Hasan Kubba - How to Take Advantage of The Unfair Advantage

0:01I am so glad you could join us. I'm your host, Mo Gaudet This podcast is nothing more than a conversation between two good friends sharing inspiring life stories and perhaps some nuggets of wisdom along the way This is your invitation to slow down with us Welcome to Slow Mo

0:34Welcome back, everyone. Today, I have with me a very dear friend. As our guest, I met him at a breakfast get-together with another very dear friend, Ali Abdel. If you don't know Ali's work on YouTube, you're uneducated, basically. Ali is one of our best teachers. Many of me and my friends, Ali picks up topics and just analyzes them very deeply and teaches them on YouTube. Anyway, we were having breakfast at his place and my dear new friend Hassan Kuba was present. We spoke about his work, which basically is all about using the world in your favor. Let's just put it this way. His book, The Unfair Advantage, is a bestseller.

1:24It was named the best business book, top business book of the year for 2021 in the UK. It is a hack if you want. I don't know if I want to call it a hack. I want to call it an approach to really, really acknowledging your advantages in the world and using them to your favor. Very, very clever approach. Hasan is also a coach to many, many business leaders, influencers, entrepreneurs. He is a speaker and he truly sees business and our world in a way that I think can help a lot of us. Hasan Quba is also interested in making everyone's life better with a lot of research and work on happiness, not just productivity and entrepreneurship.

2:13leadership so Hassan it's been a long time actually since we've been together in the same place and I'm very grateful that you agreed that we do this online instead of face to face so how have you been my friend I've been very good and I'm very honored to be here thank you so much Mo I love your work love your books it has been a while and hopefully next time in person as well Yeah, I think my decision this year has been, I love London, but not in winter. So why is that? Very good decision. I'd love to make it over to Dubai. So, or just anywhere in the region, actually, in the Middle East is fantastic.

2:51You're from the region originally, Hassan? Yes, I was born in Baghdad. Baghdad, Iraq, yeah. I came to London when I was three years old with my parents to escape the war. It was at the time it was the, I think the war had just ended. And so we came to London and escaped from all that terrible stuff that was happening in Iraq. Yeah. And that's 1991, right? Was it? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So let's just make sure people don't think it was the George W. Bush war. No, no, no. It was, as they call it in the West, the first Gulf War. But then in the Middle East, we call it the second because then there was the Iraq-Iran War.

3:31very unfortunate time for Iraq it was uh yeah so um so in my little in my three years I lived through two wars in Iraq do you believe they affected you I mean do you remember them at all I mean they affected your life for having to leave and go to a whole new culture but so I don't I seem to have some I don't know if it's a you know when you don't know if it's a memory or a false memory that you like superimposed later because you've seen photographs or something but I seem to have some memory of broken glass somewhere. I remember my parents told me, I don't remember, but I just remember this image of broken glass.

4:06And we moved to Jordan and we lived in Jordan for about a few months and then went to London. So I have like a vague memory of Amman, Jordan, funnily enough. And I also have just an image, images of our flat in Iraq. My parents lived in, my grandfather, very common. And you'll build a property on the land that you own. So he built a building with two flats for his sons when they got married. So that's when my father was there. So there's a vague memory there. But I think it hasn't affected. It's more of an indirect effect in the sense of like what kind of attitudes and kinds of ways of looking at the world, the outlook from my parents.

4:48I think that comes in. It's just inevitable for that to come from that generation to you. and I think I also have grown up with a lot of the Iraqi community in London so I still have that connection my Arabic is still good even though no way I did not know yeah I was listening to your interview with on AB talks and I was really enjoying hearing you in Arabic and I can imagine mine would be similar in that it's not as rehearsed some of the vocabulary won't be there for me but I can I could pick it up quickly because the grammar the foundation is there and the pronunciation and the grammar everything is there for me so That's really interesting.

