity scandal broke open. Never before had a more popular and successful athlete been subjected to the ensuing tabloid scrutiny and public embarrassment. Subsequent leg injuries also took their toll.

But that year had another defining moment for Woods, one that may go down as something more significant in his golfing career. In the PGA Championship that August, Woods was the leader after 54 holes, by two strokes. He ended up losing to Y.E. Yang by three strokes, shooting a 3-over 75. It marked the first time that Woods—perhaps the best closer the sport has ever witnessed—failed to win a major after having the 54-hole lead.

Woods will turn 38 at the end of this year. He has, in many ways, bounced back from that troubling stretch in 2010 and 2011, when his world ranking plummeted to 58. After losing sponsors Gillette ,Gatorade , Accenture and AT&T in 2010, he has regrouped somewhat, adding NetJets and Rolex, and hanging on to Nike. He has won four PGA Tour events this year. As mentioned, he has regained the number one ranking in the world. But he has now gone five years since his last major win. Though he has been in contention in the early rounds in a handful of majors since then, he has faltered badly on the weekends and, at times, has been relegated to finishing his Sunday major rounds hours before the leaders—and eventual winners—even make the turn.

Woods is still ahead of Nicklaus’s major-winning pace. Nicklaus won his 15th major—the British Open—in 1978 when he was 38. That means Woods has two more chances to stay ahead of Nicklaus’s pace. Nicklaus won his 16th and 17th majors in 1980, at age 40, taking both the U.S. Open and the PGA Championship. Then he famously tacked on his 18th major victory at age 46 at the 1986 Masters.

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that Woods’s playing prime will go from now until he is 42 (which happens to be the age of Ernie Els when he won the British Open last year). Barring injury or other unforeseen circumstances, that leaves him with 22 more majors to play. Winning five of those would be a tall task. It would equal the career major wins of Byron Nelson and Seve Ballesteros. It would be one more major win than Phil Mickelson has had in his career.

The remaining two majors this year may not set up well for Woods. The British Open is at Muirfield, where he tied for 28th back in 2002. The PGA Championship is at Oak Hill, where he struggled to a tie for 39th in 2003. But, taking a look ahead at the future sites of the four major championships, the task for Woods still seems doable. He seems to play well on the courses where he has had previous success. Here’s the breakdown of future major sites:

The Masters

Woods seems due at Augusta National, where he has won four times. Since his last Masters win in 2005, he has only finished out of the top 6 only once.

The U.S. Open

Woods has won the U.S. Open three times.

2014—Pinehurst: Woods finished second there in 2005.

2015—Chambers Bay: A new course in the rotation.

2016—Oakmont: Woods finished second there in 2007.

2017—Erin Hills: A new course in the rotation.

2018—Shinnecock: Woods finished in a tie for 17th.

2019—Pebble Beach: Though Woods will be 43, he has won there before (200 U.S. Open).

Best shots at victories: Pinehurst, Oakmont and Pebble Beach.

The British Open

Woods has won the British Open three times.

2013—Muirfield: Woods tied for 28th in 2002.

2014—Royal Liverpool: Woods won there in 2006.

2015—St. Andrews: Woods won there in 2000 and 2005.

2016—Royal Troon: Woods finished tied for 9th in 2004.

Best shots at victories: Royal Liverpool and St. Andrews.

The PGA Championship

Woods has won the PGA Championship four times.

2013—Oak Hill: Woods finished tied for 39th in 2003.

2014—Valhalla: Woods won there in 2000.

2015—Whistling Straits: Woods finished tied for 28th in 2010.

2016—Baltusrol:  Woods finished tied for fourth in 2005.

2017—Quail Hollow: New to the PGA rotation, but Woods has won a PGA Tour event there.

2018—Bellrive—Woods missed the 2008 PGA Tour event there due to injury.

