Your HIDDEN Key For Success: The Unfair Advantage Summary |

Normally when we think of successful people like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, we consider that they are able to achieve greater in their life because of working harder. This is not true according to the author of the book.

Introduction

This is not a discouragement rather a reality because each and everyone’s life is quite different from each other. In the book, the author says besides hard work there is something else that we are ignorant about. We only consider them as ideals and think to be successful if we hard work dedicatedly.

About the unfair advantage

Unfair advantage means in everyone’s life there is one particular thing that one cannot copy from others. For legends like MS Dhoni or Michael Jordan, everyone has an unfair advantage through which they become successful. This is their unique talent that nobody else can copy.

What we miss?

The author in the book says that all follow a traditional success framework like hard work, an ample amount of money, great idea. We ignore the root cause of success. Each has an unfair advantage that others do not. It might be a lot of money or a degree etc.

We need to figure out why this particular thing is my unfair advantage. How do we know what is our unfair advantage? This author in the book tells us about the Miles Framework.

By using this particular framework one can find out their unfair advantage.

1. Money

“I am a young, white, educated male. I got really lucky and life isn’t fair”

-Evan Spiegel (started Snap chat, youngest self-made Billionaire at 24)

His unfair advantage was his family was the wealthiest. This helped him for building his start-up and all in all his empire. From this, we can surely understand that being wealthy is a boon and an unfair advantage. Interestingly author says being poor is also an unfair advantage. This person will use his money wisely and more creatively with a small amount of money.

2. Intelligence and Insight

“Your unfair advantage is your personal economic moat,” the authors explain. The unfair advantage of early-stage start-ups is the sum of the individual unfair advantages of the founders.
The authors emphasize that these founders certainly executed brilliantly on their insights. But they also had lucky breaks which other aspiring founders may not have had.

Formal education and IQ are not enough – founders also need social and emotional intelligence and creativity. Interdisciplinary thinking helps connect trends and developments and devise unique solutions.

3. Location and Luck

Facebook by Mark has been started at the Harvard University and it stands out on the premises of Harvard and slowly got popular in the outside world. All were interested to connect with Harvard students because of the name and gradually FB became famous world-wide.

Also, luck was an unfair advantage because the time period was on the verge of uploading pictures out on the internet. It was a new trend everyone found fascinating.

4. Education and Expertise

By good quality education, one can achieve 1. Knowledge and 2. Connections. Getting passed out from a 1 tier college with a good degree can be proved as an unfair advantage.

If one expertise in a field then that will take him/her higher than expected. For example, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin used their expertise from their education. They created google by all the combined knowledge they gained from their education and expertise which made them billionaires.