5:24I mean, it's quite funny because you and I are friends for over a year now and we never spoke Arabic. We didn't even investigate the possibility to speak Arabic, which I have to admit. I mean, I say that publicly sometimes that one of the reasons why I write slightly differently than the average Western author is because Arabic as a language teaches you to debate everything. So because every word has multiple meanings and every meaning has endless numbers of words. So really, everything is about context. You could have the same statement means this is a brave man or, you know, this is a lion that's going to eat a prey or something like that, you know.

6:04And I think that basically makes me think differently. And when I did that interview with Anas on AB Talks, which is subtitled and everything, but when you read the subtitles in English and you listen to it in Arabic, there is, I think, a layer of further depth in the Arabic than it is in the English. It's quite interesting, actually. So have you been ever back to the region? The region, yes. But Iraq itself, once. in 2009 end of 2009 beginning of 2010 is when i went so it was quite a quiet time it was quite a good time and now i'm hearing quite hopeful things i think for the first time so it's quite good i'm quite happy to hear people being hopeful about it's been a long time in a long time yeah it's been a very long so yeah like and i'm planning to go this year maybe towards the end of this year october who knows i've got some intention to go there again i'd love to my parents go quite often every few years um every year sometimes um but yeah the region itself i've been to the uae i've been to um oman i've been to saudi so yeah oh and i've been to a lot of the other levant countries as well so yes yeah no i really love the middle east it's just got a completely different vibe the arable world it's got this nighttime culture which you just don't have in london it's got this buzz that it has going for it it's just there's something special and incredible about it which i really love yeah i've i've done a i've done a series i'm still actually releasing some episodes of a series that i called the remarkable women of the middle east which being here in dubai i you know it's funny when how how little the world knows about the region because of the CNN and Fox and BBC bias of what they show you.

7:54And, you know, it is quite a very unique vibe, as you rightly said. There is a lot of love and life and hospitality to the region that is sometimes misunderstood. You know what they say? They say that books are written in Egypt, printed in Lebanon, and read in Iraq. So across our Middle Eastern world, we believe that the most educated the top thinkers are normally iraqis has that been your case with your parents yeah i i've heard that phrase and i think and i and i love it and i and i see the it was especially the case let's say back in the 70s when it was like the peak time let's say for egypt and iraq it was very much the two arab powers in a way like egypt with this huge population big media the movies, the books, the incredible stuff.

8:45And Iraq was kind of, yeah, as you rightly say, known for its academic side. There's a very big emphasis in the whole Arab world, really, towards scholarship, towards learning, towards being an intellectual. And people outside of the region really have no idea about that. And I think my parents definitely, they had a huge emphasis on education. My father, one of the reasons he was able to not be drafted into the war um i mean i mean on the front line because obviously you want you didn't have a choice in saddam's time um but he was able to teach at university because he was educated at a higher level yeah instead of being at the front line so it's always something they've looked at with a huge as a huge advantage as a huge priority and it's interesting that you say you have a different take you will the way you write your books i think that's definitely true for our book as well in the sense of particularly the philosophy the philosophy around success really comes from a almost an islamic and regional arab regional kind of view of how fate works how success works how luck works how hard work plays into it a lot of it is underpinned by that the importance of gratitude these are huge huge themes in the book and yesterday I was talking to a particularly a Muslim audience yesterday it was an event of about 50-60 people and so I was like like I was able to talk even more openly about the underlying philosophy of how you know we're not in control of our lives as some of the self you know if you read too much self-development books which I'm a fan of generally generally I like it as a general thrusts but it can leave you with a sense of this idea of life is in your hands you're in full control of your own life as if you have full agency and control which if you just stop and think for a moment obviously we don't and and so and there's another underlying assumption which is that we're all starting from the same starting point which again we don't they like to pretend that it's the hard work and you follow the strategies and the hard work and everybody Nobody can be the next Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, whatever.

