unfair advantage

concept · in 24 sources (2020–2023)

A competitive edge from strengths or circumstances that others cannot easily replicate, set against fair play; the core idea of The Unfair Advantage.

Sources by year: 2020: 5 · 2021: 6 · 2022: 6 · 2023: 7

Also known as: unfair advantages

Also named in the threads: Ali, a fifth-year medical student at Cambridge University, is co-founder of SixMed, a small company running courses for medical school applicants, and has taught its BMAT Crash Course for five years.

Often together

What comes up in the same parts of the videos; the number is how many parts.

Gary Vaynerchuk (5) · The E-Myth (3) · Naval Ravikant (3) · University of Cambridge (9) · YouTube (7) · 6med (5) · LinkedIn (2) · Part-Time YouTuber Academy (5) · show your work (2) · Show Your Work! (2)

What the videos say

The most important statements of each year; all statements.

2023

• 2023-01-05 (said on 2022-12-15, implied) · How Much Money I Made as a YouTuber & Entrepreneur (2022) — Ali says there is no legitimate way to make money online without large amounts of work, luck and unfair advantages, of which he has had plenty. — video description
• 2023-02-14 · If I Started a YouTube Channel in 2026, I'd Do This — recommendation: Ali: To find a YouTube niche, Ali advises combining your interests, strengths and unfair advantages with the people you could serve into hypotheses, such as helping dentists run better Facebook ads. — 00:08:16
• 2023-03-29 (said on 2023-03-13, implied) · My Goals for 2023 - Life Update — Ali: Nick, who runs the course Linking Your Thinking, got into Obsidian in lockdown and helped people in its Discord community; with no audience or unfair advantages he made a course, giving the first 10 people free access. — 00:18:06
• 2023-05-19 · 7 Life Lessons School Didn’t Teach You — Ali loves the idea of exploiting your competitive or unfair advantages, which he thinks is one of the biggest differences between more and less successful entrepreneurs and creators. — 00:13:57
  • A business need not be everything to everyone like Amazon or Walmart, Ali says: be very good at one specific, even super-niche, service or product, because exploiting an unfair advantage beats shoring up your weak areas. — 00:14:40
• 2023-10-06 · 9 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started YouTube — recommendation: Ali: The Part-Time YouTuber Academy students who succeed, Ali says, niche further and further down to make very specific videos on a topic where they have an unfair advantage. — 00:05:50
  • To stand out in a crowded niche you generally need an unfair advantage, Ali says; the alternative is to choose not to compete in a niche that already gets a lot of attention. — 00:05:50
  • Ali defines an unfair advantage as something very difficult or impossible for someone else to replicate; hard work is a fair advantage, since everyone can compete on it. — 00:13:38
  • In almost every case where an academy student's channel blew up after the course, Ali says, a big part was an unfair advantage they leaned into. — 00:13:38
  • An unfair advantage does not matter at the start, Ali says, but once you treat a channel as a business in a saturated niche, ask what unfair advantages help you stand out. — 00:14:36
• 2023-10-22 · If I Started YouTube Today, I'd Do This — recommendation: Ali: To choose a niche for a YouTube channel, Ali uses the hedgehog concept: what you enjoy reading and talking about, where you could be really good or have an unfair advantage, and where there is a market. — 00:00:00
• 2023-11-28 · If I Wanted to Grow An Audience in 2026, I'd Do This — Ali first made very niche videos on getting into UK medical schools such as Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and UCL, with an unfair advantage: he was a Cambridge medical student who had run admissions courses for about five years. — 00:01:29
• …and 1 statement more in 2023 — all statements of 2023

2022

• 2022-02-04 · How to Make Money Online — recommendation: Ali: Beyond just publishing, Ali says YouTube takes strategy: find the intersection of what you are interested in, what you are good at and what the audience wants, for true creator-audience fit. — 00:15:07
  • For unfair advantages Ali points to the MILES framework of his friends' book The Unfair Advantage: money, intelligence and insight, location and luck, expertise, and a last letter he recalls only as "skills or status or something like that". (hedged) — 00:16:06
  • Ali's unfair advantages on YouTube were the brand name of a Cambridge University medical student and a business already making money, which let him invest in camera gear early. — 00:16:06
• 2022-02-25 · How to Grow on YouTube - Live Stream with Ali Abdaal — Ali: In Ali's model, workflow means strategy (niche, target audience, competitor analysis, unfair advantages) and systems for the content production pipeline (org charts, processes). — 00:33:46
  • A channel people follow for its creator's personality rather than a topic is really hard, Ali says, since the personality must be super interesting; vlog channels are hard to grow without large unfair advantages. — 01:07:14
  • Ali started his channel with videos for applicants to medical school at Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial or UCL, a tiny niche where he had an unfair advantage as a Cambridge medical student. — 01:10:41
  • At the get smart level, without unfair advantages in a niche you might reconsider it, Ali says: outworking people is not sustainable, and like Y Combinator's founder-market fit, he prefers niches where he has an edge. — 01:11:09
• 2022-03-03 · How To Start a YouTube Channel - Beginner’s Guide to YouTube — recommendation: Ali: To find a niche, Ali asks what you like, what you are good at and where you have an unfair advantage, then which audience to target and what problems they have. — 00:23:59
  • When Ali started his channel, his unfair advantage was being a Cambridge medical student making videos for people who wanted to become Cambridge medical students; he skipped makeup, music and tech, where he had none. — 00:26:20
  • Be honest about why your channel will stand out: putting in more hours than anyone else is fair enough as an edge, but other unfair advantages make a growth strategy much easier. — 00:26:49
• 2022-03-21 · The Biggest Lessons from 110 Books — Ash Ali (quoted): The Unfair Advantage by Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba says success is not just about hard work but also about unfair advantages that many successful people had. — 00:18:37
• 2022-03-30 · This Book Made Me a Happier Person — Ali: Having lived a privileged life, Ali found many of his own problems genuinely interpersonal, such as worrying what someone thinks of him or whether a person he asks out will reject him. — 00:09:53
• …and 1 statement more in 2022 — all statements of 2022