Best shots at victories: Valhalla, Baltusrol and Quail Hollow.

forbes.com

The Jason Njoku Story

After graduating from the University of Manchester in 2005, Jason Njoku already knew paid employment was not for him. Ten failed businesses later, he was starting to have a rethink. But with a resilience that seems common in successful entrepreneurs, he kept going. You might know him for his brash demeanor, but you can’t fault his ability to yield results when it comes to internet businesses as he has shown with iROKO Partners. Between taking shots at Otekbits’ name, talking about past failures, and sharing the plans he has for SPARK, I learned more than a few things from Jason. 

IT STARTED WITH…

You finished school in 2005 and you started iROKO Partners?

iROKO started in 2010. Between 2005 and 2010, I had several businesses, ten businesses in fact. They went from a t-shirt fashion brand to a student magazine; I had a web development store, I had all sorts of different weird and wonderful ideas. I had an event marketing company.

Over a 5 – 6 year period, I basically had ten failed ventures. iROKO actually started off as a side project as one of my ventures was failing at the time, so it kind of grew from a side project and just moved to become more and more of my life.

When you say failed, what’s your definition of failure? It didn’t last for long?

So, failure is when you put three years of your life, about a hundred thousand pounds and you basically get nothing back in terms of revenue or anything like that whatsoever. Failure is when you spend the year trying to do something and you still end up with nothing to show for it. Failure is failure. I think failure is relatively easy to judge – if you are in a business and you’re not making any money, then you’re a failure.

If I think of Amazon, they weren’t profitable for a long time; they don’t consider themselves a failure.

I didn’t say profitable, what I said was revenue. If you are building something, you will lose money. But if you are building something, it doesn’t have to just be like building users, it has to be building revenue at the same time. Whenever I tell the story of iROKO, it’s not the story of just us raising money, but it should be the story of how much revenue we are making. Now, in as much as I can’t disclose how much that is, if you are in the business of startups and you are not generating any revenue, then what are you? Because ultimately, a business is a business is a business, and a business survives on cash. If you are not making any cash or trying to make any cash, then you shouldn’t be in the business of doing businesses. At least as far as I’m concerned.

Now are you trying to make cash? Oh, you said you are making revenue already.

We have been. Between 2011 and 2012, we grew revenues like 400+ percent. When it comes to revenues, it’s something we just don’t play games with. I spend a significant amount of my time coaching the companies I work with to make revenue. Interesting thing actually, I wrote an article about what kind of companies SPARK will want to take on and revenue is essential. So, if you don’t understand your revenue model, if you don’t understand how you make money, and if we don’t believe you, we can’t put money in you. I don’t care if you have ten million users and no revenue, I’m not going to eat ten million users, it’s not going to fuel the gen, it’s not going to buy fancy cars, it’s not going to look after my children to be. It’s not going to do anything.

So, in 2010, iROKO started. How did that come about? What’s the real story?

In 2008, I was in Nigeria. I was in a club there and they were playing predominantly Nigerian music and I was quite surprised and I guess proud at the same time that with all the global music out there, they were playing Nigerian music and I thought, ‘hey, I wonder if people know about this in the UK.’ So, I basically bought about a hundred CDs of a variety of musicians and brought them back to the UK thinking I could just set up an online store selling Nigerian music CDs; that basically didn’t work. The first iteration of iROKO was an ecommerce store selling Nigerian music. It didn’t work for like six months but it was only a side project so it wasn’t something that was taking up too much of my time.

Then my mum asked about Nollywood movies because she used to watch them all the time. I went to a store to try and buy the movies and it was a bit of a nightmare. I’m a person who loves movies, predominantly Western ones at that point, and whenever I want to watch a movie, the first thing I do is go to IMDB, see what the latest movies are and get some basic information about them. For Nollywood movies, nothing like that existed. So, I thought, ‘how can a massive phenomenon have no one way you can find and discover movies and have no actual type of online presence?’ I thought that was ridiculous and unsustainable.

At the time, there was a lot of piracy on YouTube. Those days, YouTube’s clip restriction was about 10-15 minutes. People will take an hour movie, chop it into six parts and upload. I thought that obviously a huge community loves this stuff and there is no formal way of doing this; it just made no sense for me not to at least exploit that. So, I took it to Bastian and said we should look at doing this thing. I mentioned not having any money at the time. He said, ‘Shut up, let’s do it.’ He gave me £500 and we started looking at how to do that properly.