11:00Reality is, it's, no, we're not all starting from the same point. We all have different circumstances, different situations, different unfair advantages, as we call them. So I think that's, I think a lot of that is from that background that I've got. Yeah. I have to say it's challenging because you're very much like me. So I was born and raised in the East and then I lived most of my effective life, my work life and so on, education and so on in the West. And there is that massive difference. I think we both cultures approve of the fact that, yeah, we don't have much control. But then the Western way of reacting to that is, so let's exert more and more and more and more and more control.

11:45And I think the Eastern way, not just Middle Eastern, but I think Eastern in general and a bit latin way of dealing with it is accept it and flow with it and understand that sometimes those things that are out of control are actually advantages for you that actually that work in your favor rather than resist them and try to control everything exactly you're absolutely right i think that's so true the eastern philosophy to you know to oversimplify is that kind of go with the flow is this idea. I even heard you talk in a podcast about submission. And I was like, yeah, exactly. That way of like submission being a positive thing, not as a positive word.

12:28And acceptance. I think another word for it is acceptance. You've got teachers like Eckhart Tolle talks about it as non-resistance. It's a very fascinating concept. Yeah, I think humans in general need to be wise. You know, there are things that you need to exert control to make a difference, right? And there are things that you sort of almost know instinctively that regardless of how hard you try, you're not going to control them. So it's not wise to resist the mighty wheels of life if life decides to, you know, put 200 ,000 cars in between you and your meeting, like just let go and accept. So I want to start from there because I love, I love the way you phrase your hypotheses in the book.

13:12So let's start with that definition of success. So you basically view success, of course, inclusive of the Western view of success. So you're a very, very effective coach to some of the most well-known influencers on the internet, entrepreneurs and so on. But you see it as bigger than that. It's not just let's make more money or have more followers and so on. Exactly. Yeah. So the subtitle of the book is you already have what it takes to succeed. So it's the unfair advantage you already have. And I remember initially the book was going to be quite a specific book about tech startups. And the publisher was like, no, once they saw my updated manuscript, because I was like, this first draft, that's not the one.

13:56You'll see what I come up with. And they're like, no, honestly, it's quite good. I was like, no, I need to prove you wrong. It's not good. I'll show you what's good. And then I wrote a second draft of it. and that's when they like oh okay let's broaden this out let's let's let's make it a more general book about success let's release it as a hardcover version first let's this is this is some good i was like okay good i've got that validation which i was trying to get and i knew it was it was a broader concept but i wasn't sure of this subtitle that they suggested you already have what it tastes to succeed i was like is that the philosophy or are we trying to give some harsh truths and say actually there are different unfair advantages you might not have them that's okay you know And then I thought about it and I said, hold on, but you can define success for yourself.

14:38They've captured the absolute essence of the book. So the idea is that anybody can achieve success, but you have to define success for yourself. We can't all be crazy, self-made multi-billionaires or be super famous, be on the cover of Time magazine or win Nobel Peace Prizes or something like this. We can't all do that. That's just, that's not true. People love to have a growth mindset, believe anything and you can achieve it. But no, there's a limit to that. We call it in the book, the reality growth mindset. We love the idea of growth mindset. And if you had to choose a fixed mindset or a growth mindset, I would pick growth mindset any day.

15:11But there's also a limit. I'm never going to win the World Cup. I'm not going to score the winning goal in the World Cup. It's just not going to happen for me. And so I think the idea is that you have to define success for yourself beyond what society tells you success is beyond the symbols of success. Something I like to remind people is that what we do as a society, as a culture, is we confuse the symbols of success or the apparent symbols of success with success itself it's like confusing there's this concept from i think it's from i've never studied neuro linguistic programming it's this kind of thing about like psychology and words and how words affect psychology but i find it fascinating to learn about it i pick it up and one of the very core concepts of it is that the map is not the territory meaning that you can't have a map that captures all the details because if you did it wouldn't be a map it would be real life yeah it would be as big as real life and it would be useless and so this idea that we need to model the world we need to i did economics at university and one of the practically it's useless practically i haven't done anything with economics but one thing that was useful is learning to model and learning the downsides and the assumptions and the oversimplifications you have to make to model the economy that's why they couldn't predict any recessions they can't even it almost seems useless but this idea that words are not the thing that they point to this is also an eastern philosophy concept right the words are not the thing the thing is something else the word is just pointing to it i think i've heard some fancy they say if i point to the moon you look at the moon you don't look at my finger that's pointing to the moon the finger is just pointing and so this idea that we get confused of symbols of success for success itself so fancy cars designer labels huge house and that's not what success is so we have to go beyond this idea of looking at symbols and understand and try to define success for ourselves and it's going to be a bit different for everybody um and we have to get in to do that we have to know ourselves we have to have that self-awareness of what do we actually want and that's a journey that's not something that you immediately have the answer to it's a journey of discovery of life of what do we want?

