WWE NIGHT OF CHAMPIONS

Posted by muyella on

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Here’s the card for WWE Night of Champions 2013:

WWE Champion Randy Orton vs. Daniel Bryan

World Heavyweight Champion Alberto Del Rio vs. Rob Van Dam

CM Punk vs. Curtis Axel & Paul Heyman (Handicap Elimination Match)
If CM Punk wins, he gets to face Paul Heyman one-on-one.

Divas Champion AJ Lee vs. Natalya vs. Brie Bella vs. Naomi (Four Way Match)

Tag Team Champions The Shield vs. Tag Team Turmoil Winners (Pre-Show)

Pre-Show Tag Team Turmoil Match:
Prime Time Players vs. The Usos vs. 3MB vs. Tons of Funk vs. Real Americans
Winning team faces The Shield on pay-per-view.

RESULTS

Pre-show: Tag Team Turmoil Match: The Prime Time Players defeated The Real Americans, The Usos, Tons Of Funk and 3MB. Darren Young got the pin for the Prime Time Players after a gut buster on Jack Swagger. This earned the Prime Time Players a shot at the WWE Tag Team Championships later in the night.

1. Intercontinental Championship Match: Curtis Axel (c) defeated Kofi Kingston. This match was made by Triple H because the IC title was not being defended on a pay-per-view built around the idea of all champions defending. Triple H “randomly” selected Kofi Kingston, who lost to Axel after a neckbreaker.

2. Fatal Fourway For The Divas Championship: AJ Lee (c) defeated Brie Bella, Naomi and Natalya. Lee won by submission with the Black Widow on Natalya.

3. World Heavyweight Championship Match: Rob Van Dam defeated Alberto Del Rio (c). Van Dam won by disqualification when Del Rio wouldn’t release a cross armbreaker with RVD in the ropes. Del Rio retains the title. After the match, Ricardo Rodriguez held a chair so that Van Dam could hit the Van Terminator on Del Rio.

4. The Miz defeated Fandango. Miz won by submission with a figure-four leg lock.

5. Handicap Elimination Match: Paul Heyman defeated CM Punk. The result is technically “Curtis Axel and Paul Heyman defeated CM Punk,” but Axel was eliminated via submission with an Anaconda Vice. Punk handcuffed Heyman and attacked him with a kendo stick, but before he could finish him off, Ryback appeared and put Punk through a table. Ryback then put Heyman on Punk to give Heyman the victory.

6. United States Championship Match: Dean Ambrose (c) defeated Dolph Ziggler. Ambrose hit Ziggler with a headlock driver to win the match.

7. WWE Tag Team Championship Match: The Shield (c) defeated The Prime Time Players. Seth Rollins pinned Titus O’Neil after a spear from Roman Reigns.

8. WWE Championship Match: Daniel Bryan defeated Randy Orton (c) to become the new WWE Champion. Bryan pinned Orton after a running knee to the face. There were going-ons involving a ref bump and a speedy count, so that may come into play tomorrow night.

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REAL ENTREPRENEUR

Posted by muyella on

Everyone recognizes a great entrepreneur when they work with one, but most entrepreneurs don’t know what to look for in themselves that will drive that perception by others. In my experience, there is no magic gene involved, just simple good habits executed consistently and convincingly until everyone around you in a startup wants to follow your example.

This leading by example is easy to say, but not so easy to put into action. Most leadership gurus, including John Baldoni, have provided generic recipes, like his book from a while back, “Lead By Example: 50 Ways Great Leaders Inspire Results.” The points are great, but can be made even simpler and more actionable by adapting then to the world of the entrepreneur:

  1. Demonstrate character. In the dictionary definition, character is said to be “the stable and distinctive qualities built into an individual’s life which determine his or her response regardless of circumstances.” Steve Jobs of Apple had character, and the people around him knew what he stood for in good times as well as bad.
  2. Be accountable for your actions. In a startup, things don’t always work, and it’s easy to blame someone else, the poor economy, or just bad luck. Thomas Edison made no excuses for ten thousand light failures. Challenged by his contemporaries, Edison soberly responded: “I have not failed. I have just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.”
  3. Check your ego at the door (and keep it there). For an entrepreneur, this is often evident in the willingness to be coached, by outside experts or by your own team. We all know too many people who won’t listen to any advice from anyone. That’s just hubris, and it doesn’t inspire anyone.
  4. Promote resilience. There is no shame in getting knocked down; it’s getting back up that matters. In a startup, pivots and problems will happen. Learn to anticipate change, bounce back stronger, and teach others to do the same. Dean Kamen, while still struggling with the Segway Human Transporter, holds 440 other device patents.
  5. Get in the habit of asking questions but do not expect easy answers. That includes taking a hard look in the mirror, and facing reality. Howard Schultz, who grew Starbucks to 13,000 stores by 2008, decided to step back in as CEO when the economy was killing his stores, and refocus everyone on the customer. Now he has over 17,000 stores.
  6. Manage around obstacles. We’ve all seen the entrepreneur who is struggling to keep the business alive by tackling the daily obstacle. No one is looking around the corner to see the next one.Richard Branson, now worth about $4.4 billion, offers this advice: “Obstacles and challenges are healthy for everyone.” He is always looking ahead.
  7. Drive innovation. Great businesses these days start with innovation. Entrepreneur examples include Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google, who turned a new search technology into a tool that most of us couldn’t live without. Encourage everyone on the team to think and act creatively. Good ideas can come from anyone at any time.
  8. Encourage dissent about issues but promote civility around people. Receptiveness to dissent allows for corrective feedback to monitor ineffectual startup practices, poor and unfavorable decision making, and insensitivity to team needs and desires. This is positive, but a loss of civility more than negates all these positives.
  9. Create a winning culture. Entrepreneur leaders drive values, values drive behavior, behavior drives culture, and culture drives performance. High performance makes new leaders. This is the self-reinforcing circle of excellence every startup needs for success. Winning business cultures, like at Apple, are set from the top.
  10. Teach others “the how.” Then get out of the way and let people do their jobs. Great entrepreneurs are mentors to everyone on their team. Effective entrepreneurs are not afraid to “get their hands dirty” working with the troops. Bill Gates of Microsoft, even late in his career, wasn’t afraid to jump in and write some code to illustrate a point.

