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This phenomenon is called ‘clustering’ in economics ‒ the fact that businesses tend to cluster together.
It’s said that you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with, so being surrounded by innovative and entrepreneurial people, who are ambitious and hardworking, is likely to have a positive effect on your own ambitions, attitudes and productivity.
Having the right type of people around you and joining entrepreneurial groups and masterminds is incredibly valuable.
In summary, location can give you access to capital (investors and venture capital firms tend to cluster in startup hubs) and to highly skilled talent, and so much more.
I’ve found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often.
The ideal situation is to target a small but growing market. This means you’ve stepped into an industry at exactly the right time.
your thoughts create the luck in your life. If you think you are a lucky person, then you are more likely to experience good fortune. If you think you are an unlucky person, chances are you will experience more ill fortune.
This shows how important it is to always be looking for opportunities, and always be looking to create them.
You’ll be more likely to notice opportunities if you try to, and expect to, notice them.
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. This is a very powerful way of increasing your luck, because it’s like trying to roll a double six on a pair of dice, and you can roll as many times as you like. Obviously, you’d just keep rolling the dice until you got a double six. That’s increasing your chances, because nobody is counting your number of attempts in life.
Having a good Education is a huge Unfair Advantage.
a top-tier university is by far the most powerful here.
Expertise is simple. It is a self-taught process where, for the most part, you learn by doing.
The goal is to reach the stage of learning-by-doing.
By learning a lot, you get expertise in a specific industry, you acquire specific skills that can be developed further, and you often get some really valuable insights, insights that could turn into startup ideas.
you’ve got to commit and continue to develop in order to reach a level where you can get ‘results that are vastly superior to those obtained by the majority of the population’.
if you get into a prestigious university or course you’ll give yourself a big status boost and make better connections.
always try to find out if people you admire are doing events in your area.
Be sure to leverage your network to learn from people directly. There’s always somebody you know who knows something you don’t.
You don’t need to be an expert at everything: that’s impossible, so you’ve got to choose carefully. Go for something that’s both in demand and interesting to you.
Your Status is your personal brand. It is how others see you. It is your social standing, your appearance, gender, age, how you dress, stand, talk. It’s also your perceived credibility.
Our shared beliefs as a society reflect whom we consider to have higher status – and, because of that, the idea of status is riddled with assumptions, prejudices and unconscious biases.
status is your perceived ability to add value.
Status can be in the form of titles, ranks or qualifications, like Sir Richard Branson or Lord Alan Sugar. It can be in the form of prestigious universities or companies. It could be about gender, class, height, race, colour, perceptions of beauty, displays of wealth, language fluency, having the right accent, wearing the right watch, driving the right car, being famous, having friends in high places, or even just signalling that you’re ‘cool’ or are part of the right subculture.
Economic capital is covered in Chapter 7 (Money) and is simply the concrete and tangible form of wealth in the sense of money, assets and property.
Cultural capital is linked to your social class (or even your subculture), which is reflected in your accent, credentials, set of tastes, hobbies and pastimes, manner of speech, manner of dress, posture, possessions, etc.
Social capital, the third form of status, is your network, your relationships, your connections.
the unfortunate reality of Status is that it can be very linked to conscious and unconscious bias and prejudice.
because having a variety of perspectives and people from different societal subcultures helps.
Difference gives you Insights. And, as we’ve discussed, Insight is a very powerful Unfair Advantage.
Your status is a double-edged sword in that it enables you to stand out more, and therefore be more memorable.
It’s more about knowing the realities ‒ that it’s not a level playing field ‒ and taking action regardless to maximise your chances.
you signal your membership to a subculture or class by how you dress, speak and behave.
Being in the same subculture or class helps you to build relationships, because you will probably have a shared commonality: similar tastes in music and fashion, similar interests and hobbies.
He calls it ‘People like us do things like this.’ If you can leverage that tribal aspect of the human brain, you can influence a lot of people.
Status is about how we sit in the world, what position our parents occupy, and how we view the possibilities available to us.
Building your network is all about your proactiveness in forming and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships.
With a large and strong network, you gain more powerful relationships, which can always allow you to get more opportunities,
you need to work on liking and valuing yourself.
You don’t need to be perfect to succeed. That’s the thing to bear in mind.
The truth is, nobody really knows the right thing to do in every situation, and even huge success stories have a lot of missteps and failures.
Bragging is one way to immediately lower your status.
everything you are (not just your family background) contributes to the value you can bring: your personality, your mindset, your education, insight and location.
Push yourself outside of your comfort zone regularly,
what can seem like a disadvantage can actually be turned into an advantage by having the right mindset.
Make your criteria for success process-based rather than outcome-based.
Lifestyle startups are businesses that are sometimes local, serving customers in a limited geographic area
Hyper-growth startups are businesses which usually have more of a focus on technology,
This is referred to as ‘product–market fit’. That means the market wants the product, they’re a good fit.
getting funded doesn’t mean that you’ve succeeded.
