In One Sentence

Success happens when you figure out your unique strengths and double-down on them.

Top 3 Takeaways

1. Success in the (startup/business) world is not simply awarded to the hardest workers. It is awarded to those who develop and use their Unfair Advantages, which are your unique competitive advantages.
2. An Unfair Advantage is a condition, asset or circumstance that puts you in a favorable business position. Everyone has some Unfair Advantages! Examples:
   • Connections/Vitamin B
   • Being born into a rich family in a first world country
   • Having a special physical trait (beautiful, tall, strong, etc.)
   • Personal interests relevant to whatever you’re doing
   • Specific skills/talent/expertise
   • Lived experience with unique insights
3. You can influence your own luck and try to maximize it by exposing yourself to more opportunities. If you present yourself to fate over and over, eventually luck will strike. Do more things, meet more people, go to more events, get more feedback etc. After some time, you will hit the jackpot by just having tried a lot and being in the right place at the right time. If you never go out, luck has very little chance to find you.

Who Should Read This Book?

• People looking to start a business the right way and with as much leverage as possible
• People that want to figure out their strengths and need some guidance on how to reflect

How The Book Impacted Me

It made me think about which Unfair Advantages I have and where my strengths are.

I thought about my Unfair Advantages in the context of the presented MILES framework and wrote them down. This is not a big game-changer, but knowing my strengths will maybe come in handy in the future.

The book also gave me a basic introduction to the startup world. This was not why I read the book but it was interesting nonetheless.

Best Quotes

Two ways to think about how financial success is achieved:

Financial success and wealth is often thought of through either one of two mindsets:

• Rich people got rich through hard work. Rich people deserve their riches. They earned their financial success (meritocracy).
• Rich people got rich through random events outside their control. It’s all about luck, timing, natural talent and fate. Their financial success is unearned (fatalism).

You can think of these mindsets as opposite ends on a spectrum. The reality, of course, is firmly in the middle.
Believing that we live in a pure meritocracy is dangerous because it imbues value-judgement, a sense of ‘deservedness’, to people’s positions in life. If you don’t make it in this system, you are a loser. This pernicious belief is the root cause of a lot of angst and status anxiety in the developed world.

Fixed mindset vs. growth mindset:

In a fixed mindset, people believe they are born naturally gifted at doing some things, but incapable of others. This black-and-white way of thinking often obstructs their development. Failure is a disaster to a person with fixed mindset. When it happens, they will bury their heads in the sand or blame others.

In a growth mindset, people believe that life is fluid. You can be bad at something, but it is only because you have not taken the time or attention to get better at it. The growth mindset is perfectly encapsulated in one word: yet (“I can’t do xyz… yet.”). The flaw of this mindset i that it often ignores the stacks of unfair advantages (and luck) some people already have in life (it’s hard to say “I’m not a trillionaire… yet”).

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on the three forms of capital:

1. Economic capital – money
2. Social capital – our network of friends and allies
3. Cultural capital – everything else that can get you respect or prestige (knowledge, qualifications, titles, occupation, how you talk, your accent, how you dress, your body language, your tastes and hobbies, etc.)

How to get luckier:

You get luckier by maximizing your chances for opportunities.

Trying to roll a double six on a pair of dice is easiest when you can roll as many times as you like. You just roll the dice until you get it, once you get it, nobody cares about the number of your attempts.

• Take more action
• Do more things
• Meet more people
• Go to more events
• Blog more
• Produce things and publish them
• Get more feedback

Impostor syndrome:

It’s incredibly common to feel impostor syndrome. Don’t compare your behind-the-scenes to everyone else’s highlight reel.

Status as your unfair advantage:

If you do have a form of status, be sure to highlight it when necessary.

But status is a double-edged sword. Too much status can make you become blinded to reality, or lose touch with what life is like for the average person. It’s too easy to become accustomed to the privileges and blessings that we have, and completely forget that we have them.

