How To Develop Your Unfair Advantage
Discover more from Unorthodoxy
How To Develop Your Unfair Advantage
This five-step acronym can help you live up to your potential
Within this article, the reader will learn the following insights:
How we have been stifled from living up to our full potential
How can we develop an unfair advantage from where we are now
Introduction
I recently watched the Productive Game's YouTube review of the book Unfair Advantage and learned about the MILES acronym. The "L," which stands for how luck can lead to successful, value-producing results, resonated with me because that's the core message I drive in my Esoteric Section.
However, to truly understand MILES, we must first understand why we are not living up to our full potential.
Why We Don't Live Out To Our Full Potential
In my recent articles, such as how millennials were set up to fail or why millennials hate adulting, I tie this back to the compulsory public education system. In the article who are the bad guys, I paint the picture of how this fits into phase one of a global plan that we just happen to be caught up in.
That being said, we can't change the past, but we can change the present, which ultimately leads to changing our future. Here is a quote from John Taylor Gatto on education that fits perfectly with our dilemma:
You are at present trapped in a labyrinth built by past generations; our entire nation, too; we're in a maze schooling can't help us to escape; the weakened nation you are inheriting is beyond school's power to strengthen.
One thing to call out is that we all have immense potential. Thanks to compulsory education, that potential was not realized – in fact, it was stifled. We must realize this because if we had the right resources and the year-long training as others did, we would be just as great as the individuals we admire.
You could've been the next Sergey Brin, who happens to be the founder of Google. You could've been the next Lady Gaga, the next Andrew Yang, the next Mark Zuckerberg - if you happen to go to the same geek school, they went to and were trained around the clock for greatness.
They're not exceptional, but they had more resources. Malcolm Gladwell paints this picture well in his book Outliers. They simply were offered better opportunities. You weren't.
You likely didn't go to a geek school and don't have those resources.
However, you can still live up to your full potential.
By identifying your life purpose and how your soul needs to soar, and when you begin to live out that life purpose, you begin to live up to your full potential.
Here are five ways that you can influence your potential and your future.
How To Develop An Unfair Advantage
The framework to develop that unfair advantage is MILES. Again I recommend watching the video to get the entire framework or reading the book. I also recommend following the Productivity Game. Excellent information.
MILES stands for Money, Insight, Luck, Education, and Status.
With money, as we discuss in our inflation article, you don't need all the money in the world. What you need to be is more resourceful and strategic with your money.
Is it better for you to move back to another city? Is it better for you to move back home? Is it better to get a side gig from your hobby that provides additional income?
By controlling your money, you now have a better opportunity to use your money to propel yourself forward.
With insight, this is slightly different than intelligence. Of course, individuals need to be intelligent, which everyone innately is. However, what's needed is to identify problems and solve them effectively before others.
The book Deep Work by Cal Newport touches on this, and to do this really well, we must pay immense attention to everything that we do. The power of the mind helps us here. It's not enough to simply be intelligent but to use that intelligence for real-world value.
Next is luck. Luck is equated with synchronicities, which I explore more in depthly within the esoteric section. These topics should not be seen as psychic phenomena but simply natural phenomena. Phenomena take place in our world.
This is a fact of life, so we must understand it and then see how we can use it to our advantage. The takeaway from this section is that multiple studies have shown that you become luckier simply by thinking you're luckier. You end up being in the right place at the right time.
Again, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell also paints this effect when he talks about the Internet boom. Right individuals, the right course, the right time.
Education is next and what's important here is having the right skills to do what needs to be done. If you identify the problem, you need to be able to solve it, and that is where education comes in.
An Ivy League school is lovely, but with topics such as autodidactism, anyone can learn the skills necessary to enhance their advantage.
Last is status, and this ties into education. If you were blessed to go to an Ivy League school or work for a fortune 500 company, then you have status.
If you didn't, status could still be obtained by the skills you learn and when you demonstrate your problem-solving, value-producing skills to others.
By doing this, you build status within that realm. We may not have the chance to be in one of these geek schools year-round. Still, we do have real-world education starting today. And starting today, we can begin to develop our unfair advantage.
Conclusion
The MILES advantage means that the world is our oyster. We can develop and work on the skills needed to impact our lives.
By identifying our life purpose, knowing we've been set up to fail, and knowing why we've been set up to fail, we become aware of the challenge ahead of us.
We see the barriers, the invisible arms that are reaching to control us, and we can see how ideas and habits are implanted in us.
But knowing that we all have the power to increase our plight in life increases our chances and gives us the energy to move on. Knowing that within each of us is the potential to be whoever we want to be, we now have a chance to live and become that individual.
I close this summary out with a quote from the section on luck because it shows just how many chances we have to accomplish greatness:
As the authors say, increasing your luck is like trying to roll a double six on a pair of dice that you can roll as many times as you like.
All we need is a lucky lightning strike; boom, we're as good as golden.
Thank you for your time and Ashe.