The Unfair Advantage:How you already have what it takes to succeed.It stars with the thesis that life is fundamentally unfair

【1】

Have you ever wondered how do people get ahead? How does someone like Jack Ma succeed where others have failed?

 We’re often told that success is directly correlated with hard work.That we won’t get anywhere without putting in 10000 hours or working 100-hour week.

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 we’ve all got our own set of unfair advantages that we can use to succeed in our lives as well?

When we looking at successful people,they normally didn’t just get there with hard work,there was normally other stuff that played a strong role like luck,circumstances,privilege,that sort of thing.

Success ,however we wanna define it is some sort of combination of fair play and unfair advantaged.

Fair play means factors that we would look at and think,”all right,mate,fair play”.

Let‘s say there’s a startup founder who gets up at 3 o’clock 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 advantage 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 do and therefore it’s fair.

But········· that same startup founder, let’s 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 an advantage that really helps the business,but something that the rest of us can’t easily replicate.

【2】

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 we all know,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.

“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 own ways.

How do we find out what our unfair advantages are?.Well ,we can use the MILES framework.

MILES framework just breaking down into money,intelligence and insight,location and luck,education,expertise and status.

If you don’t have the right mindset ,you’re just not getting anywhere.

【3】

First of all,let’s start with money.

Let’s take Evan 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-dollar 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 technology 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 a big unfair advantage.

【4】

Secondly ,the intelligence and insight.

So let’s take the Collison brothers fo example.They co-founded Stripe which became a multi-billion dollar payments processing company before either of them had turned 22.

Ptrick Collison ‘s 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-Levels.And he’d been accepted into Harvard before he’d even done his exams.

And of course,loads of hard work and effort went into it ,but I think it’s reasonably fair to say that the Collison brother’s intelligence was some sort of unfair advantage.

【5】

Thirdly,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 do in Silicon Valley and right location can be key to unlocking opportunities making connections and accessing a target market.

Luck is even more interesting and i’d 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(可爱的麦格教授《Harry Potter;》) says”Sheer,dumb luck”.

But a lot of the time,we can sort of manufacture own luck by just exposing ourselves in a non-weird way to more things.

Take more action,do more things,meet more people,go to more events ,write your blog,produce things and publish them,get feedback,put more stuff into the world.

And the idea is that as we expose ourselves to more of 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 then we can take advantage of it. 

So I think that’s more a sort of fair advantage rather than an unfair advantage.

【6】

Moving,education and expertise.

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 BiliBili channel aimed initially at photoelectric students.

If you happen to be a photoelectric student at Southeast University which is famously a good university,you’d 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 become more interesting ,more brandable.

Beyond that,there are basically three benefits to a good education:knowledge,network and signaling.

But to be honest for me and most of my friends,the majority of our photoelectric 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 signaling,like increasingly,especially in the startup world,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 advantage doesn’t  necessarily,the specific qualification 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 own time and education.

It’s not just something that’s done to us until we go to college.

It’s a lifelong endeavour that you can,you know ,take online classes and stuff.

【7】

Finally,the status

Of course,status can be an unfair advantage.

Jack Ma’s status in the world is so high right now that if he starts any 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.

That it’s really important to develop confidence and self-esteem and all that stuff in ourselves.

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.

We can sue 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 entrepreneurs.

Going back to sort of our hypothetical audience,a first-day university student.

What is the value in them understanding this idea of unfair advantages?

Any career path that you wanna take,you wanna know what you’re good at,naturally.

So there’s this concept which is double down on your strengths,

Don’t try 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 your weaknesses.

You need to know what is gonna be the path that is 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?——Everyone has unfair advantages.

What might seem like a disadvantage,you can actually turn into an advantage.

So one example is having little money,which most of us are starting off in business might have little money ,with very tight budget or hardly anything to invest.

But having little money makes you more creative.The necessity is the mother of invention kinda thing.

I’ve learned lots of startup founders kind of pitch us and when they’ve had money behind them,their path to growth,it’s like, yeah,BiliBili ads and the other Apps ads.

But there’s no creative 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 knew some really well off classmate in university and they just were playing LOL ，World of Warcraft and the other games，had no motivation whatsoever to get a job.

So that can be a downside so that necessarily being born rich is a good thing.

Being in the wrong location ,just to give one more example,you can be in a great location like Beijing or the Lujiazui Area in Shanghai.

But rents are gonna be higher and everybody’s gonna be fighting over the same talent that you runway in terms of how much you have to spend on living cost of living basically,is gonna be super high.

Whereas if you live in the middle of nowhere where costs are cheap a lot of people go to Southeast Asia for that reason,actually.

There’s pros and cons,It’s a double-edged sword.

The final idea that I wanna talk about is related to mindset.

Some people 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 grow through their hard work.

They had what call a growth mindset,but others,for them it was tragic ,catastrophic.

From their more fixed mindset perspective,their 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 area idea that our abilities aren’t fixed,we can grow,everything is a leaning experience.

And that’s why have less than zero qualms 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 all 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.  

An evolution of the growth mindset that call the reality growth mindset.

This mindset encourages us to try to strike a balance between self awareness and self belief.

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,JackMa ia an god.”

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 privileged that we don’t have but when we do that we blind ourselves to 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 so much to be grateful for.

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.