Questions

• How much of what you accomplished is because of your hard work and your intelligence, and how much of it is because of the luck and the privileges that you’ve had?
• What do I personally have going for me that few other people do?
• Why am I striving to achieve what I want to achieve?
• Do I know what I am an expert in?
• What would I like to be an expert in?

Summary & Notes

DISCLAIMER:
The following notes are my raw notes for each chapter in the book. They are meant to be used as a quick overview and not to be read as fully fleshed-out and thought-out sentences.

Introduction

• We don’t live in a pure meritocracy.
• 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
• Easy example for basketball: if you are very tall, that is an unfair advantage.

Part One – Understand

1 – Life is unfair

• It’s not about working harder. It’s about working the system.
  • aka work smart not hard
• The oversimplification of hard work = success is not only misleading, it can be downright confusing when you don’t know what to work on.
• Working hard without working smart is useless.

2 – Our entrepreneurial journeys

• Ash Ali: poor immigrant kid from Birmingham learned some internet-, marketing- and programming-skills at the height of the “Dot Com Bubble” and then took a leap by going to the food ordering startup “Just Eat”. It was a huge success and the IPO made him financially free overnight.
• Hasan Kubba: Introverted, non-natural entrepreneur, smart kid from poor immigrants. Was on his way to become a doctor when he figured out he did not want to be one. But he was lost because he didn’t know what else to do and he would never have thought to be an entrepreneur. He got a degree in economics and instead of looking for a job, he stumbled upon an online course on how to start your own online business. Fearful and full of doubts of launching his first startup, he got a job after all. It was a sales job at a small investment brokerage firm. Sales skills helped him to finally start his website and SEO business. He traveled the world for a while, while his business created passive income for him.

3 – Success is both hard work and luck

• Financial success and wealth are often thought of through either one of two mindsets:
  • Rich people got rich through hard work. Rich people deserve their riches. They earned their financial success (meritocracy).
  • Rich people got rich through random events outside their control. It’s all about luck, timing, natural talent and fate. Their financial success is unearned (fatalism).
  • You can think of these mindsets as opposite ends on a spectrum. The reality, of course, is firmly in the middle.
• Believing that we live in a pure meritocracy is dangerous because it imbues value-judgement, a sense of ‘deservedness’, to people’s positions in life. If you don’t make it in this system, you are a loser. This pernicious belief is the root cause of a lot of angst and status anxiety in the developed world.
• Life isn’t fair. Life is too random and arbitrary to balance out and give everyone an equal share. We don’t all have the same opportunities. We don’t all get what’s coming to us. That’s why we have to make sure we are compassionate to others and ourselves if life doesn’t always turn out quite as well as we’d hoped.

4 – Introducing Unfair Advantages

An Unfair Advantage is a condition, asset or circumstance that puts you in a favorable business position.

• Unfair Advantage Examples
  • Connections/Vitamin B
  • Being born in a first world country
  • Having a lot of money
  • Personal interests
  • Skills/talent/expertise
  • Lived experience with unique insights
• Properties of Unfair Advantages (UAs)
  • Can’t be easily copied or bought
  • A set of UAs is unique to you
  • UAs stack/multiply together and can have a snowballing effect. The more UAs you can stack up early in life, the stronger they will be.
• 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.

Part Two – Audit

5 – Introducing the MILES framework

• Five categories of UAs
  • Money is the capital you have, or that you can easily raise
  • Intelligence and Insight includes IQ, social and emotional intelligence, as well as creativity.
  • Location and Luck is all about being in the right place at the right time.
  • Education and Expertise is both your formal schooling and also your self-learning, which gives you intellectual and technical know-how.
  • Status is your social status, including your network and connections. It’s your ‘Personal Brand’ – in other words, how you’re perceived. It also includes your inner status, which is your confidence and self-esteem.
  • All these advantages are built on the foundation of mindset, which is the one you have the most control over and where you have the most leverage.
• It is very important to have a sense of ‘why’ as an entrepreneur or founder. Find out why you do what you do as it will be the basis of everything you do.
• Also think about what you think success means for yourself -> Definition of Success
• Know about your general personality type to know where to spend extra effort
  • Example: you are an introvert but connections and a healthy network are very important, so you know to focus a bit harder on this part