In the end, I had to jump on a plane and come to Lagos. Over a nine month period, I came to Lagos two different times and on the third occasion, I moved to Lagos. Then in December 2010, we launched Nollywood Love on YouTube, which is the first legal presence of Nigerian movies online ever. We were one of the first Africans to be part of YouTube’s partnership program which is quite wide spread now, but it was very rare then. I guess I was fortuitous that we were at the right place at the right time.

How many people before Bastian did you talk to about your idea?

I was never part of the Manchester or London Nigerian community so it was strange to people for me to start telling people that I was thinking about doing this Nollywood movie thing and that I was thinking of going back and forth to Nigeria. They thought it was a bit crazy and more importantly, I had failed consistently for five and a half years so there was no reason for them to believe me anymore.

I spoke to the friends that I had and they said, ‘Hey, good luck. We’re not giving the money but good luck.’ Again, luck does not do you anything. It’s good to have but if you don’t have cash as well then you’re fucked.

I’m just happy Bastian believed in me at the end of the day. I had pitched different ideas to the same people on so many occasions and it all had failed. Why will they have ever thought that this one would be the one to amount to anything? I spoke to some of my Nigerian friends, they just weren’t interested.

What was the relationship between you and Bastian? 

We were roommates in school. We lived together over a couple of years while we were in the university. He left Manchester in 2006 while I graduated in 2005 but stayed on for another four years. We wouldn’t see each other but we would always talk on the phone. We were good friends and he was always interested in what I was doing.

He invested in one of my first business which he lost all his money on. I say invested because he was a student at the time and he invested his time and a few hundred pounds. When the iROKO thing came up, it started with £500 then I came back to him for more money and over the course of the year, I probably came back to him like fifty times and it was for small amounts. Then one day, it was over thirty thousand pounds and he told me, ‘Jason, you’re not getting any more money.’

Then we were seeing some progress on some fronts and in the end, he said if we are going to do this thing, we should do it properly. He liquidated his life savings and just said, ‘Jump in the plane, go and live in Nigeria and figure this thing out.’ Only your best friend will do that.

ON PAID EMPLOYMENT

It just sounds like you were a ‘kept man’ with someone taking care of you and in this case, it was Bastian. What were you bringing to the table, minus iROKO being your brain child?

So, I’m smart and I obviously have the personality. I could have gone out and easily gotten a good job.

Why didn’t you? 

The thing is, I want to be rich and I was ready to brutalize myself for that. Some people say ‘get rich or die trying’, that was me. I was like I’m going to change the world, I’m going to make my dent in the universe, I’m going to make so much money and the only way for me to do that is to focus on big things which I thought will yield big returns.

A lot of people who go into entrepreneurship think ‘I’ll do this for six months and see what’s going on,’ I was just like ‘I’m doing this!’ So in that period of time, I took small jobs, but I never stayed for long. I actually made a commitment to myself. I would get so broke that I’d have no money, no food. I was homeless for nine months. I could have gone back home, but I decided that going back to my mom was not the way real men earned their straps. You stay where you are and make things happen.

For me, at any point in time I could have stopped and given up. But once I give up and I start getting a salary, to disconnect yourself from getting a salary is quite a difficult thing. I think salary is cancer to an entrepreneur

BUILDING THE TEAM

When iROKO first started out, it was just you and Bastian? You came back to Nigeria and started talking to distribution channels?

Bastian only joined the company early this year.

How did you convince him to do that?

A boatload of VC money and I said, ‘Look, we are trying to build one of the most valuable properties in Africa. We have a big head start; we are obviously winning’, and I said, ultimately, I needed him. I am a big vision, big sort of talking type guy and Bastian is more detailed oriented and tends to be more operations focused. He is the complete opposite of me so together we make an amazing team. I’m sure by myself, iROKO probably would have spun out of control. I kind of explained to him that it won’t end with iROKO; it would be more like what I’m doing with Spark and so many other things I am interested in doing.