17:25It's the most basic question. What do you want? I studied marketing. And I remember when I was younger, I used to think marketing is must be some evil thing because you're manipulating people. And then actually, I started getting into marketing. I took an online course and learned about marketing. And I started a marketing business because I realized that this is it. This is the most fascinating part of psychology is how do you persuade and motivate people. And I think that every marketing decision is an ethical dilemma. So one of my mentors taught me that every single marketing decision you make is an ethical dilemma and i found that fascinating and deep because it's so true the amount of things that you can you can rile people up to want something to feel like they need something and so you have and you can always use hyperbole and exaggerate or you can always downplay it and you have to decide what the right move is because sometimes it's it's good to pipe something up because it's good for the person whatever you're selling you know it doesn't need to be selling actually money but persuading i believe marketing itself is empty of good or bad empty of evil it is it's the power in general that corrupts right so if if i tell you i'm giving you a machine and that machine is going to enable you to convince people of whatever it is that you want sadly most people will will use this machine for selfish reasons, you know, or many people will, which I call marketers in that case.

18:54But, you know, but the idea is you could also use marketing to propagate a happiness equation or to tell people about a health tip or advice that is really good for them. The tool itself is empty. The tool will work really well for everyone. It's just what you put within it. But I have to say, Hassan, that the biggest failure of marketing in our modern world, if you ask me, is that it convinces us that success is just one uniform mold per category. So success in business is the fancy car and the summer house. Success in relationships is the tall, sleek looking, attractive partner. Success in parenting is that your kids are at Harvard or like some kind of a big success university.

19:41I'm just making up examples, but the truth is many of us are brainwashed to the point that we don't ever revisit those definitions of success exactly and i think i was heavily people ask me i was and i got this question yesterday it was a big q a and i get this a lot as well it's like what made me start a business because i talk in the book that i'm an i like i call myself an unnatural entrepreneur you know you read a lot of biographies of entrepreneurs successful people etc and they were always buying and selling stuff and thinking of ways to make money and that just wasn't me and so i used to read this and think well maybe i just don't have it in me you know maybe it's just not for me because i was never doing it when i was young i'm not naturally inclined in that way and i literally got into it because i decided to take an online course and just do it and i pushed through and i had i had all these ways of getting through it because i struggled a lot but what was the inspiration for me not to just have to do that why did i take why did i decide not to just get a normal job and i mean the typical thing i did economics i did well I went to a good university.

