What are your unfair advantages?
On playing to your strengths, creating opportunities, and the MILES framework.
Hello there! I finally broke my one-post-per-week streak. I hope you missed me. I’m surprised I kept it going for so long. Life has been a little busy lately, but posting an update here once per week is one of the ways I’m keeping myself accountable to make time for side-projects. I find the quicker I am to resume a habit the more likely it is that I’ll maintain it again. The further away the horse, the harder it is to jump back on, so I’m back today to avoid the hiatus from extending even longer.
I’m planning a longer post for next week where I’ll share some techniques for capturing a backlog of ideas for your content and staying on top of your schedule, because as you can tell, this is something I am currently struggling with, so I want to share what I’m learning to make this process easier.
What I want to share today is a quick idea I recently read about in the book The Unfair Advantage, which I’ve been thinking about a lot this week. As much as I like nerding-out about topics like productivity, growth, and side-hustles, I am fully against the toxic “hustle culture” that permeates a lot of online spaces. I have already had one friend describe my newsletter as “feel-good hustle content” and I can’t decide if this is an insult or a compliment.
This is why I identified a lot with the core theme in the book. The idea is that, from a career or business perspective, focusing on your strengths and finding the path of least resistance is almost always the best move. If you can figure out the unique combination of skills and experience you have that sets you apart from others, you won’t actually need to hustle as much, because you’ll be leaning in to what makes you… you. An unfair advantage is one that you can already use, with less effort than others, because you already have it.
Ali Abdaal gives a practical example in the world of content creation. He says that many times whilst coaching people on how to become a successful YouTuber, he noticed that people often decided to create content for one of their hobbies, even though they have no particularly unique experiences or thing which makes them stand out to a potential audience or even give them an interesting story.
Take me for an example: let’s say I decide to start a YouTube channel with the aim of growing it and actually making money from it. I decide to start a photography channel because this is my hobby — I love photography! But I am not a professional photographer or videographer. All of my experience is based on shooting for fun. By making this choice, I have absolutely no unique story or experiences to lean on. Not only that, but I’d be competing against actual professional photographers with years of experience (their unfair advantage) who already run their own channels.
I could still do it, but I’d have to work extra hard to create a competitive edge and build an audience for myself. Instead, I’d probably be much wiser to look into my existing professional experiences (say, in management, engineering, or coaching) and find a unique personal angle there instead.
In the content-creation world, an unfair advantage is often achieved by combining two unlikely characteristics to create something new. Take Ali himself: rather than marketing himself as “guy who makes productivity videos” (a much larger, generic niche, where he would have needed to hustle a lot to make a name for himself), he leaned into the fact that he was a Cambridge medical student & doctor. “Ex-doctor turned YouTuber” is a more interesting story and unfair advantage that makes him unique and much more memorable by default, even if a lot of the content is very similar to other productivity videos.
The MILES framework
If you’re interested to explore this idea for yourself, the authors share their MILES framework for helping you identify your own unfair advantages. In short, MILES stands for:
Money: An obvious one, if you have a lot of cash to throw into your business, or a lot of savings you can rely on to quit your job and do what you want without worrying about the finances, that’s a huge unfair advantage.
Intelligence & Insight: If you find a particular skill very easy and feel like it comes naturally to you, this is another pretty obvious advantage. (The authors also mention that literally being very intelligent is an unfair advantage but I find this completely un-actionable and unhelpful. Maybe I’m just not smart enough.)
Location & Luck: Location is again pretty obvious (where you’re born and where you live will impact your career/life drastically). What’s more interesting to me here is “luck”, which can also be renamed to “opportunities”. I really identify with the idea that we can actively make luck/opportunities for ourselves by consistently doing a mix of:
Doing things: Take more actions, try things out. The best way to learn, to grow as a person, and to figure out what you’re good at and what you enjoy, is to actually do things.
Meeting people: Go to events, meetups, network online or in-person, whatever your method, find ways to make connections.
Producing things: and publish them! Blog about your work, share it somewhere. Put stuff out into the world.
Getting feedback: Find ways to get feedback — from your peers, your clients, your audience — whatever your context, implement ways to get feedback regularly.
Education & Expertise: Like in the YouTuber examples I gave above, your existing expertise and experiences can be a huge advantage. This also refers to having a growth-mindset, and intentionally making time in your life for learning new things. Regular learning can also lead to new opportunities, which can lead to new advantages.
Status: There is no denying that your status in the world impacts your life and which advantages you have. Like it or not, a fancy job-title can still get you places or make you stand out. Ali’s “doctor” title has a lot of built-in prestige.
What’s your unfair advantage?
The summary of the whole book is essentially that we should adopt a ‘reality-growth mindset’ in life — be mindful of your limitations, but recognise that your limitations are malleable. Success isn’t all about working harder than the rest or telling yourself that you can do anything. It’s about asking yourself what unfair advantages you already have and seeing how you can leverage them.
I’m still not quite sure what my own unfair advantages are. I’d love to hear from you — what are your unfair advantages?
See you next week (hopefully),
-Mike.