Being an entrepreneur may start with that million dollar idea, but turning that idea into a great startup is all about results. The quickest way to great results is to build a great team, and let it multiply your productivity. Using the actions described here as a model, take a look in the mirror to see how well you are leading by example.

10 Smart Things I’ve Learned from People Who Never Went to College – Forbes

Posted by muyella on

1.  You can learn something useful from anyone.

Whenever we find ourselves ignoring someone because we’ve already determined that they aren’t “smart” enough to say something meaningful, we’ve made a big mistake. Besides being presumptuous and arrogant, this mindset blocks out every useful thing the other person might pass along. Instead of just listening and mining the conversation for nuggets of wisdom, we allow our pre-existing bias to brand everything as  “not smart enough for me.” Incredibly bad idea. I’ve yet to meet someone who couldn’t teach me something.

2. If quality slips, it really doesn’t matter how good your ideas were.

This one I learned from a couple of my uncles who worked as quality control specialists on assembly lines. The most ingenious design plans, no matter how many brains contributed to them, can fatally falter in the execution phase if quality slips.  This is equally true for intangible plans.  Imparting greatness requires a continuum of effort and attention, not just an initial brain-fueled flurry to get exemplary ideas on paper.

3. Don’t ever let a bully intimidate you – not even once.

Now, some might say this one is too dogmatic because it’s possible to allow a bully to intimidate you in the short term so you can get the upper hand in the long term. But the best advice I ever received about this came from a retired truck driver who said, paraphrasing, “When you let a bully intimidate you, the bully doesn’t necessarily win, but you definitely lose.” What he meant was, you lose upstairs where the loss takes a progressively worse toll on your psyche. Yes you can recover from that, but it’s going to take a lot more effort to bring your self-esteem up to par again than if you’d stood your ground to begin with. Reasonable people can differ on this, of course, but I think it’s sound advice.

4. Reciprocity is the name of the relationship game and always will be.

If you can’t find it in yourself to return a favor, or give back more than you got when someone helped you out of a bind, then you are relationship handicapped. While this may seem like basic intuitive logic (and it is), it’s amazing how often it’s ignored.  While relationships shouldn’t be tit for tat arrangements, the underlying willingness to reciprocate—even if it’s really hard to do—must be there for the relationship to grow and flourish. None of us are one-way streets.

5. Learning is good; Doing is better.

Well, ok, this one is a little bit on the nose.  Learning is more than good – it’s essential. Learning is the elixir that makes the human brain the most powerful organic decision-making and problem-solving tool on the planet.  The main point here (passed on to me by a former co-worker) is that there’s a certain magic in doing that many people simply miss out on. You can learn a lot about car engines, but until you get under the hood and work on one, you can’t see just how remarkable an invention these machines we take for granted truly are.  That’s one example of thousands, but the same principle applies.

6. Kindness isn’t optional.

Kurt Vonnegut famously said, “There’s only one rule that I know of… you’ve got to be kind.”  Why do some people just “get” this while others find being kind a chore? Personally, I think it has a lot to do with our need to feel right, and an attendant unwillingness to consider that maybe we really aren’t right, and it’s not worth treating another person unkindly to prove whatever point is on the table. Besides that, being unkind is illogical because it only incites unkindness aimed at you, and who wants that?

7. You can survive anything (assuming it doesn’t physically kill you).

More than one person has said something like this to me, and I think it’s dead on right.  Often it’s rumination about how we won’t survive this or that calamity that really gets us. But usually we can find the inner reserves to overcome just about anything, and will probably surprise ourselves that we pulled it off.  I’m not saying it won’t hurt like hell, or bring us to our very brink, but we usually give ourselves far too little credit for being able to overcome difficulty.  I won’t quote Nietzsche here, but you get the point.

8. Get a dog.

I suppose this one could also be “get a cat” or a fish for that matter, but as someone once told me, there’s something about a dog that brings out the best in its owners.  Companionship with a beast brimming with unconditional love does a body good – especially when hard times hit.

9. Money is important, but experience is invaluable.

I honestly can’t recall where I first heard this but I’m putting it on this list anyway because I think it’s really important. When you buy something, you’ll enjoy that thing for awhile, but our in-built tendency toward habituation will eventually assert itself and the thing will become yet another thing we own. When we invest in experience, however, we are buying memories, and new learning, and new ways of thinking, and a whole lot more.  Those are things that become part of who we are, and no physical item can touch that dollar for dollar.

10. Just be ready.

We’ll end with a nice bit of simple logic. Just be ready…for anything. Quoting that inestimable philosopher, Mike Tyson, “Everyone has a plan – until they get punched in the face.”  Exactly.  So be ready to get punched in the face, and then refer back to #7 on this list.