Also named in: How I Make $4 Million Per Year - The CBM Framework

2021

• 2021-01-17 · My Top 10 Tips for Aspiring YouTubers — Ali's unfair advantages were being a medical student at Cambridge University, since his niche was people applying to study medicine at Cambridge. — 00:07:48
  • Ali says everyone has unfair advantages; you just have to figure out what they are and lean into them. — 00:08:17
• 2021-06-06 · How I Built 9 Streams of Income By 23 — Ali: Having taught themselves to code over years at school, Ali and his brother had the unfair advantage of coding skills while Ali, as a medical student, knew what medical students wanted. — 00:13:45
• 2021-06-13 · 8 Surprising Habits That Made Me A Millionaire — Ali says a lot goes into financial success, such as luck, privilege and unfair advantages. — 00:00:00
• 2021-07-14 · How much I spend in a month… — Ali is open about how much his channel and business make to show that if you put in the work, stack up unfair advantages and have a healthy dose of luck, you can build a reasonably high-revenue business. — 00:00:00
• 2021-07-18 · Answering Uncomfortable Questions With My Personal Assistant — Ali says Elizabeth and a few others they know made YouTube work through a combination of luck, work and unfair advantages, so it is not advice for everyone. — 00:14:01
• 2021-12-09 · The Book That Changed My Financial Life 🤑 — Ali's second lesson: do not underestimate luck in making money, because any outcome, in money or anything else in life, is some combination of luck, skill and unfair advantage. — 00:00:59
• …and 1 statement more in 2021 — all statements of 2021

2020

• 2020-04-26 · What Makes People Successful? — Ali: Reading The Unfair Advantage, Ali came up with an equation: success, however it is defined, is some combination of fair play and unfair advantages. — 00:00:58
  • Ali defines an unfair advantage as one that really helps but that others cannot easily replicate, such as rich parents investing half a million dollars in a founder's startup from day one; hard work anyone could copy is fair play. — 00:01:28
  • Hasan Kubba says everybody has unfair advantages, and what seems a disadvantage can be turned into an advantage. — 00:08:15
  • Ali says that fixating on the privileges we lack blinds us to the unfair advantages we do have, and that wherever we are in life we have so much to be grateful for. — 00:11:50
• 2020-07-13 · What We Learnt In 2 Years of Being Doctors - Deep Dive with Molly Hunt — recommendation: Ali advises against starting a medical education company like SixMed: the market is saturated; only do things where you have an unfair advantage. — 01:32:28
• 2020-10-04 · My BIGGEST Rejections in Life — recommendation: Ali's sixth lesson, his advice to people asking whether a business idea will succeed: use your unfair advantages, what would be very difficult or impossible for others to replicate. — 00:19:08
• 2020-11-15 · How I Gained 1 MILLION Subscribers — Ali says who he is results from circumstances and luck: he was lucky to have a few unfair advantages that he stacked up to build his YouTube channel. — 00:18:12
• 2020-12-28 (said on 2020-12-15, implied) · How Much Money I Earn as a Doctor + YouTuber — Ali: At 19, in his second year of medical school, Ali built the first business of his that succeeded; he credits luck, unfair advantages and seven years of trying before it. — 00:04:06
  • Ali teaches on the Part-Time YouTuber Academy that success, on YouTube and in everything in life, equals work multiplied by luck multiplied by unfair advantages. — 00:16:13 · also in: My Top 10 Tips for Aspiring YouTubers
  • You do not need unfair advantages to start YouTube, Ali says, and they should not be a barrier, but to stack the deck in your favour, work with your unfair advantages. — 00:20:57
  • Using his advantage as a Cambridge medical student, Ali's first videos targeted Cambridge medicine applicants: interview tips with about 15 friends, then vlogs of life as a Cambridge medical student. — 00:21:24
  • Ali's other unfair advantages were an eye for design built over 11 years, and money from a business he had run for four years, which bought camera gear, lights and microphones from day one. — 00:22:36
• …and 3 statements more in 2020 — all statements of 2020