How does someone like Elon Musk 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 10,000 hours or by working 100 hour weeks. But what if that wasn't the case? What if those who succeeded simply had an unfair advantage over their competitors? 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? Hey friends, welcome back to the channel and to the very first episode of Book Club, a new series where I am going to be summarizing key insights from books and today we're talking about the unfair advantage, how you already have what it takes to succeed. It's written by these two entrepreneurs and investors Ash Ali and

Hassan Kuba and it starts with the thesis that life is fundamentally unfair. When we're 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. And the equation that came to mind when I was reading through the book was that success, however we want to define it, is some sort of combination of fair play and unfair advantages. Fair play means factors that we would look at and think, all right mate, fair play. Like let's say there's a startup founder who gets up at three o'clock every morning and then goes for a two-hour run and then kind of hustles on his or her laptop all day and just like works really really hard. That would be a fair advantage we would say, all right mate, fair play to that. In a way it's something that any of us could replicate if we wanted to and therefore it is fair. But that same startup founder, let's say his or her parents were 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. The unfair advantage is about distilling 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 a network, to finance, or the right location, the right timing. As Hasan explained, 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. 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 in our own ways. How do we find out what our unfair advantages are? Well, we can use the MILES framework.

Where did the MILES framework come from? Is that something that you guys came up with? Yeah, something Ash actually initially came up with is the MILES framework, just breaking down into money, intelligence, and insight, location, and luck, education, expertise, and status. So we developed into that and then we thought, okay, where does mindset fit in? And then we thought, okay, this is all on a foundation of mindset. If you don't have the right mindset, you're just not going to get anywhere. Let's start with M, which stands for

Let's take Evan Spiegel, the billionaire co-founder of Snapchat, who became the world's youngest self-made billionaire at just age 24.

He grew up in a multi-million 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 tech 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.

Secondly, the I stands for intelligence and insight.

So 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 had turned 22. Patrick Collison sort of invented his own computer programming language when he was 16, and he left school a year early to enroll 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 yes, of course, loads of hard work and effort went into it, but I think it's reasonably fair to say that the

Collison brothers' intelligence was some sort of unfair advantage.

Thirdly, we've got L, which stands for 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 the 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 going to be some lucky breaks that are, as Professor McGonagall says, sheer dumb luck, but a lot of the time we can sort of manufacture our own luck by just exposing ourselves in a non-weird way to more things. Ash and Hassan talk about this in the book as well.

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 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. Moving on, the E stands for education and expertise. Right, 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 YouTube channel aimed initially at medical students.

If you happen to be a medical student at Cambridge University, which is famously a good university, you'd probably want to 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 becomes more interesting, more brandable. Beyond that, in the book, Ash and Hasan say that there are basically three benefits to a good education. Knowledge, network, and signalling.

But to be honest, for me and most of my friends, the majority of our medical 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 signalling, 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 come from 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 the age of 22. It's a lifelong endeavour that you can, you know, take online classes and stuff. In fact, if you want, you can even check out my own online class on how to edit videos if you want to become a YouTuber and stuff on Skillshare, link in the video description, not sponsored.

Finally, we have S for status, and of course status can be an unfair advantage.

Elon Musk'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 going to hear about it, regardless of how ridiculous the name is.

In the book, Ash and Hassan talk about how we can develop inner status, so things like confidence and self-esteem, and how this can help us if we don't have the outward status of people like Elon Musk.

And to be honest, I fully agree with the thesis that, you know, it's really important to develop confidence and self-esteem and all that stuff in ourselves. I just think it's a little bit contrived to put that under the status segment because, I don't know, 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, therefore I see that more as a fair advantage, rather than as an unfair advantage that some people are just gonna have. 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, but this stuff isn't just for people wanting to start a business or to be entrepreneurs. Going back to sort of our audience, our hypothetical audience of a first-year university student, what is the value in them understanding this idea of unfair advantages?

Well, yeah, any career path that you want to take, you want to 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 going to be the path that's 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? Everybody has unfair advantages.

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

So one example is having little money, which a lot of us starting off in business might have little money with very, very tight budgets or hardly anything to invest. That's how I started off, just hardly anything. I had saved up some student loan, maintenance grant and loans and stuff, and I just kind of saved them up and been a bit frugal with them, which really helped. But having little money makes you more creative.

The necessity is the mother of invention, kind of thing. I've had a lot of startup founders kind of pitch us, and when they've had money behind them, their path to growth is like, yeah, Google ads and Facebook ads, but there's no creativity there. You're just burning money and it's going to 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 want to be doing that. Having less money and less status, let's say socioeconomic status, can give you more of a fire in your belly to succeed. I knew some really well-off kids in university and they just were playing World of Warcraft, had no motivation whatsoever to get a job. So that can be a downside. So not 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

London or, I don't know, the Bay Area in San Francisco, but rents are going to be higher and everybody's going to be fighting over the same talent. Your runway in terms of how much you have to spend on living and the cost of living basically is going to be super high. Whereas if you live out 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 from the book that I want to talk about is related to mindset.

You might have come across Carol Dweck's idea of the growth mindset and the fixed mindset. It's based on research that she's done when they got a class of 10 year olds and they gave them a challenge that was a little bit too hard for them.

Some of them 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 I call a growth mindset. But other children, 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 listens. Basically like, you know, this idea that our abilities aren't fixed, we can grow, everything is learning experience.

And that's why I have like 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 recognize that it's all 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 kind of take it too literally. So taking this sort of thing into account,

Ash and Hassan in the book talk 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. As they say in the book, 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 like 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 it's having that balanced outlook rather than just pedestalizing them and going, wow, they're amazing.

Nobody's like them. Elon Musk is an alien robot. 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 privileges 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. As Ash and Hassan talk about in their 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. Thank you for watching.