Have you ever wondered how do people get ahead? How does someone like Elon Musk succed where other have failed.
W're often told success is directly correlated with hard work. That we won't get anywhere without putting in 10,000 hours or by working 100 hours weeks. But what if that wasn't the case? what if those who'd succeeded simply had an unfair advantage over their competitors? And what if we find out that we've all get our own set of unfair advantages that we can use to succeed in our lives as well?
Hey, friends, welcome back to the website, a new series where I am gonna be summarising key insights from books.
Today we're talking about "The unfair advantages "How you already have what it takes to succeed." It's written by these two entrepreneur and investor Ash Ali and Hasan kubba, And it starts with the thesis that life is fundamentally unfair.
When we're looking at successful people, they normally didn't just get these with hard work, there was normally other stuff the played a strong role like luck, circumstances, privilege, that sort of thing. And equation that came to mind when I was reading through the book was that, success, however we wanna define it is some sort of combination of fair play and unfair advantages.
Fair play means factors that we would look at and think, "All right, mate, fair play". Let's say there's a start-up founder who gets up at 3 o'clock every morning and then goes for a two hour run and then kind of hustles on his or her laptop all day and just works really, really hard.
That would be a fair advantages we would say or I made fair play to that. In a way, it's something that any of us could replicate if we wanted to and therefore it is fair. But that some start-up founder, let' say his or her parents was super-rich and invested half a million dollars into their company from day one, that would be an unfair advantage. It's asn advantage that really helps the business but something that the rest of us can't easily replicate.
The unfair advantage is about stealing kind of one of rout cause of success that isn't spoken about and that's essentially that life isn't a level playing field. Everybody has different strengths and weaknesses inherently, that's number one anyway. But number two, circumstances are diffrent. So people have access to the network, to finance, or the right location the right timing.
Hadan explained, unfair advantages aren't just about our strengths, they're also about our circumstances basically something that gives us a competitive edge, something that someone else can't easily replicate.
And one of the main ideas of the book, which is why the subtitle is "How you already have what it takes to succeed", these unfair advantages aren't just for people who are rich and famous, they're for everyone. We all have our own unfair advantages in our ways. How do we find out what our unfair advantages are?
Well, we can use the MILES framework. Where did the miles framework come from? Is that something that you guy came up with or- yeah, it's something Ash actually initially came up with, is the MILES framework just breaking down into money, intelligence and insight, location and luck, education, expertise and status.
So we developed into that and then we thought okay, where's does mindset fit in? And then we thought, okay, ths is all on a foundation of mindset. If you don't have the right mindset, you;re just not getting anywhere.
Let's start with M which stands for money. let's take Even Spiegel, the billionaire co-founder of snapchat who become the world's youngest self-made billionaire at just age 24. He grew up in a multimillion-doller house in los Angeles, attended expensive private schools, and had parents who were powerful and well-connected lawyers. This put him in unique circles and gave him access to tech entrepreneurs and CEOs that most people could never dream of accessing. Clearly he had to put in the work and the ideas but his example shows how money, prestige, and power can be big unfair advantage.
Secondly, the I stands for Intelligence and insight. So let's take the collison Brothers for examples. They co-founded stripe which became a multi-billion dollar payments precessing company before either of them had turned 22. Patrick collision sort of invented his own computer programming language when he was 16 and he left school a year early to enrol at MIT. HIs brother John finished with the highest ever score on his leaving certificate, sort of the Irish equivalent of A-level's, and he'd been accepted into Harvard before he'd even done his exams. And yes, of course, loads of hard work and effort went into it but I think it's reasonably fair to say that collision brother's intelligence was some sort of unfair advantage.
Thirdly, we've got L which stands for location and luck. And as Ray Kroc, the Pioneer of McDonald's once said, "The two most important requirements "for major success are first, "being in the right place at the right time" and secondly, "doing something about it". Location is clearly important. For instance businesses cluster as they for silicon valley and the right location can be key to unlocking opportunities, making connections and accessing a target market. Luck is even more interesting and probably argue that luck isn't really an unfair advantage. I'd probably put it into the fair play section instead. Yeah, there are gonna be some lucky breaks that are as professor McGonagall say- sheer, dum luck.
But a lot of the time, we can sort of manufacture our own luck by just exposing our selves in a non-weird way to more things. Ash and Hasan talked about this in the book as well, take more action, do more things meet more people, go to more events blog about your start-up, producer things and publish them, get feedback put more stuff out into the word. And the idea is that as we expose ourselves to more to these opportunities, we get a lot more luck coming our way, so in a way the more of this stuff we do, the more of a surface area we have for serendipity.
The more we allow luck to appear and them we can take advantage of it. So I think that's more a sort of fair advantage rather than an unfair advantage.
Moving on, the E Stands for education and expertise. Right, let's be honest, having a fancy degree from a fancy university probably is an unfair advantage, depending on what you're going for, like let's say hypothetically you wanted to start a youtube channel aimed initially at electrical students, If you happen to be a electrical student at cambridge university, which is famously a good university, you're probably wanna plug that wherever you could because yeah, that's your unfair advantage. It's something that other people in that space can't replicate very easily and therefore it becomes more interesting, more brandable. Beyond that, in the book Ash and Hasan say that there are basically three benefits to a good education, knowledge, network and signalling. But to be honest for me and most of my friends the majority of our electrical knowledge comes from books and the internet, not from our fancy university degrees.
