I’ve been thinking about unfair advantages in the process of planning my first virtual course experiment. What are the things I do well, and how can I teach other people those skills? It turns out that recognizing your unfair advantages is great for making better use of them—and for turning those unfair advantages into even more advantages. No matter who you are, there’s bound to be some things you can do better than many people, and combinations of those things can open up more possibilities.

How can you turn an unfair advantage into more advantages? You can use your strengths to help you develop new skills. You can use the confidence you get from doing something well to get you through the frustrating parts of learning something new. You can use your unfair advantages to build trust and relationships that will support you as you take more risks.

Over at The Smart Passive Income Blog, Pat Flynn gives seven examples of unfair advantages that can help you with business and life:

1. Your Rolodex – the people you know
2. Your experience – what you’ve been through
3. Your story – and how you tell it
4. Your hustle – how much you put in and where
5. Your personality and your ability to connect with others
6. Your ability to listen, build, measure, and learn
7. Your specialization – who you serve and your ability to do so

If you think about your unfair advantages, chances are that you’ll see how different unfair advantages are tied together. Learning helps you gain experiences and specialize in something, which leads to developing a network and being able to tell a story that’s supported by the strength of your personality. Hustling helps you make the most of those advantages.

Here are some of my unfair advantages and how I used them to create more advantages:

I read quickly, and I enjoy reading. This lets me blast through search results, technical manuals, blog posts, business books, and more. I don’t remember everything (that would be an awesome superpower!), but I can speed-read to filter through cruft and zero in on what I should read in depth.

I turned my reading into experiments. Reading lots of people’s experiences and tips inspired me to tinker with my life. Reading personal finance books and blogs encouraged me to be frugal, which gave me the space and freedom for bigger experiments. Reading about tools and techniques gave me ways to improve the way I work, including through programming and automation.

I turned my experiments into writing. Reading and experimenting gave me plenty of things to write about, and writing helped me remember and learn even more. Experimenting helped me build a life that supports writing and learning. I started by typing my notes into my laptop, and then I moved to publishing most of my notes online in this blog. (More searchable!)

I turned my writing into conversations. Writing helped me explore thoughts so that I could contribute more to conversations. Writing also helped me have more conversations, thanks to people who found my blog through search engines or stayed in touch after connecting for the first time.

I turned my conversations into presentations. I found myself sharing some things again and again, and I turned those into presentation submissions for conferences. All that writing practice and all those conversations helped me polish the presentations into useful resources, which led to even more presentations.

I turned my presentations into drawings. Tired of bullet points, I started drawing my presentations. People really liked them, so I drew more and more. Since I enjoyed drawing my presentations and people liked them, I started drawing my notes for other people’s books and presentations as well. And that’s how I got to this point!

Next up: I want to turn my reading, experimenting, writing, conversations, presentations, and drawings into teaching. =) I want to get really good at organizing ideas step by step so that people can build small unfair advantages that turn into bigger ones. I want to get really good at helping people be inspired, and to help them follow those motivations to their goals. Let’s see how that works out!

How do your unfair advantages connect with each other? What’s the next unfair advantage you want to develop? I’d love to learn from your experiences so that we can get even better at making the most of unfair advantages.

Do I have any unfair advantages that you would like to develop? Are there other unfair advantages you want to try?