Let’s go back to the first few days when iROKO started. Talking to people, making connections. Who helped you start off? Did you do everything yourself or was it contract staff you got to help? 

For the first year, in most of 2010, I did it myself. Everything. I had like six screens, I was sitting in my cousin’s house in London. Eight hours a day, I’ll just stare at the screens; I spent obscene amounts of time just sitting there trying to figure things out. I think I was scarily ambitious.

In the beginning, it wasn’t contact staff; I pulled in people as I needed them. When we launched Nollywood Love, it was me and like six people working at my apartment in Festac. Over six months, it was me and 45 people. At the end of day it’s me and 100 people. We’ve grown and shrunk the business accordingly depending on the nature of the work we have to do.

And again, bringing online the digital assets of 15 years – and we are talking about text, visual, audio and video – bringing it all from all the different formats is not a lean, four guys in a room type of thing. It needs bodies to get that done.

Do you handpick all these people?

I’m a terrible interviewer. Literally it’s one interview and if I like you…there are two criteria for me. First: are you stupid? If you are stupid, then you can’t work with me. If you are not stupid then we give you a chance. So, if you are smart, if you can string some sentences together, I’m good. And second: do you want a job or do you want to come in and work for me? Can you believe in what I’m actually trying to do? Anyone who has interviewed with me knows that I’d have an interview and at the end of the interview, I’ll make you an offer. I’m just that kind of person; I don’t have the patience for that long ‘getting to know company culture’ and the rest of that stuff.

And co-founders, are they necessarily important?

It depends on the kind of business but I think usually co-founders are. You need someone to share in the pain. It’s horrible to start up. Running a business is not easy, you think it’s all kinds of glitz and glamor, most of it is just really boring stuff. You’d be horrified how much time I spend on admin

ON STARTING OUT

So you moved back to Nigeria and started this. What you did basically was bring Nigerian movies online with a partnership from YouTube and that was it?

Simplest thing. The issue with the partnership was actually a very difficult thing to get. I was trying to get it for three months and I just couldn’t so, again, in steps my angel Bastian and he said he knew someone who is the largest independent film distributor in Germany. We reached out to this guy and spoke to him, told him we were trying to contact someone from YouTube and asked if there was any way he could help us. He was kind enough to listen to me and hooked us up with someone from YouTube. Once I showed them the data of what people were actually doing on YouTube with the pirated stuff, they got really excited. So my original YouTube partnership, even though there was a Google in Nigeria and in the UK, was with Google in Germany. We got the contract on a Tuesday, by Sunday, I jumped in a plane and moved to Nigeria. It was like that was what we were waiting for.

What was the hard part in this? The technology?

The technology was easy. Getting the licenses was the most difficult.

How long did that take?

We launched with 200 movie licenses in December. It took me the best part of eight months just to figure the licensing piece out. We had to deal with the complexity of not trying to get fucked over. The whole iROKO business is basically built on a stack of legal notices and this is not the most respected thing in Nigeria. So we had to make sure that we could protect ourselves from that. It’s called a fuckability factor.

So, we were very aggressive. We were very content focused in a world where no one valued content. The biggest innovation we brought to Nigerian media space is that we value content more than anybody else. And when I say we value content, we pay for Nollywood content more than anybody. We pay more than DSTV for content because we value it. We have almost forced them to increase their content cost by hundreds of percentile just to catch up with us. Our biggest fear is DSTV because ultimately, they have eight channels dedicated to Nollywood type content.

I would think that your target audience are not in Nigeria

Today. There is a tomorrow, and tomorrow usually looks a lot like today. There was a DVD market in the US, we just destroyed that basically. Seventy percent of their market just disappeared in like a year. Do you honestly think if we had like 5,000 free movies online and you had a fast internet connection, you’d go out and…

But that would take us a while, getting the fast internet connection.

Absolutely. But the strangest thing about progress is that it always seems slow until its not. Ten years ago, no one had a mobile phone. Now, everyone’s got a mobile phone or two. I think, lets see how the next 3 – 5 years looks like. And the interesting thing is that iROKOtv is what, 17 months old? It’s a very young business. Let’s see what it looks like in like 5 years’ time.