When it comes to network, yeah, fair enough, being at university unlocks a certain type of network but when it comes to signalling, like increasingly, especially in the startup word people are caring less and less about where you went to university and much more about what you've been doing on the sides or what skills you can bring to the table. Our value, you know the unfair advantages doesn't necessarily come from the specific qualification that we've got, although it can, bit more often than not, these days it's coming more from our expertise and that is something that we can build on our own by learning in our own time and education. It's not just something that's sone to use until the age of 22. It's a lifelong endeavour that you can, you know, take online classes and stuff.
Finally, we have S for Status. And of course status can be can unfair advantage. Elon musk's status in the world is so high right now that if he starts my new company, it's guaranteed to be successful in some way or at least everyone's gonna hear about it. regardless of how ridiculous the name is. In the book, Ash and Hasan talk about how we can develop inner status, so things like confidence and self-esteem and how this can help us if we don't have the outward status of people like Elon Musk.
And to be honest, I fully agree with the thesis that it's really important to develop confidence and self-esteem and all that stuff in ourselves. I just think it's a little bit contrived to put that under the status segment because, I don't know, I think it's more of a fair advantage, like anyone could gain more confidence and self-esteem and stuff if they put the effort into it, therefore I see that more as fair advantage rather than as unfair advantage that some people are just gonna have.
So the idea behind this MILES framework is that we can use the categories to help us figure out what our own unfair advantages are but this stuff isn't just for people wanting to start a business or to be entrepreneur. Going back to sort of our hypothetical audience, a first-year university student, what is the value in them understanding this idea of unfair advantages? Wel, yeah, any career path that you wanna take, you wanna know what you're good at, naturally. So there's this concept which is double on your strengths, don't tey and bring up necessarily from a career point of view or a business point of view, bring up your weaknesses, focus on your strengths, but in your personal life, focus on your weaknesses of where you can bring up you weaknesses.
You need to know what is honna be the path that's least resistance for you. So to determine the path of least resistance, you kind of have to know where do you have an unfair advantage. What would you say to people who say that they don't have any unfair advantages? Everybody has unfair advantages. What might seem like a disadvantages, you can actually turn into an advantage. So one example is having little money, which a lot of a starting off in business might have little money, with very, very tight budget, or hardly anything to invest.
That's how I started off, just hardly anything. I had saved up some student loan, maintenance grant, and loans and stuff, and I just kind of saved them up and been a bit frugal with them which really helped. But having little money makes you more creative. The necessity is the mother of invention kinda thing. I've had lot of startup founders kind of pitch us and when they've had money behind them, their path to growth, it's like yeah, Google ads and Facebook ads. But there's no creativity there, you're just burning money and it's gonna be very difficult to sustain that, especially in the early days before you know that the market, the customers really like your product.
You don't wanna be doing that, having less money and less status, less a socioeconomic status, can give you more of a fire in your belly to succeed. I know some really well off kids in university and they just were playing World of Warcraft, had no motivation whatsoever to get a job. So that can be downside, so not necessarily being born rich is a good thing.
The final idea from the book that I wanna talk about is related to mindset. You might have come across Carol Dweck's idea of the growth mindset and the fixed mindset. It's based on research that she's done when they got a class of 10 year olds and they gave them a challenge that was a little bit too hard for them. Some of them reacted in a shockingly positive way. They said things like, "I love a challenge," or "I was hoping this would be informative." They understood that their abilities could frow through their hard work. They had what I call a growth mindset but other children, for them it was tragic, catastrophic. From their more fixed mindset perspective, theri core intelligence had been tested. I've been preaching about this growth mindset stuff for years to my friends and family and anyone who listened.
Basically, you know, this is this idea that our abilities aren't fixed, we can grow, everything is a learning experience and that's why have less than zero questions about putting my hand up to ask a question in class or in a lecture, or looking like an idiot because I recognised that it's all a work in progress, it's alll part of the process of improving, it's all part of the growth mindset. But one of the issues with the growth mindset, in fairness, is that you can kinda take it too literally.
So taking this sort of thing into account, Ash and Hasan in the book talked about an evolution of the growth mindset that they call the reality growth mindset. This mindset encourage us to try to strike a balance between self awareness and self belief. As they say in the book, "The reality growth mindset is about having your feet rooted on the ground with your head in the clouds."
So again, this is one of those paradoxical things which is like, we're all humans, we're all cut from the same cloth. Whatever somebody else can achieve, I can achieve versus don't kill yourself trying to achieve and feel bad and get depressed about it, because not everybody's born with the same opportunities and the same talents. But what can we learn from them anyway? So having that balanced outlook rather than just pedestalizing them, and go, "Wow, they're amazing, nobody's like them, Elon Musk is an alien robot. But then versus saying Anybody could do it."
When we think about success, we can think about all the things that we don't have going for us. We can fixate on the privileges that we don't have but when we do that, we blind ourselves too the unfair advantages, the competitive edge that we do have. We often don't appreciate that wherever we are, whatever stage of life we're in, we've got much to be grateful for. As Ash and Hasan talked about in their book, "It's not about focusing on the negatives, it's about knowing the realities and leveraging the unfair advantages that we do have to help us live our best lives."
Thank you for reading.