6 – Mindset

• Your mindset is very important, because it’s where you can have the most immediate effect. You can change your mindset in an instant, simply by looking at your circumstances and your life situation through a different lens.
• Amazing mindset ‘hack’: gratitude
  • Focusing on what you’re grateful for in life can make you feel happier, less stressed and more focused, all without having to change your external circumstances at all.
  • Popular technique in journalling
• Fixed mindset vs. growth mindset
  • Fixed mindset
    • People believe they are born naturally gifted at doing some things, but incapable of others. This black-and-white way of thinking often obstructs their development. Failure is a disaster to a person with fixed mindset. When it happens, they will bury their heads in the sand or blame others.
  • Growth Mindset
    • People believe that life is fluid. You can be bad at something, but it is only because you have not taken the time or attention to get better at it. The growth mindset is perfectly encapsulated in one word: yet. -> “I can’t do xyz… yet.”
    • Flaw: it often ignores the stacks of unfair advantages (and luck) some people already have in life (It’s hard to say “I’m not a trillionaire… yet”).
• The ability to think ‘The sky is the limit!’ is an excellent tool to have in your mental toolbox. However, there does need to be an element of realism in your thinking, though not one that overly limits you. You need to find the right balance.
• Authors propose the idea of a Reality-Growth Mindset
  • 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).
  • Sometimes you need to believe that anything is possible to get you inspired and motivated to take action. Other times, it’s good to know that you’re probably not going to be an extreme outlier, and to enjoy the simpler things in life, because it’s true that the best things in life are free.
  • “Having your feet rooted on the ground, with your head in the clouds.”
  • Characteristics of a strong Reality-Growth Mindset
    1. Vision
    2. Resourcefulness
    3. Constant growth and lifelong learning
    4. Grit and perseverance

7 – Money

• Rich people often intentionally obscure how easy it is for them to make even more money. And they also know how to pay less than you’d expect in taxes.
• Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu says we have three forms of capital:
  1. Economic capital – money
  2. Social capital – our network of friends and allies
  3. Cultural capital – everything else that can get you respect or prestige (knowledge, qualifications, titles, occupation, how you talk, your accent, how you dress, your body language, your tastes and hobbies, etc.)
• Having a lot of money is an UA:
  • You can fund your own startup
  • You don’t have the pressure of living paycheck to paycheck
  • You have a longer runway time and can afford to have a higher burn rate
• A good general rule of thumb is that you need at least 6 to 18 months of runway time if you’re going to quit a full-time job and focus on a startup.
• Figure out if money is your UA by asking:
  • Do I have the necessary capital in my bank account now?
  • Do I have friends and family who might invest that money upfront?
  • Can I save that money doing my current job?

8 – Intelligence and Insight

• Different types of intelligence
  • IQ
  • Book smarts (capacity for theoretical understanding)
  • Street smarts and people skills
    • Things you learn outside of school by doing
    • Three different elements
      • Social and emotional intelligence
      • Common sense
      • Bullshit detection
  • Creative intelligence
    • All about connecting dots from disparate fields and coming up with unique solutions
    • Intersectional or interdisciplinary thinking
  • Insight
    • Being able to see below the surface of things and to understand elements of a situation that others might not
    • Having insight means finding a need or a gap in the market
    • Understanding the problem you’re solving inside and out is the powerful insight that investors are looking for
    • Get insight by talking to potential customers
    • It’s advantageous to be the target customer of your own startup, so you know the needs and wants already
• To assess your level of ‘street smarts’, ask close friends and colleagues for their feedback:
  • How well do I work in teams?
  • How good am I in my interpersonal relationships?
  • Do I make others around me feel better about themselves?
  • Am I in touch with my own emotions?
  • Can I get a good gut feeling of what other people’s intentions are?