And you are going to stay strictly online? You’re not going to try and compete with DSTV directly in their space?

Last year, I actually looked at how we could get into TV. I’m a big fan of TV. We looked at acquiring a TV channel in the US and in the UK, we even spoke to StarTimes at the. In the end, we looked at the space and we thought they’d have to come and beat us where we are. With TV, it’s more difficult; there are lots of gate keepers and I don’t like gate keepers. So, our concern today is not DSTV or trying to compete with DSTV. Our concern is to make sure that we are so awesome that they will have to somehow find a way to deal with us.

I think Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, said recently that HBO will end up having to look like Netflix because they have to go online, they have to mobile, they have to do these things. So he wants to look more like HBO in terms of his content deals and his strategy before HBO ends up looking more like Netflix. In the end, do you honestly believe in ten years’ time that people will be using mobiles and internet to watch TV programming? Of course they will. Will we need to go back and be on TV or will we need to be on every device? I think as long as it many seem, things move much more faster than we usually think.

ON FUNDING

When did you start having other people minus Bastian investing in you?

So, Bastian put his money in. It wasn’t enough. Then we met with the Tiger Global guys and the first raise was $3 million, then $5 million. We announced $8 million as a big number because we did not want people to know yet that we had raised the money. By the time we announced it, it was game over already.

How did Tiger Global get to hear about you?

They read about us from Sarah Lacy on TechCrunch. When she came, we had grown beyond my apartment, we had about forty people, we were doing fifty thousand dollars a month in revenue so we were actually profitable when she came.

So why did you need funding?

The difference between a business that does $1 million in revenue and a business that can quickly grow to doing tens of millions of dollars in revenue usually is funding. So, to open up our global office base is not an easy thing. To hire the sort of people we need is very difficult. I think you’ll be hard pressed to find any actual big consumer internet companies that haven’t taken funding.

You spoke about having revenue models, what’s yours?

Too much money, that’s our revenue model. As much money from where ever we can. We have revenue from our advertising business, both display and video. We have direct relationships with different advertisers, locally and globally. At the moment,I have an ad sales team in Johannesburg, Lagos, New York and London where we are just trying to make money from advertising. We have a subscription business based out of New York. We launched iROKOtv PLUS in July 2012 and, to get access to brand new movies, you basically pay $5 a month.

LET’S TALK SPARK

So you took VC money, started your company, made money and now you are putting money into other companies

It’s the circle of life. But they are very separate things, there is no iRoko money in SPARK. SPARK is a completely different thing.

Whose money is in SPARK?

My money, Bastian’s money, my wife’s money and we have a private individual who is interested in giving us some money as well.

How do you find these people interested in giving you money? Or do they find you?

Rich people like to do business with rich people. I learned that the hard way. That is the reason why the world is what it is. Social mobility is dead. Three years ago, if I wanted to raise $1000, I would struggle. Now, I can make a few phone calls and raise a million dollars just because it’s me. I think what has changed: Ten failures, One success.

Let’s go back to SPARK

SPARK is my pension.

You know, I was thinking, it wasn’t like you started iROKO cos you absolutely loved Nollywood movies. Fine, you loved movies but the driving force, to me, was the need to make money.

No, it’s not need. I don’t even like money. The strange thing about me is that I have no interest in how to spend money. I’m sure if you look around, I wear the same things over and over again. I have no care for fashion, I have a thing for Range Rover cars but beyond that, I genuinely don’t care about most things. I care about building. There is just something beautiful about building things. So, I work every single day, I read reports, I look at stock charts. I’m just interested in the business of business. iROKO was an interesting business opportunity I thought I could exploit, and I guess SPARK is like a similar big gamble.

It’s not much of a gamble

A million dollars put down into about twenty unsubstantiated teams is a big gamble. If it wasn’t, why is everyone not doing it?

These COMPANIES you brought together, they are different people who own all of them?