20:45I could have been an investment banker or something in the city of London, which is like, it's like Wall Street for the UK. And the reality is that I think I was heavily inspired by the film Fight Club. Oh. And another film, yeah, which is about this topic of like, buying stuff that you don't need with money that you don't have to impress people that you don't like. That had a big imprint on me when I was young. So it's a bit of a depressing film, but it's a very deep film. my kids always recommended it for me and i i see the message behind it just find it very violent for my taste so i i took me like joy i just i kept thinking about it you know i mean it wasn't like i was like i haven't even i don't think i've even re-watched it because i don't enjoy it but i just it just stayed with me this this message there no i mean when i when i watched it i went back to my daughter so it was past past the time when ali left our world and i i was like you know i would have really liked if you had told me the story without the scenes right so if you just explained it to me yeah but it's interesting that you bring it up i i see your point it's buying things that you want the money that you don't have to impress people that you don't even care about yeah and the other one is a much more light-hearted influence was a film called office space i don't know if you know that i don't i don't know it's famous for the scene it's quite a low budget film it has Jennifer Aniston in it it's got uh it's essentially it has a very famous scene where they beat up a printer it's fantastic they have baseball bats basically these guys are office workers and they hate this printer it's a comedy film and they take it out to the park and destroy it with with baseball bats and kicking it and this and it has gangster rap music playing while they destroy the printer the whole idea is that late 90s feeling of cubicle white collar nine to five rat race type of life and office space and those two together one very depressing one very funny two films really did influence my view of i don't want that life i don't want that you know the dilbert comics you probably remember yeah yeah yeah of course that was in it as well so my dad was a was a civil engineer in era but he was always really into computers he had computers in the 80s yeah so he decided to he decided to do another master's degree in the uk in it and so he's database administrator for microsoft back in the year 2000 so when we first came to london we had no money basically but slowly but surely we became i would say middle class kind of feeling here in the uk but it's that life and i remember But one issue was that he couldn't get into the management type of roles because of, number one, language.

23:28He had a strong Arabic accent, Iraqi accent. And he also, because all that socializing happened at the pub. My dad was a devout Muslim, doesn't drink, doesn't want to go to the pub. He says, I can never get to the levels of management. And alhamdulillah, he did really well. Thank God he did well in his work and he enjoyed it. But I still remember these kinds of things are the things that influenced me. and made me think, hmm, I'm not sure if I want that corporate life. So when you say that, you know, most people will take things like your dad's unable to socialize at the pub and say that's a disadvantage or you saying I cannot fit within the corporate world and think that this is a disadvantage.

24:09And what I think is refreshingly, not surprising, but sort of like, yeah, epiphany-like is you go like, yeah, yeah, it is a disadvantage. if you wanted to be a corporate employee. But it's a major advantage if you're not supposed to be, right? And I think The Unfair Advantage, your book, is entirely about that, entirely about the idea that based on how you define your success, you'll find that you have all that you need to succeed. And based on what you have to succeed, you can define a success that's very different than Oprah, but very, very valuable and impactful for you and your life. Yeah, you absolutely nailed it.

24:53So the book is broken down into three parts. Part one is life is unfair. Understand how life is unfair. Let's accept that. Accept that. Part two is audit your unfair advantage. So it's a framework that we've developed, the different categories of unfair advantages. So you can self-reflect and have a think about what your unfair advantages are. And then part three of the book is about how to start any new project, such as a startup, like a business startup. And that was kind of what we had in mind at first. But we've had people start charities. We've had people start projects within their work, like entrepreneurship.

25:29We've had people talk about it, applying in their careers. And it was just a quick start guide to get people started in the right direction. Because I'm a big believer that you can really, because I fell into that trap myself, you can really bog yourself down with theoretical information. and really you just need enough to get started and then you'll learn as you go and learning i'm a big fan of just in time learning so that was essentially the philosophy of the book it's like look it's not just about hard work and grit and perseverance as all these other books are telling you and it's not all luck either you know you have some control it's somewhere in the middle it's based on not just hard work it's based on working smart it's not just working hard it's working smart and working smart means leveraging your unfair advantages but first you have to discover what yours are yeah so so i want to come to this in a second but i want to repeat the sentence that you said it's not all about grit and hard work and being grumpy and killing yourself and stressing yourself out like all those business books and self-help books are telling us okay which i have to admit i you know is something that really really gets me because if i look back at my story of success and i rarely ever want to talk about my corporate life but i ended up being chief business officer of Google X.

26:43In my view, this is the top job on the planet, right? This is, there is no better job than this. And, and I think, and I think the reality is I got there not because of grit at all, not because of perseverance at all. It was because of avoiding the things that I didn't enjoy, the things that I wasn't good at that, you know, the idea of me trying really hard to say, hey, I'm never, and it was my wise, wise, wise ex-wife, we were married then, when there was a day when I went to her and I said, look, my best friend, who was also my colleague at work, is the funniest guy on earth. He's so funny. He's so lovable.

