What Makes Someone Successful?
We all wonder how does someone gets ahead, becomes successful.
How does someone like Bill Gates succeed while others have failed? We’re often told that success is directly relation with the amount of hard work we put in. That we don’t get anywhere without putting in a lot hours or by working 100 hours weeks.
But what if that wasn’t true?
Did the successful people have the some kind of upper hand over other people? Some kind of unfair advantage?
And what if we find out that we’ve all got our own set of unfair advantages that we can use to succeed in our lives as well?
The book “The Unfair Advantage: How you Already Have What it Takes to Succeed” is all about that. It’s written by these two entrepreneurs Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba. And it starts with the rule that life is fundamentally unfair. When we look at successful people, they didn’t just get there with hard work, there was normally other things that played a larger role like luck, circumstances, privilege, and other variables that played a part in it. And that equation that came to mind when I was reading the book was that, success, the definition of success can be broken down into variables of fair advantages and unfair advantages. Fair play means factors that we would look at and think “All right this is legit play.”
Let’s say there’s a founder who gets up at before sunrise every morning and then goes to hour run and then works on his or her laptop all day, making calls and just works really hard. That would be a fair advantage we would say or I made fair play to that. In a way, it’s something that any of us would replicate if we wanted to and therefore it is fair. But that same startup founder, let’s say his or her parents were crazy rich and invested a ton of money into their company from day one, that would be an unfair advantage. It’s the advantage that really helps the business but something that the rest of us can’t easily have access to it.
As Hassan Kubba, author of Book mentions it,
The Unfair Advantage is about stealing kind of one of the root causes 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 different. So people have access to the network, to finance, or the right location, the right timing.
As authors of the book mentions, unfair advantages aren’t just about our strengths, they also about our circumstances, basically something that gives us a upper hand, 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 but we don’t recognize them yet.
What can we do to find out out our own unfair advantages?
In the book, there is this concept that helps us to look inside ourselves, the factors that made us who we are. That things can be something that we are looking for.
Well, we can use the MILES framework.
Money
Let’s start with M which stands for Money. Let’s take Evan Spiegel, the billionaire co-founder of Snapchat who became the world’s youngest self made billionaire at the age of 24. He grew up in a multi million dollar house in Los Angeles, attended expensive schooling, and had parents who were powerful people. This put him in unique circles and gave him access to famous entrepreneurs and CEO’s that most people could never dream of accessing .But he had to do the hard work and put the wheels into motion to make the company what it is today.
Intelligence
Secondly, the I stands for intelligence and insight. Let’s take the Collison brothers for example. They co founded Stripe which became a multi billion dollar payments processing company before either of them turned 22. Patrick Collinson invented his own computer programming language when he was 16 and he left school a year early to join at MIT. His brother John was accepted into Harvard before he’d even done his exams. And yes of course lot of hard work and effort went into it but I think it’s reasonably fair to say Collison’s brother’s intelligence was some sort of unfair advantage.
Location and Luck
Thirdly we got L which stands for location and luck. And as Ray Kroc, the pioneer of McDonald once said, “The two most important requirements for major successes are first,
- being in the right place at the right time and
- secondly doing something about it.”
Location of the businesses is clearly important. For ex, if businesses cluster as and the right timing can be key to great opportunities, and making connections and accessing a target market.
Luck is even more interesting and I would argue that luck isn’t really an unfair advantage. I would put it into the fair play section instead. Yeah there are gonna be lucky breaks but that is just dumb luck. But lot of time we can make our own luck by just exposing ourselves to more things.
Authors talked about this in the book as well, doing things like
- 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.
And the idea is that as we do more of these, the more luck comes our way, the more of this stuff we do, the more of surface area for serendipity. We can take cash in on the opportunities that it might bring with it. So I think that’s more a sort of fair advantage rather than a unfair thing.
Education and Expertise
Going forward, the E stands for education and expertise. Right, let’s be honest having a degree from a fancy university probably a unfair advantage, depending on what you’re going for. It becomes your unfair advantage, people in the space can’t replicate very easily and therefore it becomes more legit, more probable. Beyond that, in the book Ash and Hasan say that there are basically three benefits to a good education:-
- Knowledge
- Network
- Signalling
But for me and most of my friends, majority of our knowledge comes from books and the internet, not from our fancy degrees. When it comes to network, yeah, good enough, being at university unlocks a certain type of network but when it comes to signalling, like increasingly, in the world, people are caring less and less about where you went to university and much more about what skills you can bring on the table.
Our value, you know the unfair advantage doesn’t come from the specific accomplishments that we’ve got, although it can but 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 time and education. It’s a lifelong journey that to learn take some online classes, go to a boot camp etc.
Status
Finally we have S for status. And of course status can be unfair advantage. Bill Gates status in the world is so high right now that he starts any new company, it’s guaranteed to be successful in some way or atleast everyone’s gonna hear about it. In the book, the author talks about, how we can develop inner stuff, so things like confidence and self esteem and how this can help us if we don’t have the high status of people like Elon Musk. And to be honest, I fully agree that it’s really important to develop confidence and self esteem and all that. I think it’s just doesn’t play as a unfair advantage that someone can’t have access to it or build it. Everyone can have confidence and self esteem so it doesn’t come in unfair sort of way, provided they work on it. I take that as a fair advantage rather than as a unfair advantage.
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.
So ultimately,
Where does this idea of unfair advantages help us in?
If you wanna choose your career path, you first wanna know what things you are good at, naturally. So there this concept of double down on your strengths, don’t try to bring up 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 improve up your weaknesses. You need to know what is gonna be the path that least resistant for you. For determining the path, you have to know that what’s your unfair advantage is.
Author says in the book, everybody has their own unfair advantages. What seem like a disadvantage, you can actually make it into an advantage.
Last thing from the book I want to talk about is to mindset. You might have come across Carol Dweck’s idea of the growth mindset vs the fixed mindset. It’s based on the research that she’s done when they got a class of 10 year olds and a challenge was presented to them that was little bit too hard. You can find the video below.
Basically this is idea that our abilities aren’t limited, we can grow, everything is a learning experience. But one of problems with growth mindset, is that you can take it too literally. So taking this thing into account, the author talks about an evolution of the growth mindset, that they call the reality growth mindset. This mindset encourages us to try to strike a balance between self awareness and self belief.
When we think about success, we usually think of all the things that we don’t have. We can keep on fixating on the privileges that we don’t have but when we do that, we don’t see the unfair advantages, the competitive upper hand that we do have. We don’t appreciate that wherever we are, whatever stage of life we are in, we’ve got so much to be grateful.
As the authors talked about in the 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.
