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Life is not fair. But not as unfair as you think.
What if you were told that someone who succeeded in a field where you failed achieved that just by some advantage which you didn't have?
What if the 10,000 hours wasn't the big deal that made others succeed?
That life isn't fair isn't a good excuse to bank on to stop you from winning big, everyone can leverage the unfairness associated with life to triumph.
"When you look at successful people, they usually didn't just get there with hardwork, there is always some other stuff which played a strong role like luck, circumstances, etc", says Ali Abdaal.
These were "unfair advantages" that helped them to get ahead.
Consider a man from a humble background who worked really hard to succeed just because he wanted to improve his financial situation, he had an advantage of his humble background which propelled him to hammer hard. His background was his big "unfair advantage". Stories like this are not uncommon.
You should also think of the story of Evans Spiegel, who had highly influential parents, powerful family connections and attended the most expensive schools, which were important factors that set him on a path to being Forbes youngest self made billionaire at 24, by co-founding Snapchat. Did he work hard? Yes.
But what else? His super influential background gave him access to tech entrepreneurs at a very young age which was a big unfair advantage for him.
Now, we should talk about the key characteristics of an unfair advantage, in order to get a good grasp of what it really means:
There is some fairness in Unfair advantages— everyone has it!, which makes it reasonably fair enough. We all have a set of unfair advantages that can be leveraged, if properly identified. Plus, your unfair advantage is unique to you and no one else can directly replicate it.
An unfair advantage is not always positive. Remember the first story above? His humble background was not a positive one, but it pushed him to creatively find ways to get improve the situation. So an unfair advantage is not necessarily a strength from the outset.
Outside your control — You don't get to decide whether you will be born to wealthy or poor parents. That is not within you control. You also don't decide if you will grow up in a developed country with a lot of opportunities to explore, or an underdeveloped one. Either way, you can still always maximize your circumstances.
There are many reasons why you should identify and leverage your unfair advantages, to win smart. Here are two notable ones:
1. There is an intriguing compounding effect associated with unfair advantages and success generally. It turns out that the more successful you are, the easier it is to become even more successful.
Similarly, unfair advantages stack up to accrue more unfair advantages which opens you to even more opportunities, massive success, like a chain reaction.
So the more unfair advantages you can identify early enough, and develop, the more succes you beget. A YouTube channel with a million subscribers will grow even faster than one with a thousand.
Malcolm Gladwell calls this trend an "accumulative advantage".
2. Unfair Advantages give you a greater chance of winning in situations where every other person has similar level of expertise, just like you. This of course is not cheating, it is just you being smart to maximize some circumstances which weren't in your control.
Think of applying for a job, competing with over a hundred applicants. Everyone else like you has got a fancy university degree, which creates a level playing field. But a wealth of other relevant skills you acquired perhaps due to some training, which you bring to the table might earn you a leg ahead of others. That was an unfair advantage you had, which helped to secure the job.
Another applicant who had some sort of connections with a top official in the company would even have greater chances when applying for the same job. We are all aware of the fact that life is never fair. But nevertheless, it played as an advantage in these instances.
THE MILES FRAMEWORK
In 2020, two start-up entrepreneurs — Ash Ali and Hasan Kuba wrote a book on this whole concept, The Unfair Advantage. In the book, they proposed a model to help budding entrepreneurs identify their unfair advantages.
However, i find the model applicable in other aspects of life where we aim for success, and not just in the start-up world.
The model was called THE MILES FRAMEWORK. M in MILES stands for Money, I stands for Intelligence and Insight, L for Location and Luck, E for Education and Expertise, and S for Status.
To help you identify your unique set of unfair advantages which you should leverage to get ahead in situations, let's dig a bit into the elements of the model.
1. Money: This is a double edged sword. Financial constraints can foster creativity and that becomes an unfair advantage for whoever succeeds along that path. On the other hand, massive wealth also becomes an unfair advantage if properly leveraged, like in the story of Evans Spiegel.
For the average Joe, you might want to consider other elements of the MILES framework before reaching a conclusion on whether money counts as your unfair advantage.
2. Intelligence and Insight:
The extraordinary intelligence of the Collison brothers who founded Stripe —a start-up that helps companies take payments online, was their big unfair advantage. Yes, loads of hardwork went into it, but John Collison finished with the highest ever score on his school Leaving Certificate, and went ahead to co-found a multibillion dollar start-up with his super smart brother. So, you can clearly infer the influence of their intelligence. If you are really smart, you can count that as an unfair advantage and build on it!
3. Location and Luck— Here is what Ray Kroc, the brain behind McDonald said:
“The two most important requirements for major success are: first, being in the right place at the right time, and second, doing something about it.”