I have been sort of half advising. I’m very active online, I advise people all the time.Whether you want my advice or not, I will give it to you. So, these are guys I felt had the potential to be the next generation of like internet beasts. Interesting ideas, interesting teams; they just needed a little bit of mentorship and some money. And I think that’s pretty much what we bring to the table.

So each company is owned by different people?

Somethings we have created ourselves because we thought it was an interesting space so we kind of built a small team for that. A lot of the bigger businesses we are putting more money into are businesses that existed before. Take hotels.ng for example, he was there for a year and we thought he needed to move faster with somethings and we could help him.

The idea was really simple, it was just like: you didn’t have the idea quite right, but I like your hustle. I think with the idea quite right and just some strategic advice on a non-frequent basis, you could build something pretty awesome. That’s pretty much it – strategically helping them get a framework for their ideas and just make sure they are well funded.

And its only technology companies you are taking on?

Yeah

Why do they have names like that? Why is it Drinks or Bus or To Let? Why not some brand name like Kuluya?

When you see Insured, what do you think it is? If you are going to build a brand, the most important thing is that people get you. A lot of startups have some pretty stupid names. I think you should try where possible to improve your chances of success and sometimes the name looks after that.

I think iROKO Partners is a shit name. I was telling Bastian I want to rebrand it to just iROKO. iROKO Partners with what? It sounds like a private equity firm or something. I think simple things like stupid names have a massive impact. If you call up like Nigerian Breweries and say I’m from Drinks.ng, understandable. If you go to pitch your hotel to get some direct relationship and you say you are from Hotels.ng, understandale. If you talk to insurance companies and you say you’re calling from Insured.ng, you get it. if you call yourself a christian dating community then Christians.ng…

Its still vague. It sounds like a group of Christians coming together

But what is it? The whole point of the dating site is: you want like minded Christian individuals to come together. You don’t want strippers and prostitutes on there.

So, as opposed to me thinking it was you guys being lazy, its really you keeping it simple?

Brutally simple.

The whole point of SPARK is to give other businesses a structure?

No, just to give it cash. We write checks; our edge is access to funding.

IN RETROSPECT

What would you tell your 2005 self?

I would have told my younger self, go straight to the internet. Don’t waste your time on anything else. I have no interest in anything else other than internet or technology. Not banking, not oil. I would be a terrible banker and a terrible oil executive. Internet is the thing. Go to the internet!

otekbits.com

The Linda Ikeji Story

The history of blogging sounds like any other ’History of’ – not very exciting. Yet blogs, an online platform where people share information and opinions, provide some of the most exciting reads today. Hundreds of millions of blogs about politics, business and entertainment exist on the World Wide Web, how do you choose which ones to read?

For many African readers, searching for the latest ‘gist’, gossip and celebrity news, it’s an easy choice. 

The Linda Ikeji blog is now a household name and undeniably one of the most profitable, exciting and often controversial, blogs in Africa. The blogger behind the medium, Linda Ikeji, is herself a fascinating woman. How she turned a once obscure practice into a money making machine and has successfully sustained it since 2006 is a testament to the commitment it takes to be an entrepreneur a creative industry. Linda shares freely today how she makes millions doing what she loves – blogging. In her characteristic casual writing style, she says “Now I don’t chase money anymore…it chases me.” Hers is a rags to riches story that emerged in the midst of controversy when radio presenter openly said she was not a role model. In response, Linda shared her story which was deeply personal with noteworthy business lessons.

Linda Ikeji, a native of Nkwerre in Imo State, Nigeria, was born in 1980 to a struggling family, the second of seven children. From as early as 10 years old, Linda was writing. The fiction she penned down were praised by her friends and family and over time she cultivated a passion for news. Unlike many teenagers her age, Linda loved watching newscasters and interviews and by the time the opportunity presented to attend university in Lagos, her course choice was decided: Mass Communication. She was admitted to study English in university to her disappointment, but she decided to make the best of it. To support herself and her family through school, Linda began working at the age of 17, doing everything from waitressing and ushering to modelling and bartending, none of which paid a lot in the late 90s. She recalls, “I’d leave lectures, go to a hotel and sell beer from 1pm till 10pm. I did this for a few months. It wasn’t easy but I had to survive”. Linda worked hard, she was determined to succeed and become a journalist, her lifelong dream. In her second year of university however, she experienced a defining moment where she made a choice that would impact the rest of her life, particularly her decisions on avenues for earning money.

