Leverage your unique edge.
The Secret Sauce to Success: No One Tells
What if I told you success isn’t just about hard work, but something you might already have? Let’s decode the secret behind billionaires like Bill Gates and Evan Spiegel.
Just shout in front of a large audience that if they can do it then why can’t do?
You can do it too.
It’s easy.
Hey brother, it is not easy.
Now who will explain to motivational speakers that, no matter how much you work hard, you can’t become like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. Nothing happens with just hard work, else the rickshaw puller could be the richest person on the planet. For success you need a luck factor, which is called as “The Unfair Advantage”. Nowadays people keep telling their success stories on podcasts that we did this, we did that, we worked hard, we faced difficulties in a certain way and then we got success.
Surprisingly millions of people also listen to it carefully because it gives them hope that, yes, by working hard and facing difficulties they will also be successful. But no one tells what was their unfair advantage. Success is a combination of two things, one is fair play and the other is unfair advantage.
Fair play means hard work, getting up early in the morning, working 12 hours a day etc. and everyone can do this. The second important part is the unfair advantage, like access to the network, finance, location, timing, all these things are not in your hands.
This factor works as a cutting edge for you. There was a time when millions of people used to watch comedy videos on YouTube made just by turning on the front camera. But today, the standards for comedy videos have become so high that mediocre content doesn’t get any attention. That combination of timing, situation and talent is what brought fame to a few. But this particular combination is not going to be repeated in future. Some other combinations will work in future. There is a main reason for everyone’s success which you cannot copy and that is their unfair advantage.
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Story Of Evan Spiegel the world knows Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel, who was the youngest self-made billionaire in 2015. But very few people would have the idea that there is a combination of many factors behind his success. That he was born in a big city like Los Angeles. His parents were well-known lawyers there. His family’s net worth was already in multi-million dollars. His family had very powerful connections due to which Evan Spiegel got contacts of many big tech leaders. Who helped Evan a lot. Even his parents funded Evan’s startup with millions of dollars. So here Evan’s unfair advantage was the combination, in which his already-educated parents, money, power and connections came in handy.
Work hard, bring great ideas and face difficulties. All these traditional success frameworks are to fool you. Because as long as the multiplier of the equation of success, that is, the unfair advantage, does not support you, no matter how hard you work, nothing is going to happen.
The root cause of success is the set of unfair advantages you have. It is a combination that only you have but others do not have. It can be your richness, poverty, expertise in a field or the environment around you. Or even your city can be your unfair advantage.
Let’s understand this with the story Of Bill Gates Everyone knows that Bill Gates started coding at a young age. But very few people know that, The school where 13-year-old Bill Gates used to go in 1968 was the only school in the world that had computers. Now how lucky is this because in 1968, around 30 crore children were of high school age in the whole world. Out of which only 2 crore lived in the US. Out of that only 270,000 were from Washington State. And out of that, only 100,000 children lived around the Seattle area. Out of these, only 300 children were studying in Lakeside School. That means, out of 1 million children in the whole world, only one child had access to a computer at such a young age and Bill Gates was one of those lucky children.
Bill Gates himself believes that if he had not been in Lakeside School, perhaps Microsoft would not have existed today.
The Unfair Advantage Ray Kroc, the American businessman who expanded McDonald’s globally, used to say that —
Two things are necessary for great success. First, being at the right place at the right time and second, doing something about it and taking advantage of that opportunity.
For example, if you want to start a tech startup, then what can be better than being in Silicon Valley or Bangalore in India? If you want to work on AI and you are in China, then what can be a better unfair advantage than this? Your location enhances your product. Being tall in basketball is an unfair advantage.
Thus, in the company where you are applying for a job, it is an unfair advantage to know a senior authority or having a good referral. Being rich before starting a business is also an unfair advantage. Nature definitely gives some unfair advantages to every person. You should just be aware of what your unfair advantages are. Identify your unfair advantages and combine hard work with it, then you can get success.
You might be thinking or planing to complain Anks, I don’t have any unfair advantage. Everyone has, but they could not figure it out. Let me share another story of Facebook’s Project after that you will understand that anyone can have the unfair advantage but s/he has to connect it to correct place.
Facebook’s project: I had heard about a project in which Facebook had to be taught abuses. Because many people on Facebook commit sexual harassment in their local language, abuse some religion or make inappropriate comments on any post. It was easy for Facebook to detect these things in English. But it was not able to detect the same thing in languages like Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi and Telugu. So they hired someone who can create a dictionary of such words.
All one had to do was map the abuses and create a corresponding dictionary. This is the meaning of this word so that the system can block it easily. So, to complete the project, one should have some qualities. You should hire one data engineer and then someone who should know the local abusive words and most important you should know such project exists and this combination is very rare.
Creative? Look, creativity means training your mind in such a way that, it don’t think like everyone else.
