15 Things That Compound in Life
You know, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who understand how compounding works and everyone else. Those who do make up the top 2% of society. They make choices and take actions based on this idea of compounding. This is what allows them to build incredible wealth and a life they take pride in. Here are 15 things that compound in life.
Welcome to Alux, the place where future billionaires come to get inspired. So, here's a perspective on life: your 50s are when a lifetime of habits either start paying off or start catching up to you. So, the first one is:
Number one: What you believe about yourself. Now, at the risk of sounding crazy, that's the ROI of your mother. The stories we believe about ourselves impact everything that unfolds. If people told you you were smart when you were growing up and you believed them, you became smart in real life because you had to live up to that identity. But if they said you were shy, you grew up thinking you were shy and an introvert. Then you slowly grew into yourself and started building your own kind of stories. The stories we believe about ourselves are what shape the reality around us, but you have to really believe them, like deep in your soul. This belief alters the way others see you, date you, treat you, do business with you, and even more.
Number two: Bad decisions. Now, most people think compounding is just on the positive, but it's not true. A bad decision is like a stone in your shoe. If you don't remove it, not only will it slow your journey down, but it'll cause you continuous harm and shape your future. Bad decisions actually compound a lot faster than good decisions do. Here's how we look at it: good decisions compound like money compounds in an index fund—slowly and predictably. But bad decisions, well, they compound like the debt you owe to a loan shark. The faster you get out, the more likely you are to keep all of your fingers. Trusting the wrong person, going to jail, making a really bad hire early on, not showing up for an interview—it doesn't take long until your entire future collapses because of a chain of bad calls or missed opportunities. Bad decisions, if unchecked, compound into regret, but corrected, they compound into wisdom.
Number three: Long-term investments. Compounding is fueled by time, right? Those who have the patience to wait for the seeds to grow into trees will enjoy the fruit and shade that comes with it as a reward. Long-term investments are the closest thing to magic that we have; they turn patience into prosperity. But the main problem of our generation is we don't believe in anything slow. We want to find out instantly, and that's where those with patience can leave everyone else in the dust.
Number four: A great hire. Now, we already mentioned the impact of a bad hire, so let's focus on the positive. A good hire cuts the workload in half. A great hire is not an addition to the team; they're a multiplier. A good hire doesn't require micromanagement; they elevate the people around them. A good hire brings solutions and opportunities, not problems. The right person in the right position compounds their value over time. A great hire brings in not just skills, but they help to shape the culture and the energy around your business. Like a great novel, the first chapter sets the tone of a book. A great hire is like the best kind of chapter.
Number five: Quality advice and guidance. Quality advice compounds. Look, okay, quality advice compounds because it doesn't just tell you what to do; it teaches you how to think. And once you know how to think, well, that how applies to everything. Do you remember the first person that believed in you and how important that was? How it made you delusionally confident that you've got something special? Just the fact that they showed they saw you and the potential that you had shaped your attitude, didn't it? Now imagine what happens when you have the right mentor—someone who instills in you that motivation backed by a clear set of steps. One mentor who cares about you and has the know-how to give you the right advice at the right time. It would be life-changing, wouldn't it? What if you had 100 of them helping you? Just how fast would you make progress then? You'd be willing to pay them millions of dollars if you had it because they would help you to make hundreds of millions in the long run. And that's why we built the Alux app. We find the mentors on your behalf. We have them share the really valuable insights that took them their entire lives to learn and deliver to you the advice when you really need it most. Because hundreds of thousands of people use our app, we know in real time the steps that actually make a measurable difference in people's lives. So we can do the same for you. Go to alux.com/slapp right now and test out the free trial. Foundation week will provide you with a framework that you'll use for the rest of your life. We'll remind you about our trial on day five, just to make sure you don't get charged accidentally. And those of you who are serious about growth, you'll instantly realize just how much compact value is in this app and how you can immediately apply it to your life and business. Go to alux.com/slapp and let us shape you to get you to your dream faster.
Number six: True friendships. Friendships that stand the test of time compound into one of the richest forms of wealth—unwavering support and joy. Think of them as emotional capital paying dividends with every interaction. The value of true friendships compounds over decades. As you grow, your friendships provide a mirror, a sanctuary, and a source of wisdom that deepens with time. As you grow older, you'll realize you can't make new old friends, so the value of those who stayed true to you really shoots through the roof. This applies to your business network as well, because the most valuable thing in business is trust.