For businesses, a terrible location is a bad idea. On the individual level however, location can be considered to be where you grow up, or where you eventually end up living. In the right location, you get more opportunities. This is why location is tied to luck in the “L” of the MILES framework.
Being in a wrong location might not be a terrible disadvantage too, it can be a prompt to making changes and that becomes an unfair advantage.
The fact that luck is often an advantage is not exactly unfair. Luck can be manufactured depending on how much you open yourself up to opportunities. Here is an important trick to getting more luck as suggested by Ash and Hasan:
"Take more action. Do more things. Meet more people. Go to more events. Blog about your startup. Produce things and publish them. Get feedback. Put more stuff out into the world. "
It is that simple!
James Clear (I'm sure he needs no introduction), did write an article on the intersection of luck, hardwork and success. It's just a few thousand words long, you should check it out here.
Luck is not in your full control, but you can get to influence how much of it you get, and it becomes a powerful unfair advantage.
4. Education and Expertise: A school education might not ring to be a strong unfair advantage because everyone has got a fancy university degree. So, some level playing field exists which makes that seem quite fair.
However, here are three benefits you get from a good education that makes it an unfair advantage, as Ash and Hasan mentioned in the book: Knowledge, Network and Signalling.
Knowledge: The primary goal of a school is to equip you with knowledge in a particular field. Depending on how well you master what you are taught, and extra efforts you put into furthering your studies, education becomes an unfair advantage. Bagging a masters or a PhD doesn't only give you more knowledge in your field, it stands as an unfair advantage to land better jobs.
Network: You get to meet with a lot of goal-driven fellow students who you can immensely benefit from. Likewise, professors are always glad to mentor students. Building networks of like-minded individuals becomes an unfair advantage, which you can leverage.
Signalling: This benefit implies the branding you get from attending cetain schools. Attending an elite university earns you some sort of status and importance, which becomes an unfair advantage when you throw yourself out to the job market.
In recent times however, the signalling benefit is becoming less significant. People now care less about the elite universities you attended, the skills you have matter more. That drives me to the other word the "E" stands for. Expertise.
Exceptional mastery of a specific domain is expertise. You only attain this peak by chanelling conscious efforts, which doesn't demand the confines of the four walls of a classroom.
So, expertise as an unfair advantage isn't restricted to those who go to school. This cements the idea that education itself is beyond what you learn in school. You don't have to pass through school to be become an expert.
There are quadrillions of resources you can use to tune your skills to an elite level, and for sure, that becomes a big unfair advantage that shoots you to the clouds.
5. Status: If Jeff Bezos starts a new company today, the probability of him not succeeding is almost zero. That's the easiest definition of the status as an unfair advantage.
Apart from the fact that he is going to work hard to make it a win, he has an unfair advantage of his status to contribute massively to his success. Because of his fame, more people are going to hear about it which means more patronage.
Here is some good news: Without being Jeff Bezos , you can also leverage the unfair advantage associated with status. By developing your self-esteem and confidence, you build an inner status which tremendously boosts you your outer status. And, it becomes another powerful unfair advantage that gets you ahead.
And that was the "S" of the MILES framework, which brings me to the end of the article.
If you read this article to this point, you are a legend! Thank you.
We have been bombarded with beliefs that the 10,000 hours is the most important criteria to achieve success. Truly, the hours and depth matter, but some other people just get ahead simply because of some advantage they got, outside their control. People work hard not because they believed it is a standard requirement, it just happens that hardwork comes subconsciously when you do things you are deeply interested in.
Life is not fair, not just to you, but to everyone and that makes it fair. SO, WHAT YOU THINK YOU KNOW MIGHT NOT BE SO.
To learn more about the topic, and more importantly, if you are creatively business minded, then you should add The Unfair Advantage by Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba to your reading list. That's a hundred and eighty plus whopping pages that tells you how you already have what it takes to succeed.
Until next time, stay good and do well to share with everyone you know.
Thank you for shining light into those long believes we've had, that only the rich have an unfair advantage of doing great deal of amazing stuffs. With THE MILES FRAMEWORK model you've shared with us, it's so untrue. Everyone in their corner have that "unfair advantage". And all we need do is to be smart enough to identify those unique set of unfair advantages and leverage on them to get ahead in situations.
Life is so fair in being unfair to all.
Thank you for recommending the book, " The unfair advantage", I will sure read that.
I look forward to reading from you next week. Well-done TDWT.
This read is absolutely beautiful and so timely,one more book to read and I really can't wait to make the most of my unfair advantages. Thank you ✨💙