27:23Like you can't but hug him every time you see him, right? And he basically, and I started almost the same time at Microsoft and he entertained very well. So he took clients out for dinners and parties. He took his boss and boss's boss and boss's boss's boss to out to dinners and parties. And they loved him. They just loved him. He was a fun, fun, fun person. And so I went to my ex at that time and I said, baby, I'm going to have to be late evenings because I have to take my superiors out to entertain them too if I am to have a career in this company and she told me well of course Habibi I support you 100 % do what you think is right but you'll be mediocre at it at best I remember vividly and and and we spoke English we spoke English in that conversation so these were her exact words she said you'll be mediocre at it at best okay you'll never be like Khaled.

28:23Khaled is fun. He is made to entertain, right? You will go there and you'll talk to them about mathematics and physics, and that's not going to entertain a lot of people. I'd rather you sleep early, wake up early, and continue to grow your business 29 % year over year, right? And the truth of the matter is that's what I did. So I basically took it, you know, immediately, and I just focused on growing my business. So I wasn't the most entertaining employee, but nobody could give up on 29 % growth year over year. So they were very happy to keep growing my career because otherwise the business wouldn't grow.

29:01So in a funny way, she said, you know, when they go and have fun in those parties, they'll be doing that because you grow their business. So, you know, so keep it that way. So when you talk about grit and perseverance and so on it's really not it's not going out to the places that are difficult and fighting it out it's being selective that needs to be our choice right exactly it's all about being strategic one thing that i learned see because i was quite i i used to read a lot of books when i was younger and then i you know i started my own business i started to have clients some of these clients became like mentors to me they were like very successful business people and one thing that was interesting is I would observe what they used to do and they used to some of them used to break every rule in the business book and they used to succeed anyway and that used to make me think ah interesting and this applies to every area of life you do not need to be perfect to be successful you do not need to be optimal I started to get to know CEOs of 300 plus people companies I started to get to know um serial entrepreneurs startup founders i started to get to know people who are successful at public speaking who've won awards who've written books who've you know amazing thinkers successful in lots of different areas sports people and they don't necessarily do everything right yeah that was fascinating they just need to be good where it's like rather than being like sort of you know if you look at statistics like in video games and each player has different statistics for different areas like attack power defense power whatever like different areas of your life you don't need to bring them all up you can be really good at certain things and then delegate or work with people that will balance you out for the other things yeah and that was like a eye-opener for me it was like whoa that seemed it almost feels like cheating because at school you have to do everything yourself you can't get any help you can't look something up you can't copy something oh no that's copying that's no in In the real world, everyone's inspired by everyone.

31:04Everyone's copying everyone. Everyone's getting ideas from everyone. Everyone's collaborating, working together. It's fascinating how you can really focus on what you're good at instead of what you're not. Stephen Bartlett says this very, very well in his book, Happy Sexy Millionaire, where he basically says, and I agree, by the way, you can be very, very, very, very, very good at one thing, right? Or a couple of things, but that wouldn't make you the best contributor. the top contributors to our world are those who are good at a configuration of different things, you know, that mixed together make them very unique, right?

31:42So basically, you're not the best at any of them at all. But there is no one else that is good at those seven things at the same time in your environment. And so you're the best at all seven combined, but not the best at any of them. I want to go back to your first part of the book. And let's depress people a little bit i know you don't mean it to be depressive but let's depress people a little bit first before we cheer them up so life is unfair and i think i think that's that can extend to deep deep realities like you know you growing up in the middle of two wars that's very unfair right so what does that mean yeah it's like one thing that i love is the feedback that we get is what you're saying is so obvious but nobody said it that way and i love that kind of because i used to love books that were like that so when i as a reader of books i used to love it when somebody could articulate something which i have a vague sense of like we all know this we all know life is not but we all know that actually success is based on unfair advantages actually we all know this this is like nobody goes no no that's not can't be true nobody's reacted like that but they're like oh interesting tell me more nobody's explained it this way so life is unfair we all know this look anything can happen in your life you can grow up in a war-torn country you can grow up in poverty you can grow up with a lot of conflict in your family you can grow up with health issues you can grow up with a loved one with health issues that you have to be the caretaker of i'll share with you one story because we were talking about my father and i remember he was teaching at a university, I think during the war in Iraq.

