This is a story from the Unfair Advantage which I found both sad and insightful:

One day in 2015, I was in Manila, the capital of the Philippines, and I was on my way to meet another ‘digital nomad’, a 19-year-old German kid who was making five-figure sums a month doing online marketing. I had escaped London’s dreary weather, and was really enjoying the unbelievable friendliness and good cheer of the Filipino people.

As I walked out of my Airbnb, I saw some children who were standing around in the street. They looked scruffy and were barefoot. They can’t have been more than nine or ten years old.

As I walked past I realised they were begging. This was unusual. Not that Manila doesn’t have impoverished children, but that it was happening here, in the poshest part of Manila, right in the centre of the business district. I’d already been there a several days and hadn’t seen anyone begging in this area before.

I’m used to growing up in a cosmopolitan city with a few beggars here and there, and knowing that we have a welfare system, food banks and safety nets to stop them from literally starving to death. However, here in the Philippines, one of the little girls pointed to the almost-empty bottle of Evian in my hands. She was literally desperate for a drink of water.

That absolutely broke my heart.

I handed it over and immediately emptied my pockets for any cash that I had. The look of genuine happiness on the children’s faces, and the sad state that they were in, really had an effect on me. It was so upsetting to see a poor little girl begging for a drink of water.

That’s when it hit me how lucky I was. I understood my unfair advantages. It wasn’t just me working hard and making it happen. So much of my success was because I had been set up for it.

My parents had moved to London from Baghdad in 1991, just before Iraq started to get even worse from economic sanctions, which led to widespread malnutrition and hyper-inflation. That child could have been me. Who knows what might have happened to my life had my parents not left when they did.

I had the education, the security, the stability of being a native speaker of English. Also I had the money to invest in my education, to take an online course, to be able to live at home in an expensive city for the year it took me to get my startup off the ground. I had the family and friend connections to get my foot in the door of my first couple of clients. I had the emotional intelligence and communication and persuasion skills to get them to hire my new agency.

Being British and having that passport allowed me to travel the world,and gave me the freedom to be a digital nomad in the first place.

Later that year, I happened to sit next to Ash at a business dinner in London. We became friends. From him, I learned about hyper-growth tech startups, and the Silicon Valley world of VCs, angels and growth hacking. Ash had recently had the Just Eat IPO and wanted to invest it, and so I became Ash’s investment partner for startups.

As we screened startup pitches together, and discussed what made some stand out from others, we developed an idea that has slowly grown. Together, we built a boutique startup training and consultancy business based on the Unfair Advantage concept to help startup founders and have a positive social impact. We were both aware of our own privileges which enabled us to build successful startups. We’ve since been invited to speak all over the world. At first, I was nervous about public speaking and training others, but we began getting brilliant feedback, and invitations came from further and further afield.

I’ve now spoken at many events, in the UK and internationally, with my knowledge and expertise in strategy, digital marketing and fundraising. My path has not been one based on innate brilliance or certainty: I’ve had failures and false starts, and have had to contend with my own self-discipline. But I have watched others with a keen eye, taken every chance to educate myself, observed and analysed the landscape of startups, and learned from anyone and everyone who has crossed my path. That has been my Unfair Advantage