Core Message
Life is Unfair
We have often heard that hard work is the key to success. However, that is a very simple and ignorant way to look at the cause of success. We often don't want to admit certain factors like genetics, great social connections, money, family support and luck often contribute to success.
We have to work smarter and not harder. What I mean by working smarter is by leveraging your unfair advantages and stacking the odds in your favor in order to progress faster. I believe that if you have the unfair advantages like money and connections, you should use them to the maximum and not apologize for it. Often people feel guilty for using their unfair advantages to pull ahead but they are there for a reason.
The Miles Framework
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| Miles Framework |
1.) Money
Money is not the only type of capital we have, though. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu said we all have three forms of capital: economic capital (money), social capital (our network of friends and allies) and cultural capital, which is essentially everything else that can get you respect or prestige (for example, knowledge, qualifications, titles, occupation, how you talk, your accent, how you dress, your body language, your tastes and hobbies, etc.).- A.Ali
That’s the great thing about wealth: it’s a safety net in case anything goes wrong. It’s a powerful contingency. That’s how privileged entrepreneurs can manage risk. They have a big fat safety net of money to fall on.
2.) Intelligence and Insight
What is far more useful to understand is a concept that virtually all psychologists definitely agree on: believing you can get smarter actually makes you smarter-H. Kubba
There are various types of intelligence and include
a.) Book smarts
It’s also a style of learning – some people prefer to increase their knowledge through books and formal education. This type of intelligence gives us conceptual frameworks that we can use as tools for understanding the world.
If you enjoy learning from books, and find that you grasp concepts quickly and easily without having to go and do it yourself first, then you’ve got a really helpful unfair advantage already – books contain all the knowledge accumulated throughout world history, so there will always be something to read and learn from. Equally, when you’re founding a startup, it doesn’t hurt to have a degree certificate and a string of letters after your name on your CV (though it’s by no means essential).
b.) Street smarts and people skills
These are things that you learn outside books. They are developed by doing. You’ll have some kind of baseline ‘talent’ at it, but ultimately it’s developed primarily through real-life experience, and by learning from other people’s real-life experiences.
Street smarts are comprised of three different elements:
- Social and emotional intelligence : Knowing which questions to ask, how to ask those questions in a way that gets you the answers you’re after, building trust and relationships, and being assertive.
- Common sense: Knowing who you can trust, who you should approach, and getting a sense of different trends and the demand for different things.
- Bullshit detection : Knowing when people are trying to screw you over, reading their intentions, and having a sense of where their incentives lie.
Street smarts is very important to develop. For example, Nikola Tesla was very intelligent and was book smart but he didn't have the street smarts. He wasn't able to interact with people very well and leverage his book smarts to further develop his career. This led him to dying broke in a company of pigeons.
c.) Creative Intelligence
One way to improve creativity is to increase your interdisciplinary knowledge: learn from areas and fields of knowledge, and other industries, that are completely different to what you already know. You will learn a lot and develop mental models that are more diverse and that will allow you to think more laterally. -A. Ali
This is primarily connecting the dots between fields that are very different and coming up with distinct and unique solutions to problems that we face.
d.) Insight
Having an insight means finding a need. Finding a gap in the market. Seeing an inconvenience that can be solved. Figuring out the inadequacies or inefficiencies of existing products and services on the market. In other words, finding a real problem to solve.
Insight backed up with book smarts + street smarts + creative intelligence give you a crazy unfair advantage over your competitors.
3.) Location and Luck
It is being at the right place at the right time.
a.) Location
In summary, location can give you access to capital (investors and venture capital firms tend to cluster in startup hubs) and to highly skilled talent, and so much more
Location determines a lot the access to resources one gets. If your business is located in Nairobi, it will get more people than if it was located in Mandera.
Location also includes your environment, so if you're surrounded by top achievers, you will become a top achiever naturally. If you're surrounded by losers, you will become a loser by association.
b.) Luck
Timing has being shown to account for 42% of the difference between success and failure of startups
Timing in founding a startup is all about trying to ride the big waves (not short-term trends or hype) that we are being carried on by societal and technological shifts. It’s all about the macro-trends.
4.) Education and expertise
a.) Education
It is a big unfair advantage to have a great education. An education at a great school will give you access to knowledge, connections to high value individuals and even increase your status.
i.) Knowledge
At university you get to study in areas you are interested and if you take further, you can specialize by doing a masters and even a Phd. This specialized knowledge, gives you an unfair advantage over your competitors.
ii.) Network
You get to meet people who are like you if not better. These are individuals who will go on to do well in life and if you associate with them, they can help you in business/career and you can even the right people to further progress your career/business
iii.) Status
Going to a school like Harvard, signals to everyone you're the best and opens doors to many places that you usually cannot enter if you went to somewhere like JKUAT. Also, you can get to work in foreign countries at the top level as everyone knows Harvard and the quality of their education.
Education and expertise is powerful combo and is what helped Larry Page and Sergei Brin invent Google. This was as a result of them doing their Phd at Stanford and they realized the current search engines were not bringing up the best results. Due to their specialized knowledge on the matter, they were able to come up with a better solution.
Moreover, most of the unicorn companies i.e companies that are worth more than a billion dollars in revenues, were started by people who went to elite universities like Harvard, MIT, Stanford etc
b.) Expertise
It is a self-taught process where, for the most part, you learn by doing. Begin by learning enough theory to get you started, but know that ultimately most of the real learning comes when you apply that theory and get feedback from the real world as to how it’s working. That is how you truly become an expert in something
e.) Status
Sociologists define status as being about your perceived social value relative to others – in other words, what you can bring to the table.
Thank you for reading all the way to the end. Make sure to check out part 2 of the review.
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