33:24And there was one student who had very terrible attendance, terrible attendance, just wasn't bringing in the assignments. My father told him, what's the matter? Why are you not doing the work assigned to you? And he said, well, actually, I'm from Halabja. He's a Kurdish man from the town of Halabja in the north of Iraq. This town is well known for a chemical attack. Saddam gassed. You know, when they say Saddam gassed the Kurds. Saddam had a chemical bomb go off in this Kurdish town of Halabja. This guy's whole family were ill or wiped out or God knows what. Terrible tragedies. And he, first my dad was thinking this guy's just not putting in the effort.

34:08And then when he found out the full story, ah, I see what happened there. And we can look right now where it wasn't long ago when the crisis is still ongoing in Turkey and Syria with an earthquake. Things like that are not fair. I went to the Philippines. I was traveling around Southeast Asia. My business was running itself. I did a lot of exploring and traveling, which was really fun. I remember I was staying in a very posh part of the Philippines, Manila, the capital of the Philippines, where there weren't really any homeless people, any beggars. I guess they clean up the area. I don't know.

34:40But there were kids playing barefoot in the street. In the UK, that's like, people are skeptical like there are social safety nets in the uk in general of course there are people that fall through the gaps but in general they say they always for example in the london underground don't give people who are begging because you'll only encourage that to happen more and there are other ways that they can get welfare and social security and support there are these systems in place but i forgot that i was young i was traveling and so what we used to is if there are people begging then usually that somebody set them up to do so or they're doing this almost as a bit of a hustle that's a generalization but that's how I felt at the time now these kids they came up to me and they seemed like they might be begging they were playing earlier and it kind of it broke my heart a little bit especially because I realized what she was doing she was pointing at this bottle of water I had with a little bit of water left and that's what she wanted from me she wasn't asking for money she just wanted this water and I was like in tears I was emptying my pockets of everything I had and I was giving it to these children because I realized what kind of childhood is that like how much poverty are they going through how difficult must that life be that they might be thirsty now i don't know how bad it was i don't know any details but it's just moments like that in life and that's why i guess travel is great because it can give you perspective you know i talk about this in my ted talk whereby i was like proud of myself i did this i had this ego around i did this i set up this business it was successful i'm making a great passive income i'm able to to invest in some property, invest in some companies.

36:12And look, I'm not even working right now. This is the middle of the week and I'm in Indonesia and I'm just traveling around and I'm doing all this. And I started to develop this idea because I wanted to prove to people that told me that can't be done, that making a passive income business, you can't make a business that runs itself. But I wanted to prove that it was possible because I did some due diligence. It felt like it can make sense. I can have my team take care of my clients. And that's what was happening. So I realized in that moment, have I done this myself is there such a thing as self-made man or woman or do we have so much to thank oh there's so many factors and variables that are not in our control and therefore it's unfair that's why I talk about unfair advantages life is unfair we all know this there are lots of things that come to people easily there are lots of opportunities that come to people easily Trump said I got a small loan of one million dollars from my father a small loan in the 70s It's like 10 million now.

37:07And this is the kind of world that we all live in and grow up in. And everyone knows that this is the case. So life isn't fair. It's not just going to give you what you put in. There is an aspect of that, but that's not the full story. But then this is very depressing, Hasan, because I think so many people would just switch off now and go like, you know, I have no hope, right? No, but so the point is that life isn't fair. But here's the good news. We all have unfair advantages. We all have it. No matter how bad you think your situation is, you have an unfair advantage somewhere. We all have a unique set of unfair advantages.

