Uncovering The Hidden Power Of Your Unfair Advantage

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(00:48): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Ash Ali. And Hassan Kuba gonna have two guests today, their award-winning authors and entrepreneurs. And despite not going to University, Ash became a serial tech founder and the first marketing director of the Unicorn Startup Just Eat Hassan built a successful startup from his bedroom with nothing more than an online course and a yearning to escape the rat race. They’re now international best-selling authors, coaches and keynote speakers. And we’re gonna talk about their latest book, the Unfair Advantage, how You Already Have What It Takes to Succeed. So Ash and Hassan, welcome.

Hasan Kuba (01:32): Hello. Thank you. Thanks for having us.

John Jantsch (01:34): Hi. Awesome. So the book starts out with this premise, and we could probably do the whole show without me asking another question, but here it is. Life is fundamentally unfair. Who wants to take that dollop of hope?

Hasan Kuba (01:47): I’ll take it. I’ll take it going and so life is unfair. Yeah. That is the under underlying principle behind our book is that life is not fair. And sometimes when you get into self-development, like I did, and still I still enjoy a bit of self-development. Mo you know, you learned that you know, what you got in life is what you deserved. You know, you built the life that you’re living now. You designed it. Your decisions led to the moment you are in now and all these kinds of quotes and beliefs and mental models to make you take responsibility for your life, which is a very useful tool, but it’s limited because it’s not actually that accurate. So one of the ways to look at, well we talk about this in the book, is that it’s, it’s all about mental models. So there’s one extreme, which is to think that all success is based on hard work and, you know, merits.

(02:35): And the other extreme is to think it’s all luck and unearned. Mm-hmm. And the reality is squarely in the middle. Yeah. Right. There’s a lot of serendipity in life. There’s a lot of luck of births and genetic lotteries and there’s a lot of things that just happen because you were in the right place at the right time. Yeah. But at the same time, you can, you know, stack the deck in your favor. You can make the right decisions, you can be consistent in how you think, think and how you behave and the decisions you make to lead towards success. So it’s a mixture of both. Life is unfair and ultimately, you know, we’re so lucky and we should all be so grateful for everything that we have going for us. And at the same time, uh, we can also exert our own agency on the world. We can also take bear some responsibility. We can also take control of our lives to an extent.

John Jantsch (03:19): Yeah. Cuz it, it’s interesting. I mean, we all know people have had everything handed to them, all the funding, all the backing, all the mentors, all the, you know, whatever. And they’ve still found a way to piss it away, haven’t they? . So it really is kind of that combination.

Hasan Kuba (03:33): Exactly.

John Jantsch (03:34): So, so let’s maybe start out by defining, um, what an unfair maybe some examples of what you would call an unfair advantage that people tend to recognize.

Ash Ali (03:46): Yeah. So I mean, an unfair advantage is something that’s unique to you based on your circumstances and also based on your background and who you are as an individual. There’s so many books out there that talk about strengths, but what we do is talk about your strength, but also about yourself as an individual, as a unique person. So we talk about, you know, life is unfair and it’s not a level playing field, but sometimes when life is unfair and it’s not a level playing field, some people can grow up with a victim mindset and a victim type of thinking say, I didn’t have this, I didn’t have that. But actually what we say in the book is actually, how do you turn that around? How do you make that stuff that you, you felt was unfair growing up in poverty or growing up in an area that wasn’t great?

(04:26): How can you turn that around and make it part of your authentic story and use it to an advantage? So an example for me would be, I grew up with little money. And when I start companies now, and I know a lot of listeners are listening here who are run small businesses, when you don’t have a huge amount of money for marketing budgets, for example, I’m the perfect person to come in and work with you because I know how to be resourceful cause I had no money. Right? So my mindset is always based around being resourceful. That’s just an example of something that you could use, uh,

John Jantsch (04:53): Strip. But again, I, you know, to the flip side of that, I guess we all know people who had everything and should have made it. You know, there, we, we all probably know at least somebody, or at least you’ve read their story of somebody that sh never should have . You know, like you said, they didn’t have the education, they didn’t have the backing, they didn’t have the money. Yeah. They didn’t really have seemingly, you know, didn’t seem that smart, you know mm-hmm. Scroll back to top