The Fairly Unfair Advantage

Dear reader,

What is your unfair advantage? What is the thing that sets you apart from everybody else?

Not sure? Same with me.

I asked myself that question after reading “The Unfair Advantage” in late 2021.

The book argued that every person has an unfair advantage, it could be a location advantage, experiences, connections, access, or anything that only you have.

I had nothing significant. I was born in a small village of Nepal, had an ordinary childhood, and had no extraordinary experiences or connections.

It felt like I had no unfair advantage.

So I set out to build my own unfair advantage.

And I am happy to report that I was successful.

I cannot tell you which method will work for you because I’m not you. Instead, I will tell you what I did and you can try those or use those as reference for your own discovery.

There were several things I experimented with, here’s the top 3 that worked for me:

1. Understanding the common sense

It took a lot of wishful thinking and disappointment for me to understand this simple fact:

“Only if you work for something, you might get the result.”

For a long time, I used to only think about doing things, achieving things, and creating impact through content.

The keyword here is “think.”

That is all I did. And honestly, that is what most people do.

We think, we plan, we wish, but we rarely take meaningful steps towards actually making progress. And when we don’t take action towards all the things that we want to do, nothing changes.

The journey starts with a single step–not with thinking about taking a step.

Once I understood nothing was going to come from just thinking and hoping for things to happen, I started taking actions.

What creates the difference is doing the thing over just thinking about doing the thing.

2. Consuming long-form content

People are addicted to dopamine hits that they receive from short-form content.

We are in an era of constantly reducing attention span, 15 seconds is the average.

Even when you’re trying to improve your life and try to learn, most people will only watch videos that are around 10 minutes.

I made that my fairly unfair advantage.

The videos that are under or around 10 minutes explain topics and concepts in a very surficial manner. Nothing is covered in depth.

So I started watching videos that are boring and long because those are the videos packed with most value. Not all of them but most of them.

One of my recent favorites is the podcast Deep Life which is hosted by Cal Newport, the author of “Deep Work” and professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. The value he shares is incredible.

3. Reading books

Books are results of decades of learnings and life lessons that authors share in the most comprehensive way.

Most books don’t sell through clickbait or excessive marketing, they sell through word of mouth.

Authors can’t say “…so watch this other video to learn how to do that.“

That is what YouTube and other platforms promote do. The digital creators want you to move from one video to the next without giving the full picture because they are incentivized to do so.

Books are different.

Books are the full guide to doing certain things or understanding certain topics.

Books have been used as a reservoir for knowledge for a very long time, since the beginning of civilization.

The fact is that we have free access to all of the best knowledge, all of the best ideas, and all of the best “content” that has been created in the history of mankind, and it’s literally one click away.

Yet, most people consume content made in the last 24 hours.

You have to use that to your advantage.

Most people aren’t willing to read books because they are long and boring and don’t give the quick dopamine hit that people have gotten addicted to. So do that and you’re already ahead of most people.

If you want to read but are not a huge fan of reading, I recently published a video on How to read if you hate reading which might be helpful.

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The above are only some of the ways you can use to build you own unfair advantage, those are not the only ones.

You can try other things for yourself. Experiment and see what clicks.

I hope you found this article helpful. If you did, let me know via the comments.

See you next week.

Warmly,

Suraj.