9 – Location and Luck

• Being in the right place at the right time
• Location
  • You become the average of the five people you spend the most time with
  • Not only physical, online environment also matters
    • Who we follow and befriend
    • What type of content we consume
• Luck
  • Mostly luck with the correct timing, not too early but also not too late
  • How to get more lucky
    • Maximize your chance opportunities
      • Take more action
      • Do more things
      • Meet more people
      • Go to more events
      • Blog more
      • Produce things and publish them
      • Get more feedback
    • Trust your intuition and gut feeling, especially when you’ve had some experience
    • Expect to be lucky
    • Turn even the bad luck into good luck (fail forward, learn from bad luck)
  • Trying to roll a double six on a pair of dice is easiest when you can roll as many times as you like. You just roll the dice until you get it, once you get it, nobody cares about the number of your attempts.

10 – Education and Expertise

• Education
  • It’s very important to be educated, but it does not matter how you get that education
  • Benefits of high-end schools
    • Knowledge
    • Network
    • Signalling/Status
  • Specific expert knowledge is an UA
• Expertise
  • Learning by doing and applying theory
• Ask yourself:
  • Do I have the skills to build my company?
  • Do I know what I am an expert in?
  • What would I like to be an expert in?

11 – Status

• Outer status
  • With higher social status comes more prestige, honor and respect, and therefore increased influence
• Prejudice and unconscious bias
  • Being in a minority status-wise can be a hindrance but potentially also an UA because if you impress, you stand out more
• Cultural capital
• Your network
  • All about your proactiveness in forming and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships
• Inner status
  • Self-esteem and confidence
• Imposter syndrome
  • It’s incredibly common
  • Don’t compare your behind-the-scenes to everyone else’s highlight reel
• Status as your unfair advantage
  • If you do have a form of status, be sure to highlight it when necessary.
• Status as a double-edged sword
  • Too much status can make you become blinded to reality, or lose touch with what life is like for the average person. It’s too easy to become accustomed to the privileges and blessings that we have, and completely forget that we have them.

Part Three – The Startup Quick-Start Guide

12 – The why

• You have to ask yourself why you’re launching a startup, or why you’re choosing any path to pursue.
  • What are you trying to gain and achieve, and what are you trying to avoid?
• According to psychology, not losing or avoiding pain is the bigger motivator than the vision of gaining something for the majority of people.
  • -> Loss aversion
• Have a Definition of Success
  • Make your criteria for success process-based rather than outcome-based.

13 – The type of startup

• Lifestyle startup/lifestyle business
  • Are designed to sustain a certain lifestyle
  • Usually don’t need external investors
  • Are not binary when it comes to success (not either multi million IPO or complete failure)
  • Are often local and tied to a limited geographical area, or very niche
    • Target market is smaller/limited
  • Examples:
    • Professional service businesses like accounting firms, law firms, marketing agencies and consultancies.
    • Online shops for niche goods
    • Social media content creator with a small brand
    • Restaurants, clothing boutique, bakery, architecture firm
• Hyper-growth startups/moonshots/unicorns
  • Are scalable, possibly global, often in the technology sector
  • Once built, the product can be distributed at incredibly low cost
  • Need massive amounts of funding to grow virally from month to month
  • Examples:
    • Digital products or intellectual properties such as film, books, photos, software, apps, algorithms
• Which type to choose?
  • Hyper-growth startups are better if you’re very strong on Unfair Advantages
    • You often need Money and Status to get going, some Insight to identify a problem, and Expertise to solve that problem
  • Lifestyle startups are better if your unfair advantages are not so developed
  • Tweet from venture capitalist Villi Iltchev:
    • “If you think you can build a $100M biz, raise VC and go for it. Otherwise, build a $10M biz with $3M in cash flow and live happily ever after.”
• Founder mental health
  • Make sure to get some help and speak to somebody if the pressure gets too much.

