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

by Ash Ali

the media narrative on startup success can be very misleading.

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.

An unfair advantage is a competitive upper hand, and 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, and sometimes it’s not one that is ‘earned’ or worked for.

By knowing, developing and leveraging your unfair advantages, you will work on the right idea, partner with the right co-founders and develop a strong foundation.

‘It’s not about working harder. It’s about working the system.’

it’s not about working harder, it’s about working smarter to succeed.

Sacrifice is required for success because you do have to forgo some short-term pleasures for long-term success.

Sales is a fantastic way to get started if you want to start your own business, because the skills you learn, and in particular the resilience to the rejection and the ‘no’s that you develop, are absolutely indispensable.

When examining success, you are not going to find just one single cause.

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.

And hard work also plays a very important role, because it’s true that hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. But combine the two and that’s when you get rocket fuel.

Life is too random and arbitrary to balance out and give everyone an equal share.

unfair advantages can take many forms and help you at every stage of your career or business path, and knowing about them, developing them and leveraging them is the most powerful way to work smarter and stack the deck in your favour to succeed.

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.

Always partner up with somebody with unfair advantages that balance out yours.

We all have the same 24 hours in a day. What matters is knowing how to spend that time.

Unfair advantages are a shortcut to success. They offer you incredible speed.

Focusing on what you’re grateful for in life can make you feel happier, less stressed and more focused,

All of which shows how your mindset can affect both the quality and outcomes of your life.

The growth mindset is perfectly encapsulated in one word: ‘yet’.

defining success for yourself in a way that’s process-oriented, and which focuses on taking action and on enjoying the journey of life.

A 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.

Reality-growth mindset is the balance between self-awareness and self-belief.

if you want something badly enough, it has power to change you.

Vision is the ability to see plainly what will exist. It’s not magic; it’s imagination and goal-setting.

Lifelong learning is probably needed more now than at any other point in history.

In other words, that person kept going in the face of resistance. Rejections, pitfalls and obstacles will consistently get in your way. Without perseverance, your startup won’t make it out alive.

three forms of capital: economic capital (money), social capital (our network of friends and allies) and cultural capital, which is essentially everything else that can get you respect or prestige

However, your ability to raise funding through knowing rich people and being able to convince them to fund you can also be thought of as a Money advantage.

financial constraints can breed creativity,

According to many reputable studies, children who score higher on IQ tests will, on average, go on to do better in the conventional measures of success in life:

After all, business isn’t an exam. It’s a process. Business success is almost always about relationships and adding value to other people, and assembling and working in a team.

believing you can get smarter actually makes you smarter.

don’t let your exam grades dictate your future success.

Street smarts can be developed through experience. Having friends or mentors with a lot of experience is also incredibly useful, as they guide you to make the right ‘street smart’ decisions.

people skills are absolutely essential to every stage of a startup.

having people skills can often be more important than being incredibly intelligent.

a ground-breaking idea require creativity, it’s also extremely valuable in finding ways to grow a startup

One way to improve creativity is to increase your interdisciplinary knowledge: learn from areas and fields of knowledge, and other industries, that are completely different to what you already know.

By insight we mean being able to see below the surface of things and to understand elements of a situation that others might not.

finding a real problem to solve.

The key is to spend more time on the problem than on your solution to that problem. Understanding the problem you’re solving inside and out is the powerful insight. This is what investors are after.

Only by gaining that level of insight from working can you get really valuable insights about pain points and inefficiencies which can be solved through a better product or process.

This is something that few entrepreneurs are willing to do: to roll their sleeves up and get their hands dirty to such an extent.

there’s nowhere better to start in gathering information than by getting out there and talking to all the people your product will involve and serve.

You can always read more books, hone your skills and improve your self-belief.

‘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.’

being in the right location increases your chances of luck.