Unfair advantages are everywhere. Contrary to popular belief you want to find yours and use it. This is not cheating, it’s winning, and winning isn’t bad. But finding one’s unfair advantages is not enough: it must be applied ruthlessly.
To be clear I am not talking about the unfair advantages one gets from birth. Sex, race, and other topics de jur are not unfair advantages that one can learn or develop. To view these characteristics as advantages is to ruin your soul whether you have them or not. Regardless if some people gain advantages from them. No single person has ever lived a happy life playing the victim.
Ask anyone around you about “how to find your way”. Most will respond with philosophies on self help, religion, identity, or purpose. I myself have fallen into this trap, many times over. I now think it’s a natural step that is necessary. Do not avoid this step. It is part of nature. A necessary step. This is the litmus test of any knowledge you get. If it can’t be used in your life, it is likely not useful to you.
Knowing what to use when, is wisdom. This can be learned by anyone and applied to wealth creation. Creating wealth in the world is not a bad thing. It is the basis of everything we have and will have. There is no shortage of people that believe money and wealth creation is evil. Without the motivation “wealth” provides nothing in our world would exist. Not even your food would exist, for it takes a farmer with a motivation for wealth to feed you. A very small % of the human population would do it for free, the vast majority need a reward. It is to this person I speak, the one who understands the world for what it is. The people who want to play the great game of wealth creation.
By far the greatest of all unfair advantages is motivation. The mysterious X factor that is present in all artists, creators, founders, entrepreneurs, and business owners. This desire, this urge, or calling. If you have this, you know it. Harnessing it requires accepting the potential for failure. Unleashing it requires relentless focus. I’ve come to believe that motivation can come from many places. Survival is largest and most powerful motivation. Creativity & disdain. for authority are in the middle. The least powerful, but it's everywhere motivation is a simple desire to play the great game and win, to compete, for competitions sake. Whatever the game, there is always winners and losers. Participation ribbons are great for kids in games of sport. In the games of life everyone should be playing to win. One needs to be clear on why they are playing. Playing any game for the wrong reason is a bad idea.
It is possible to play positive sum games and win. Positive sum games are everywhere and people are winning them all the time. Take any business, big or small, it employees people, it makes valuable things. Without them our economy, living standards, enlightenment would not grow. Creating a business that employees people is positive sum. Not all businesses are positive sum, some are predatory and drain on our world of value. This is an unfortunate consequence of the world. Avoid negative sum games.
Experience is the only prerequisite. It isn’t enough to have been around longer. Everyone knows the saying, “I have more experience”. This never resonates with anyone. What does matter is an accumulation of successes and failures, aka reputation. This is what the word experience is to reflect. Some people are exceptions, child proteges, freaks of nature, that sort of thing. I’m not talking to them, or for them. I’m talking to everyone else that has accumulated a variety of experiences from trying. The person who has holds many successes and failures.
A useful framework for people starting to look for their unfair advantages is MILES. Money, Intelligence, Location & Luck, Education & Experience, Status. knowing the framework is not enough. I find it helpful to first understand how each is an unfair advantage.
Money is by far the rarest of all unfair advantages. It is also the hardest to get if starting from scratch. It is also the most coveted and thus is the one almost all us are envious about. Having a skill of raising capital is unique for it means you are exceptional at persuasion. having capital does not give you an unfair advantage, one must be a exceptional at allocating it. Allocating capital things that make more money is the skill you want. Not being able to do that turns money from an advantage to a burden of obsession.
Intelligence is a weird one. Street smart vs. Book smart. Being exceptional at persuasion is what people mean when they say street smart. Sales and marketing is the fluffy term schools use to describe this skill. But anyone that’s ever done it knows what it is, persuading people to buy what you want them to buy. In 2022 digital marketing and sales is the best skill to have. 90% of the world are online. This isn’t likely to change. To persuade, you need to talk to people where they are online.
Writing is the sleeper agent of unfair advantages. Most people think writing is grammar, punctuation, the stupid shit taught in school. It's not. Writing as an unfair advantage is best used in sales & marketing. The lesser known way in which writing becomes a super power, is in clarity of thought. Become a great writer, you will think clearer, and focus more. The unfair advantage of writing flourishes when you can write to persuade people to do what you want. Sell stuff online.
Everyone has a love hate relationship with content. Movies, Music, Ad’s, Videos, Reals, whatever. Great content produces exponential returns in business. Mastering both the art and science of content allows one to capture the attention of an audience. Attention allows for persuasion. Content is hard and torturous. It takes a particular person to want to produce content. The two biggest traps to avoid are 1/ the price of fame and 2/ a prisoner to my audience. etc. What one needs to master is the art of not giving a fuck what people think. Producing content helps you refine your idea, which is a prerequisite to persuasion. Direct the content for a purpose of wealth creation, not status games.
One of the most cringe worthy words found on the internet is audience. So often is it misunderstood. Without a valuable product or service, audiences are there for entertainment. For a long time Social Media audience building confused me. Then I noticed that people with audiences were building business around them. Selling ad’s, launching products, creating services, the list goes on. The truth is no business can succeed without an audience - a group of people that you can speak to and engage with. If you have an existing audience, you have an unfair advantage. Building one from scratch is selling.
There is a famous saying “Your Network is your Net Worth” which is very accurate. I know of no business that has succeed without a network of support. The advantage of a pre-existing network is great. Partnerships, connections, early customers, financing, problem solving. If the type of business doesn’t matter to you, then ask your network what problems do they need solved. A large number of businesses start by asking around their community. This is an unfair advantage.
Existing in a particular moment in time and place gives one an unfair advantage. It is unwise to feel guilty about this. You did not have a choice. No one has ever got ahead in the world from winning the bigest victim game. We have some limitations of our physical world, but the internet has removed more than not. The internet increases the surface area for someone to experience “luck” of geography. The serendipity of being alive at a particular time, to capture a unfair advantage. No longer do you need to live in Silicon Valley to start a tech company or meet the right person. If you look around you, you will be able to find an advantage of being alive now. Having the ability to choose now.
Skills tests and assessments are like fortune cookies. No instruction is give on how to use the information. The useful part is knowing the value of the skills one possesses. The simplest way to find the value of your skills is to google salaries for jobs you can get with your skills. Here’s the thing, if it’s on those search results, it’s not that valuable relative to how much can be created in the world. If it’s a job, the value of the skill has been competed down to a commodity. One where the market establishes an accepted salary range. What should be done, is to think about what outcomes you can create for people, and what value that is to them.
If after thinking long and hard you don’t have any of these, you have two choices. First is to build them. This requires that you have the motivation to do so first. If the motivation doesn’t exist, you will surely loose interest. There is a second alternative - to keep searching. But to much searching is an advance form of procrastination. The time horizon for searching is subjective. It is likely that you will know when enough is enough.
What is your unfair advantage and how will you ruthlessly exploit it?