Number seven: Your work environment. Now, the environment you work in shapes your habits, your mindset, and ultimately your success. It'll shape your health, your beliefs, and the lens you see the world through. Most of you struggle with lower back pain and you've only been doing this for a decade. What about the takeaway food you order, the Red Bulls, the pills, the smoke breaks? You don't realize it, but your life is made up of what you do on the day, and work is one of the biggest chunks in your life calendar. Your work environment can either be conducive to your well-being or it can be a drag. If the environment affects you physically and mentally, well, the people you work with will affect you emotionally.
Number eight: Real skills. Early in life, any real skill pays dividends every time you use it in life. So, the sooner you can start cashing them in, the better. Learn how to use Photoshop or at least Canva, and you'll never have to wait for anyone to make you a banner, a visual ad, or remove something from a photo or crop an image ever again. Learn copywriting and you'll be able to build a following, sales pages, and an online identity that people will recognize. Learn how to communicate clearly to other people. Learn to inspire them. Learn to communicate a vision that only you can see. Any of these will be game changers that could lead to money, wealth, fame, and achievement.
Number nine: 1% improvements and outcomes. Look, tiny incremental gains compound over time into massive shifts. Do not underestimate what a 1% difference can make, especially when it bundles up with everything else. If you've been on the internet for a while, you might have seen this equation right here. But look, that's not all there is to it. Let us give you a personal example. So, we've recently been working on the landing page for the Alux app, trying to optimize it. You can see it in development live at A.A. So if the old landing page converted 2% of page visitors and this one converted 3% of visitors, that's not just a 1% increase, okay? That is a 50% increase. Once you figure out the power of conversion optimization, you shift where your energy goes. Because no matter what business you're running, there are only three ways to grow it: one, ask your customers to give you more money than they do now, aka raising prices; two, get more people to walk into your store or website; or three, convert more of the people that are already in-store. Now, there are optimization opportunities for all three of them. You deploy effort toward optimizing it once and then reap the benefits from it months and years from now.
And speaking of this strategy: Number ten: Anything you can build once and sell 1 million times. So, there are two things that scale infinitely: media and code. We can make a video once and reach millions of people with it. We can build an incredible app and millions of people can use it. One of the greatest examples we have for this in action is our course platform, al.org. So, since starting, we've released one flagship course every year. Since we care about the product, it takes us a little over a year to develop a premium learning experience. But once it's all built and shipped, people can keep on buying it years later. And you know, in all honesty, we've made millions of dollars selling online courses, and most of it has been reinvested into the development of the Alux app and its content. All of our courses have what we call an extreme guarantee: if you take the course and you believe you didn't get your money's worth, we'll give all your money back. Believe it or not, our refund rate is extremely low—less than a quarter of the industry standard. If you're a creator or digital entrepreneur looking to learn exactly how we do it, how we create our outlines, the research that goes into our courses, the exact tools we use to publish, promote, and sell our courses—well, that's exactly what Online Course Mastery is all about. We'll take you behind the scenes and show you step by step how we do it. If you want to learn exactly how to do the same, go to alex.com/digital and join the waitlist. Once the course is complete, not only will we let you know when the doors open up, but we'll send you a discount code. Online Course Mastery is the complete blueprint of how we do it, and you'll get everything with the same guarantee as always. You don't want to miss out on this, so go to alux.com/digital and join the waitlist. You'll learn multiple skills that will compound over time.
And speaking of compounding: Number eleven: Automated investments. Now, automation removes emotion and inconsistency, allowing compounding to really work its magic. Set it, forget it, and let time and the market do the heavy lifting for you. You get rich when you spend what's left after your investments. Poor people stay poor because they have it backwards. So, here's how we do it: we've set an automated rule where 5% of any income that touches our account goes straight into an index fund. That's the fund we refresh to feel better. We set it as a percentage because income might fluctuate month over month. We've got another automated rule where a certain amount of money goes directly to the family fund every month—a fund that anyone in our family can access to buy whatever they need. It might sound weird, but we have a portfolio of investments that pays for our holidays. Our luxury holidays cost less than what a portfolio returns on a yearly basis. So, the pool keeps growing and we don't have to spend any earned income to travel the world. Now, before we move on to the next point, here's a golden rule of money: the less you touch money, the richer you get. So, stop trying to buy low, sell high. Stop trying to time the market and find that next 100x investment. Just trust the process, automate into the S&P 500, and move on with your life.