Being a beautiful model with growing popularity, Linda was approached by several wealthy men looking for sexual favours in exchange for money – a common practice in many higher institutions. These men offered quick access to the easy lifestyle that was so prized among university girls yet excluded many from poor backgrounds. For an aspiring career woman and entrepreneur, the quick money held deep appeal. Yet Linda had decided early on never to give her body in exchange for money so when the temptation came, hungry, desperate Linda, battling family pressures to send money, was able to resist. Following her experience with nearly compromising her values, she renewed her commitment to hard work and living with dignity no matter the circumstances.

After university she worked hard to break into the journalism trade, launching her media company, Blackdove Communications, a modelling agency and events management outfit. She also started what she describes in her first ever blog post as her “true passion”, her magazine called, FM & B. The first issue was released in 2006 and after discovering how capital-intensive and time-consuming magazine publishing was, only two more editions made it to print. Fortunately, in that same year, Bella Naija, another popular Nigerian blog, carried a story about Linda herself and for the first time, Linda began to see a new possibility to take her writing to the world. Blogging had all the charm: it was free except for the cost of an internet connection, easy to do and gave you access to millions of readers instantly. From that first Bella Naija blog post, she was sold.

7 years later, Linda Ikeji’s blog is averaging between than fifty and one hundred thousand visits every day from various countries. In fact, the blog has become a melting pot for Nigerians based at home and in the diaspora. Speaking about how others can turn something as unconventional as blogging into a multi-million naira business, Linda said “You have to love blogging. You can’t say I want to blog because I want to make money. It takes a stepping stone to get there. There are over a thousand blogs, but what will make people enjoy visiting your blog depends on the efforts you put into it. So, be passionate about it, be consistent, don’t blog once or twice in a week, blog everyday if you can, enjoy it, and love it.” Her advice is on par with the words of many success coaches and creative giants – love what you do and you will never have to work another day in your life.

Although Linda began her business as a hobby, did it for four years before making any money and had no set goals for it at the beginning, she’s making the most of every opportunity that comes her way. Her blog generates millions of naira annually from advertisements run by companies and Linda has gradually moved into a field she calls ‘motivational writing’. Speaking about her first book It Takes You, Linda said “I hope more than anything else that everyone who reads this book learns something from it. I hope it changes their perception of some things and more than anything else I hope it inspires them to go out there and make something of themselves”.

The money she earns has not only ended her family struggles but has brought her great influence in the entertainment industry and amongst young people. To her credit, her influence has been a force for change. By mobilising thousands of readers in her online community, Linda was able to lend a voice to Blessing Effiong, a young girl who had been detained for four years in prison without a trial. Four months after the story was reported on the blog, Blessing walked out of prison with her freedom, grateful to all her supporters including Linda Ikeji.

The story of Linda Ikeji, Nigeria’s most popular blogger, shows that you can create value, and therefore a business and influence, from whatever you’re passionate about; and even when controversy abounds, there are many opportunities to do good.

Whether you agree with her tactics and content or not, we have to hand it to Linda, she has entertained, engaged, inspired and provoked Nigerians for 7 years doing what she loves best. She has turned blogging into a lucrative business and shows no sign of stopping.

www.ventures-africa.com

Traits of a Successful Failure By John C. Maxwell

Nobody likes to fail. But if we’re honest, we understand that failure is a part of life. There is no success without some amount of failure. Great inventors like Thomas Edison experience a lot of failures on the way to a successful invention. Even the best baseball players strike out much more often than they hit a home run. Anyone pursuing a goal of value will make mistakes and wrong decisions. So the key is to expect failure, to prepare for it, to be ready turn it into a lesson and a stepping stone to success. There is such a thing as a successful failure.