37:40And the kicker, the real key is that what seems like a disadvantage can be turned into an advantage. If you just have the right mindset, if you just have the right goal, you can turn that disadvantage into your strength. This is the incredible thing. It's like alchemy. You can turn a weakness into a strength. And a classic example, I'd like to give this example is Oprah Winfrey. We mentioned her earlier. let's use her as an example she's a case study in the book one of the most famous women in the world incredibly incredibly influential apparently that the obama election was won as a part because of the influence of oprah winfrey in the united states a self-made said the self-made thing black woman in the u.s african-american billionaire and not just that the emotional impact she's had you know is incredible and where did she grow up she grew up in 1950s rural mississippi so in the south where there was much more racism much more problems super poor she tells the story of her grandmother washing clothes by boiling water and stirring it with a stick and she says strangely from those days she was like four years old she used to think i'm not going to live like this something inside her told her that she's not going to live like this and she used and she went through abuse she had so much discrimination there was a story that her mother used to let her sleep outside while her other her sister used to sleep inside her mother was a maid to rich white families and the reason was because of her complexion she had darker skin color than her sister her sister was more favored and she was allowed inside the house it's heartbreaking though if you listen to her story she was sexually abused she was it's awful things she was pregnant when she was a teenager and then she lost the baby it's just so sad it's so sad she goes from father to her mother to her grandmother but all that pain all that terrible trauma that she went through look at how emotionally intelligent she became look at how compassionate and empathetic she became and that was the main if i was to look at and analyze the success of her show which was running for like 20 years or whatever however long it was and then she had her own network is the compassion she had for her guests for her audience the way that she could connect with people she was actually a newsreader at first but because she used to get so emotional during the stories she had to quit that and do something else and became a chat you know did the chat show so something so terrible even something so awful as this terrible poor racism abuse childhood somehow became a strength for her and so that's just one example but they're right but you know again the modern world will sell this to you as grit as oprah went out in the world and tried really hard and she worked and then she got up after being abused and so on yes there is that but you know if she had been a news reader she wouldn't have gone as far as oprah is the point that we're trying to highlight here right Exactly right.

40:44Yeah. She was also another unfair advantage is that she was a child genius. She was actually a prodigy. She used to give lectures to churches, whole church congregations at the age of three. She used to memorize verses from the Bible and give full speeches. And she was known as this child speaker. She could read and write at an incredibly young age. She had the support of her father and her grandmother who used to take her to go and speak and used to get by books for her. so even amidst that horrible childhood you could see glimmers of little advantages that she had and that's the thing we all if we stop and think we can find little glimmers of things as bleak as it might be if you're listening to this i'm sure you can find things to be grateful for i'm sure you can find advantages that you can use we'll have our own unique story and often our advantages come from that that background and that story so it's not just the i mean the reason i was highlighting that is not she could have the grit and perseverance and vision and success she could have gone into i don't know like the investment banking consulting you know she could have had a corporate job it's because she had this gift there are gifts out there there is such a thing as talent that's part of the unfairness but we also can all develop something we can all have something in us where it comes easier to us than it comes to others we all have something it took me a long time to figure out what mine is but we all have something it took me a long until i was almost 30 i didn't realize that communication was my strength i didn't realize that at all i had no idea i thought i was a science guy you know i was really good at science i was going to become a doctor classic you know arab background my parents got me a birthday cake when i was one of a doctor cake hassan is going to be a doctor yeah yeah and so yeah i'm sure everyone is very ashamed that you're a best-selling author so no they're brilliant they're brilliant my parents are also so supportive and amazing but just to show that you never know what it might be and it takes time that self-discovery to figure out what your unfair advantages are and when and right now we're only talking about the inner unfair advantages the strengths we also include circumstances and i think not enough books or people or gurus they don't talk about that they just talk about talent and focus on your strength, which is good advice.