Number twelve: Charitable work and small acts of kindness. Every act of kindness creates a ripple effect. The compound interest of doing good is measured in the lives you touch and the goodwill that comes back to you in unexpected ways. The crazy thing is, you do good once and the dividends keep paying back. For example, two years ago we started building the Alux International School in Uganda. For those of you who don't know, a percentage of all of the revenue we generate from the Alux app goes toward having a real impact in communities that need it most. So, almost 300 children attend this school now, and it's become a local educational hub in this underserved region. Now, last year we had a medical camp set up for a week to provide medical care to the local community, and three days ago we did it again. 40 doctors and volunteers traveled to Uganda to increase the quality of the lives of the people there. And this is the difference between donating money and building something that's useful. Year over year, volunteers from all over the world use our school as a base for humanitarian efforts, and it all started with you watching an Alux video like this one. So, on behalf of all of the kids at our school, thank you to everyone watching these videos and especially to those subscribed to the Alux app.
Number thirteen: Rational optimism. Now, rational optimism is the belief that both your world and the world get better when you contribute to it. It's the belief that tomorrow will be better than today. Long-term optimists outperform pessimists because they're willing to take chances that pessimists would dismiss as improbable. This attitude of "maybe I can do it" increases your luck surface area. With it, luck simply compounds.
Number fourteen: Stable family relationships. You don't realize just how big a flex it is to have non-toxic family members. Having a mom and dad that love each other—no divorce, no drinking or abuse, no crazy talk when you meet—it's the dream, right? Having siblings actively involved in your life that you can share your joy and sorrows with—priceless. You know you're not alone because they provide security, confidence, and lifelong support. A stable family relationship is like the foundation of a well-built home. Like a European house instead of the cardboard homes they build in the US, it stands the test of time.
Number fifteen: Reading and reading books. Now, before launching our app, the best money we ever spent was on books. To this day, we still spend close to $1,000 on books every year. We buy them physically and we've got an Audible subscription. By the way, here's a secret trick we use to read more than any of our friends: we've got the physical book in hand and we play the audio on Audible at about 1.4x. This allows us to increase the pace of reading and still retain 100% of what we read. So now we can finish a book in 4 to 6 hours. We don't just go through the book; we take notes in what we call our book journals. These are business ideas or strategies that we uncover while we're reading. And every year, we reread the journals just to make sure we don't forget them. We have a couple of books that we reread fully and still find value in them every single time. Oh, and if you want to test out the Audible strategy yourself, go to alux.com/freebook right now. If you use our URL and this is the first time signing up to Audible, you can get a full audiobook for free. Because who knows what knowledge you'll find in it and what will compound for the rest of your life.
And since you've made it to the end of this video, it's time that you contributed something to the conversation. What decision did you make early in your life that is still paying dividends to this day? Let everyone know in the comments so we can learn from you too.
And before the end of the video, we've got an extra bit of love for those who watched it until the very end. So, here's your bonus: Decision is greater than effort. You want to be great at making decisions, of course you do, so you'll pursue life with whatever your set volume of effort is. Some people work hard and some don't. Some people can self-motivate and some can't. If effort is equal and you can only double or triple your effort, that's not where success lies. A better decision leads to 5, 10, or 100x the outcome. So, think about it. Most people spend more time watching TV than figuring out who they're going to marry, or what career they should pursue, or where they're going to live. Marrying the right person can be one of those 100x multipliers in life. Moving to a city with opportunities—that could mean 10x more success and fulfillment with the same amount of effort. You don't need decision volume, okay? The best of the best don't make a lot of decisions; they make as few decisions as they can and then pursue those decisions with the highest volume of effort they can deploy. Because effort here means the time, capital, brain power—whatever it is.
Right now, wherever you are in the world, take the rest of your day to think about the big decisions that could impact your future. Make a habit out of running through those decisions constantly until you're ready to make them. But once that decision is made, stop looking at alternatives and focus on that choice fully. If you believe you got the power to alter your future through strategic choices, Alexa, write the word "choice" in the comments. Let's see how many of you vouch to become a master at decision-making.