Onassis

Introduction

It is important for anyone who seeks success in practical life to study others' success stories, learn about how they could reach such success, know their strengths and weaknesses and understand how they could face any challenges or problems they faced and how they could overcome them. In this assignment, Aristotle Onassis' success story will be discussed in order to learn how he could succeed in business world and become the richest man in the world. His strengths and his weaknesses will also be discussed in addition to approaching means he used to overcome any failure he faced in order to learn from such a successful model.

Body

Aristotle Onassis was born in 1906 in Karatass which is one of Smyrna suburbs. He mastered four languages when he was sixteen years old , he spoke English, Greek, Spanish and Turkish. The World War 1 caused great loss for his family as they lost all their properties and they escaped poor to Greece and became refugees as Smyrna was fired. During the fire, three of his relatives died burnt. In 1923, he traveled to work in Buenos Aires in a British telephone company and that was his first job. His father helped him in importing tobacco which was the business that helped him form the first million dollars. He established many companies such as Olympic Airways, worked in oil shipping, established whaling companies but his big failure was losing a part of the Omega project for oil factories in Greece. He got married to  Athina Livanos then to Jacqueline Kennedy and got two children, Alexander and Christina.(Prionas et al, 1996)

To reach success, Onassis had strengths as well as weaknesses. Among the strengths are his cleverness and professionalism when he was a telephone engineer, he had intelligent thinking as he found that soft Turkish tobacco will be better used for women, he had marketing abilities as he used to study the markets' needs and make use of them and he was distinguished with the ability of making the right decisions at the right times. His relatives provided him with the aid as he was lucky for having a father working in shipping and helpful cousins. In the beginning of his life, his family lost everything they had and turned to be poor which was a very dangerous situation for Onassis but he was full of enthusiasm and ambition accompanied with insisting on success. There were also many times when failure threatened his business career and weaknesses were embodied in the limit use for women cigarettes, failing in signing many business contracts and taxes that the Greek government set on shipping. (The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, 2013)

Onassis managed to overcome the problems he faced during his business career as he was clever in having social relationships with important people in the society and in the Greek government as well as his ability to take quick actions such as when he was endangered with taxes and he discovered that such taxes will endanger the whole country finance which he explained to the government in a memo sent to them and this helped in solving the problem. His deep thinking and creativity helped him when the women cigarettes business failed as he established his own company for cigarettes and then success came soon to him. He was dare and this is a critical matter that could lead a businessman to failure or success but Onassis once took a loan from the bank to buy 16 liberty ships with contracts with companies made at a time he had no money and this was intelligent but risky. Another obstacle was when he needed to buy T2 oil American tankers which were intended to be sold for Americans only but quickly he established American company and shared American citizens and then he managed to buy the tankers and the company was closed after that. (Prionas et al, 1996)

Conclusion

The youth who wish to succeed in their business career and reach their goals need to read and study the success stories of great famous and successful people who did not let despair destroy them and continued in their work facing any barriers that could hinder their success track. Onassis was presented as a model for those who wishes to success in business or in any other field and to challenge failure whenever and wherever it appears.