Episode: 137 — "Your Understanding of Success Is Wrong — Hassan Kabbah" · Full Episode #137
Language: Arabic, with English code-switching
Hassan Kabbah (حسن كبة) is an Iraqi-British author and coach. He is a co-author of The Unfair Advantage, published by Macmillan, a business book on the structural assets that determine entrepreneurial outcomes. He was born in Baghdad, raised in the United States, and has been based in London since 2014.
The Damiri episode is the first Arabic-language podcast he has ever recorded. He had built a public-facing career in English — book, coaching practice, conference appearances — and the Arabic-language conversation, for a long time, did not exist for him as an option. The episode is, for that reason, partly an interview and partly a homecoming.
The episode's most resonant story is about Hassan's father. After the family had left Iraq and settled in the United States, his father's PhD thesis remained in the university library in Baghdad. The thesis was, for years, both a physical object the family could not retrieve and a representation of the academic life the move had truncated. Hassan returned to Baghdad as an adult and located the thesis on the library shelves. He described the encounter with the document as the meeting with a version of his father — the academic, the scholar, the man before the displacement — that the household-facing father had not been able to be once the family was in the diaspora.
See: The Father's Thesis
Hassan structured the episode's central argument as a rejection of two opposing narratives. The first is the Hollywood American Dream — the story that says any individual, by sufficient effort, can produce any outcome, and that the absence of the outcome is therefore the absence of effort. He called this story wrong, both as a description of his own life and as a description of the lives of the people he coaches. The second is the inverse: the fatalistic regional story that says "it's all qisma" — divine apportionment — and that effort is therefore a kind of category error. He called this story also wrong. His position is that the truth sits in the middle: structural advantages and disadvantages set the field, and individual agency operates inside that field. Coaching, in his framing, is the practice of helping someone see both layers clearly.
The book — co-authored and published by Macmillan — sets out the framework in detail. The "unfair advantages" are the structural assets a founder enters the market carrying: capital, education, expertise, status, network, location, and timing. The book's argument is not that the assets are unfair in a moral sense — they are unevenly distributed in a factual sense — but that a clear inventory of what a founder has and lacks produces better strategic decisions than the standard motivational-poster posture of pretending the field is level.
His personal geography — Baghdad as the place of origin and the absent father's library, the United States as the place of childhood and English-language formation, London since 2014 as the place of working life — runs as the underlay of the episode. He treated the geography not as exotic biography but as the material the framework was built from. The Hollywood American Dream story had been the air he breathed in his childhood; the qisma story had been the air the Iraqi side of the family breathed; the book is the document that proposes a third position from inside the experience of both.
He flagged, at the top of the conversation, that this was the first time he had recorded a podcast in Arabic. The flag was not throat-clearing. The conversation operates with the small additional friction of someone working publicly in his second written language, and the episode is more honest for it.
"The Hollywood American Dream is wrong. 'It's all qisma' is also wrong. The truth is in the middle." (EP 137)