14 – The idea

• Ideas are overrated. Yes they are important, but there are countless people all over the world having the same genius idea at the same time. The real differentiator between an idea that remains an idea and an idea that goes on to become a successful startup is execution.
• Ideas do not need to be unique. Most startups are either a twist on an idea that already exists, or the implementation of the same idea but in a new market or industry.
• It can be bad for you to be the first in any industry
  • You learn from the failures of first-movers
  • The risk and effort for first-movers is much higher
  • They have to educate the market about the product, which can be very expensive
  • Amory Lovins on first-movers vs. successful startups: “The pioneers take the arrows, the settlers take the land.”
• Ask yourself: “What is the problem that I am going to solve?”
• Start with who, not what
  • Picture a person for whom you would like to solve a problem. Sometimes it’s a problem that they don’t know they have because they’re so used to having to deal with it, or avoid having to deal with it, that they just see it as an unchangeable fact of life.
  • Keep your attention in your daily life attuned to whenever someone mentions something they find annoying, a problem they can’t solve or a situation they’re struggling with.
• Scratching your own itch
  • Solving a problem that you yourself have
• The biggest mistake is having a ‘solution’: creating a product before looking for a problem for it to solve.
• Your Unfair Advantage is you
  • Startup success is not just about choosing the right idea; it’s about choosing the right idea for you

15 – The people

• Finding co-founders
  • Don’t do it all alone
  • Join a co-working space, find a mentor or an accountability partner
  • Find a business partner that complements your unfair advantages
  • A startup founding team often needs a creator, a communicator and a technician
  • Conflict between founders is probably the leading cause of startup death. Be very careful who you go into business with.
• How to grow your network
  • Two ingredients are needed to develop your network:
    1. An authentic desire to add value to people you meet
    2. Increasing your Status so that people perceive more value from you
  • Networking shouldn’t be a ‘salesy’ handing out of business cards. Make it a genuine desire to learn about people and listen.
• How to get mentors
  • Don’t just try to leech off more successful people, seek to add value to your potential mentor
  • Get their attention – break through the noise. These people receive huge numbers of really long messages, be straight to the point and seek to add value. Find out how you can help this person. Also, act normal, don’t put them on a pedestal.
  • Apply what your mentor advises you to do as quickly as possible, then immediately feed back to them the outcome of the action.

16 – The business

• Start small, take small risks by running small tests to see if your idea has legs. That means not risking significant sums of money on it straight away.
• The idea validation phase
  • Tweak and rethink your approach after getting initial feedback from your first customers, to make the product just right for them. They need to love the product, they need to spread the good news of your product by word of mouth. If they don’t, then you’re probably going to fail.
  • So the first phase consist only of building your product and speaking to your customer
  • Often your idea simply won’t work
    • You have solution for a problem that doesn’t exist
    • The customer doesn’t perceive the problem as a problem
    • The problem is too small for the customer to be motivated to solve it
  • Don’t fall in love with your own idea before you have any feedback!
• Building an MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
  • Simple features without fancy extras, just core features.
  • Don’t fall into the trap of perfectionism, as long as your MVP solves the problem, you’re good.
  • Reid Hoffman: “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”
• Growth scrapping
  • Before doing big scalable marketing campaigns, you need to creatively find each of your early customers/users manually.
  • Make sure you don’t spam them!
  • Realize that you’re going to get a lot of rejections and that you’ll need to develop a thick skin.
  • Watch out for “Vanity Metrics”: numbers that may be growing but don’t represent the most important thing for you to measure.
    • Social media example: don’t watch your follower/like count, but your retention

17 – Fundraising

• When pitching to raise funding, make sure your communication is crystal clear. Avoid jargon, speak in simple language. Be ultra specific:
  1. What does your startup do? (simpler is better)
  2. What problem are you solving? (present your key insight)
  3. How big is the market? (research it)
  4. What is your traction? (how many users/customers/clients you already have)
  5. How will you make money?
  6. Who is the team?
  7. Who are your competitors? (properly research this, saying you have no competition makes investors skeptical usually)
  8. What is your Unfair Advantage?
  9. How much money do you want to raise?
  10. What will you spend that money on?

Conclusion

• Figure out your unfair advantages. Find a problem to solve, speak to potential customers and users, and develop a solution based on their needs. And make sure to charge for it, otherwise it’s a hobby, not a business.