How To Play The Unfair Game of Life...
Note: If you don't want to stress your head, don't read this article.
Imagine you’re Janet. You spend three years building a business. It’s your dream, and a version of your life that finally makes sense. You find your footing, the revenue is growing, you just paid the yearly rent for the business space, and for the first time in a long time, things feel like they’re moving in the right direction.
Then two guys in suits, one in Russia and the other in Ukraine, sitting in rooms you will never enter, decide they have a disagreement. Their disagreement becomes a conflict. Their conflict becomes a war. And one evening, a bomb lands where your business is, destroying the entire building and your three years of work with it.
You don’t know any of those guys, and you had no opinion on their disagreement. Your business was just there, in the wrong coordinates, at the wrong time. Their unknown disagreement has just tampered with the flow of your life.
Life is unfair. And the sooner we accept that, the better equipped we are to live it.
But… the unfair game of life started way before you even arrived here on earth.
You didn’t choose to be born; nobody sent you a consent form. One day, you simply didn’t exist, and then you did. Some people like to say it’s because you were the fastest swimmer. That out of millions of sperm, you won the race. But did you even know you were racing? First race you ever won, and you weren’t even awake for it. You were just… moving, the way everything moves, with no awareness that the finish line was the beginning of an entirely different and considerably more complicated situationship called life.
And it gets worse before it gets better.
You also didn’t choose where to be born. You didn’t pick your country, your family, your face, your body, or the economic conditions you were handed on arrival. Some people are born into wealth, connections, and opportunity. Others are born into scarcity and have to spend the first half of their lives just trying to reach the starting line that others began from.
Some are born with good passports, some are born with bad ones. When you grow up, you can have the same skills as someone and get paid less just because of your passport. Then you have to apply for all these damn visas; they'll still reject you, chop your money, and there's no refund. Meanwhile, some people just book the flight, pick two shoes and stroll to the airport in pyjamas.
Same humans, wildly different circumstances, based on a roll of dice they couldn’t control. But luckily, at least, you weren’t born an antelope.
Thinking of it… an antelope wakes up every single morning with one primary objective: don’t get eaten today. The antelope didn’t choose to be an antelope either. It’s just the card it was dealt. And every morning, without complaint, it gets up and runs. But thankfully, an antelope does have an unfair advantage: it can run VERY FAST.
So what do you do with all of the unfairness?
You could cry about it. My twenty-month-old daughter cries about everything, and honestly, it works for her most of the time. The emotional release is real, and nobody should tell you that you’re not allowed to lock yourself in a dark room and scream at a wall just to feel the weight of something unfair. Feel am.
But then, when you’re done screaming at the wall, you still have to decide what comes next.
And that’s necessary to emphasise because if you’re not a smart thinker, self-pity becomes your default solution. Life does something unfair to you, which it will, repeatedly, and your one and only response is to feel sorry for yourself. Boo hoo to your sorry ass because pity is not a strategy. Nobody’s bomb un-lands because you cried about it, and the antelope that stops running to feel sorry for itself becomes lunch for Mufasa. Self-pity feels like doing something, but it’s actually just standing still while the game continues without you.
You could also pray about it, genuinely. In a world this unpredictable, the need to get lucky is significant. And luck, for a lot of people, lives somewhere in the space between preparation and something they can’t fully explain. Whatever you believe in, there is something to be said for acknowledging that not everything is within your control, and making peace with a supernatural force to help you through it is necessary.
But the most useful thing you can do is to join the unfairness and play the game on your own terms by taking advantage of your unfair advantage.
What’s an unfair advantage?
Everyone has an unfair advantage. The problem is that most people either haven’t identified it or they’re embarrassed to lean into it because it doesn’t feel “earned” enough.
An unfair advantage is anything that comes more easily to you but is harder for others. Anything that makes people ask you “How come it’s that easy for you?” and you’re like “I don’t know, it’s not that deep”. Anything you can use to legally bully others in order to succeed.
Some arrived in this world with talent. Some can sing, some can play football, and some can act. Some people are good at making friends. Some people are good at talking. And some people just have a good passport.
Some people are naturally attractive. And I know that’s not a politically correct thing to say out loud, but it’s true. An objectively attractive person will get through some doors more easily than otherwise. It’s not fair, it’s just reality. And pretending otherwise doesn’t make it less true.
Some people simply have no shame (and yes, that’s also an unfair advantage). People who can do cringy stuff without giving a damn are a different breed, and they tend to get more done in life without worrying so much.
And if you’re squinting at your life right now and still can’t find yours, here’s a cheat sheet. Every unfair advantage on earth falls into one of these five buckets:
Bucket 1 → What you know: knowledge, the thing you understand that others don’t.
Bucket 2 → Who you know: connections, the call you can make that others can’t.
Bucket 3 → What you can do: skill, the thing your hands or brain do that looks like magic to everyone else.
Bucket 4 → What you have: resources, money, a good passport, your uncle’s spare office.
Bucket 5 → Who knows you: reputation, the doors that open before you knock. As they say, “your reputation precedes you”.
You can bet that the more of these five you have, the more likely your chance of success. And the fewer you have, the less likely.
So I ran the audit on myself. What’s my unfair advantage? I can’t sing (hell no). I can’t play football. I can’t act. I can’t talk. Nobody has ever looked at me and thought, “there goes a handsome man who should be given opportunities immediately”. And my passport certainly isn’t doing me any favours either.
And so I realised… my unfair advantage is that I can outwork and outlast almost anyone (That’s bucket three, if you’re keeping score). I used to think it was discipline, something I had built deliberately over time. Then I realised it’s just natural. I don’t have to fight myself to get up and keep working even when things get hard. I actually get more energised when the difficulty of responsibilities increases. It’s just how I’m assembled. And because I know it, I use it.
When I go toe to toe with someone who is smarter or better resourced, I back myself to outlast them, because I know their lazy ass will eventually get tired and go to sleep, and I won’t, because I’m a stubborn goat who can choose to not sleep or eat for days just to achieve a goal. It’s easy for me, and I can’t count the number of times people have asked me, “Kay, how do you do it?” I don’t really know what to tell them, but I do acknowledge the fact that this level of savagery is uncommon.
And that’s what I’ve chosen as the unfair advantage I’m working with.
Although between us, we can agree that mine is not the premium tier of unfair advantages. Outworking people is the sweatiest bucket on the list.
I could have simply had a rich dad, and boom, “what you have” and “who you know” would have been unlocked at birth, delivered to the maternity ward alongside my birth certificate.
But sadly, nobody asked me for my preference before I was born (remember, no consent form). So I’m working with the sweaty one. And that’s exactly why it’s now my job to become the rich dad. My daughter, the same one who currently cries about everything, will be handed “what you have” and “who you know” before she can even spell them, so she can bulldoze through life unfairly on my behalf. And for your own sake, just make sure your kids aren’t part of those who’ll be bulldozed.
Back to the subject…
The final question is… What are you working with? What do you actually have, right now, that is yours in a way that is hard to replicate? What’s your unfair advantage?
And if you genuinely believe you don’t have an unfair advantage, then… be sure you can pray hardest, your unfair advantage must be that “you know God” and God answers your prayers fastest, because in a world where no one is hesitating to bully you with their unfair advantages, you’ll need those prayers, my guy.
Footnote:
Mehn… I read this piece after writing it, and I realised I’m just too good at this writing thing… I wrote this in about 30 minutes on a peaceful Saturday morning. So, I guess that’s another unfair advantage. Regardless of who you think you are, you cannot write better than me, (even if) except you’re GOD himself.