These are some of the traits of a successful failure:

1. Optimism. Find the benefit in every bad experience.

Thomas Edison redefined the failures in his experiments as “10,000 ways that won’t work.” He expected failure and counted it as one of the costs of finding a way that would work. By finding the benefit in the failure, he was able to keep attempting something great.

Optimism is not limited to a few people as a personality trait. Optimism is a choice. And while it doesn’t guarantee immediate positive results, it does result in higher motivation and stronger character.

2. Responsibility. Change your response to failure by accepting responsibility.

When we fail at something, it’s easy to blame someone or something else. Perhaps the circumstances or the people that we worked with. But failure is a learning opportunity. If I blame someone else, I’m just cheating myself out of that lesson.

Responsibility is more important than reputation. And it tends to lead to reward, which can lead to more responsibility. Your willingness to take responsibility marks you as someone who’s mature and can be trusted to learn from the failure and keep trying.

3. Resilience. Say goodbye to yesterday.

The ability to move on from failure is key to continuing to attempt great things. The mind can only focus on so much, so if we’re still too focused on what we did wrong, we can’t give all of our attention to attempting to do things right.

Here are five behaviors of people who haven’t gotten over past difficulties:

• Comparison. Either measuring your failures against those of others, or convincing yourself that your circumstances were harder than theirs.
• Rationalization. Telling yourself and others that you have good reasons for not getting over past hurts and mistakes. Believing that those who encourage you “just don’t understand.”
• Isolation. Pulling back and keeping yourself separate from others, either to avoid dealing with the issues, or to continue to feel sorry for yourself.
• Regret. Getting stuck lamenting or trying to fix things that cannot be changed.
• Bitterness. Feeling like a victim and blaming others for negative outcomes.

4. Initiative. Take action and face your fear.

When we make mistakes and then consider trying again, we all feel some measure of fear. Facing the unknown, we easily come up with a list of things to worry about. But the act of worrying doesn’t help us at all in accomplishing our goals. As Corrie ten Boom said, “Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength.

Just believing that failure can be good isn’t enough to help us succeed. We need to act on that belief and take a step forward again in pursuit of our dream. Only then do we learn from our mistakes and make progress.

A successful failure is a failure that we respond to correctly: by finding the good, taking responsibility, moving on, and taking action. How do you respond to failure? Which of the above characteristics would you benefit from adopting?

johnmaxwellonleadership.com

How To Change Your Life with Power of Ideas by Sam Adeyemi

Ideas rule the world. You need to know and believe it!  There are million dollar ideas around you every day. The quality of ideas that flow through your mind determines the quality of your life and success. You can never rise above the level of your idea.

Ideas are products of thinking that emanate from your mind. Just as an architect will sit down first, think and see clearly in his mind the dream of a house before putting it down in pencil, your idea must clearly be seen in your mind and you need to capture it down in writing.

Have you seen an edifice before and you said, whaooh, this is a beautiful building! Know that it is somebody’s idea and it is the product of someone’s quality thinking. Have you ever seen a great man that you appreciate and wish to pattern your life after? You wish to have the quality of life the person has. Know that what makes him great is the quality of ideas that flow through his mind. He is the product of his thinking.

It therefore simply means that you are what you think. You are 100% the product of your thinking and your life is shaped by your idea. So, if you want to change the quality of your life, allow quality ideas to flow through your mind.

It is one thing to know and understand the life-changing and potent power of ideas but it is another thing to know how to generate powerful ideas that are capable of delivering the type of quality life you desire into your hands.

Firstly, if you are going to get new ideas, it is essential that you eradicate negative thinking from your mind. This is very important.

Impossibility thinking must be sent to jail. You will not be able to produce creative ideas if you think negatively. You must therefore delete the word impossible from your vocabulary.

You must not allow money to influence your ability to quality ideas. Some people are hardly able to come up with creative ideas because their brains often pack up when they remember that they do not have money or resources to execute the ideas even if they come up with one.

Note that it is the quality of ideas that flows through your minds that matters because great ideas have the capability to magnetise money and resources.

nuggets4nobles.com