The Unfair Advantage: How You Already Have What It Takes to Succeed

by Ash Ali

Success in the startup world is not simply awarded to the hardest workers. It is awarded to those who develop and use their Unfair Advantages.

your set of unfair advantages is unique to you. It’s more than just a unique selling point, it’s a fundamental leg-up over the competition,

every disadvantage can have a corresponding advantage, and vice versa. Your circumstances and unfair advantages, whether apparently positive or negative, can be double-edged swords.

People unaware of the true power of luck can become bitter, broken men and women, confused as to why they worked all their lives and didn’t reach their goals.

if you are unaware of the effect of effort and hard work, and the power that you yourself have to improve your life, then you can become bitter and inflicted with a disempowering victim mindset where, instead of looking at what you have in your favour, you focus on what you don’t.

Life isn’t fair. But if you use the unfairness of life as an excuse to have a victim mindset, to stop yourself from striving to achieve your goals, to make your dreams a reality, then you’re only shooting yourself in the foot.

An Unfair Advantage is a condition, asset or circumstance that puts you in a favourable business position.

Your Unfair Advantages can’t easily be copied or bought. Your set of Unfair Advantages is unique to you.

Competitive advantages are to businesses what Unfair Advantages are to individuals

Success is the result of what sociologists like to call ‘accumulative advantage.’

popular tool to better understand your personality is the Myers–Briggs assessment,

Yes, you can be bad at something, but it is only because you have not taken the time or attention to get better at it.

reality-growth mindset is the ability to accept the hard limits of the way things are (like the physical laws of the universe) and also to believe that anything is possible (the metaphysical way of looking at the universe). It acknowledges that there are limitations, but that those limitations are more malleable than some people may think.

duality of thinking is necessary. Lean too far towards the unfairness of life, and you become a victim. Lean too far into the ‘fully-in-control master and architect of your future’ side, and you become disillusioned when your millionaire status doesn’t appear after a couple of years of hustle.

believing you can get smarter actually makes you smarter.

Creativity is largely about training your mind to connect things you learn in one domain to situations that seem completely unrelated. This is known as intersectional or interdisciplinary thinking.

Once he had founded Deliveroo, he decided to ride his bike around as a delivery guy himself, eight hours a day, seven days a week, for nine months when he first launched! Most wealthy founders would never bother working so hard at something for which they could easily hire someone.

There was even an occasion when he delivered to a posh house in Knightsbridge only to have the occupant look at him in shock – he realised he used to work with Shu in banking, and thought that he must have fallen on really hard times.)

You need a bit of naive optimism to become a startup founder.

Knowledge spillover is basically how information, knowledge and insights spread informally between different firms, merely because they are near one another.

I’ve found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often. Brian Tracy, Canadian motivational speaker

You can make your good luck by focusing your attention on what you’re grateful for, instead of what you don’t have.

There can also be a downside to too much early luck. When luck strikes too soon in a business, such as with very early success, you might never develop the thick skin required to take rejection, or the humility to take feedback.

Sometimes success that comes too early can stunt your growth, because you are unable to fulfil it, or to follow up with a subsequent product

Institutions can also be slow-moving, and simply can’t keep pace with all the new skills that are in demand by employers.

‘The world more often rewards outward signs of merit than merit itself.’ La Rochefoucauld

status is your perceived ability to add value.

Value can be in the form of wisdom, entertainment, spreading good emotions, solving problems for people, achieving something difficult, being cool, trendy, aspirational, attractive or interesting.

As social animals, Status affects, and is affected by, virtually everything we do.

If you can leverage that tribal aspect of the human brain, you can influence a lot of people.

‘Entrepreneur is a long, fancy French word,

If you pin your self-love and happiness to something external, you’ll either keep moving the finish line and never be happy, or you’ll experience the most profound anticlimax in your life and get depressed when you realise that achieving your external goal does not fill the inner void.

This insecurity led to her having lip fillers done when she was only 15 years old. This helped drive the trend for big lips even further, with teen girls (and some boys) doing things like the Kylie lip challenge where they’d use suction from a drinking glass to puff up their lips. This is the level of status and influence that Kylie had as a 15-year-old.

Bragging is one way to immediately lower your status. Status is more nuanced than shouting

self-aggrandising.

Success for the approval of others is inevitably hollow. There needs to also be a bigger intrinsic motivation for true happiness and fulfilment to come.

you need to define success for yourself. If you do not, Hollywood, the media, friends, family, colleagues, not to mention social media, will define it for you.

many digital and technology startups are actually lifestyle businesses.

Hyper-growth startups are better if you’re very strong on unfair advantages. Lifestyle startups are better if your unfair advantages are not so developed.

ideas are overrated.

Most startups are either a twist on an idea that already exists, or the implementation of the same idea but in a new market or industry.

not usually the case that the idea in and of itself is ground-breaking. It’s more the execution of it, including leveraging a lot of unfair advantages to succeed.

it may actually be worse for you to be the first in any industry. All these businesses learned from the failures of first-movers in their respective fields.

‘The pioneers take the arrows, the settlers ...

the risk to the early movers is much higher.

They often have to be the ones to educate the market about the product (or service

Intersectional thinking,

is where ideas come from.

Great ideas come when you put a twist on existing things, consider a problem from another point of view, or take a solution from one industry and apply it to another, or from one geographic region to another.

Once you have attuned yourself to thinking in this interdisciplinary way, and learned to look for pain points and solutions, ...