15 Things That are Mutually Exclusive in Life
Some of you are living in a paradox of choice. You desire something, but you take the exact opposite actions that would lead to that outcome. Some outcomes are mutually exclusive. Mutually exclusive means if a coin lands on heads, it cannot simultaneously have landed on tails. If your life hasn't yet turned out the way you want it to, it's because you're violating one of these rules. See which of them applies to you.
Here are 15 things that are mutually exclusive in life. Welcome to Alux, the place where future billionaires come to get inspired.
Starting off at number one: you can't be somewhere else without leaving the old place behind. Transformation requires the abandonment of what once was and embracing something new. Some of you want to be somewhere else, but you've done nothing to leave because you've chained yourself to your current environment. Sure, it's scary to leave the cage, but the alternative is to never know what's out there. This is the tipping point; you have to leave the current reality behind if you want a new one.
A common cognitive mistake people make is they think this implies forgetting or renouncing everything from the past. That is false, but you do need to let go temporarily if you want to at least visit and see what else is out there.
Number two: you can't get new outcomes if you're doing the same old things over and over again. You can't grow without embracing change. If your last five years look the same, it's no wonder you haven't made any extraordinary progress. Progress is a function of doing more than you're currently doing. Current effort leads to the same predictable outcome you have now. More effort leads to more outcomes; new effort leads to new outcomes. Learn to manipulate output by changing the input. You know you're making progress when you become in charge of the outcomes of your life.
Also, a sign of growth is having more tolerance for discomfort and less tolerance for complacency.
Number three: you can't have fame and enjoy anonymity at the same time. This is a choice you have to make. Fame comes with a lot of benefits; people know you, doors open up for you, you get preferential treatment, and people gravitate toward fame. Fame is fun, but it comes with a big drawback. Once you're up on that stage, it is almost impossible to get off of it. Anyone who's done this knows it's the truth. Fame requires you to throw out the advantages of anonymity.
Beyoncé, she can't walk the busy streets of London or Barcelona. As hard as some people try to escape anonymity, it does come with some perks. You know our channel would have grown 10 times faster if people could connect to a person instead of this persona I've created. But we enjoy a level of freedom of living great, comfortable but regular lives without having people show up at our house unexpectedly. If you're one of the people who are here for the value of these videos we share, thank you for subscribing.
Number four: you can't win the lottery without buying a ticket. And this is not just about the lottery; okay, this is about putting yourself out there in terms of potentially getting lucky. You can't complain of not winning the lottery if you didn't buy a ticket. You can't complain that your country is poorly managed if you didn't vote. You can't complain that you don't have a girlfriend if you never leave your room. You see, it's all about increasing your luck surface area. This is why to everyone else, successful people seem incredibly lucky. Sure, most of them did get lucky at some point, but they put themselves in a position where luck was even an option in the first place. To get lucky, you need to identify a place to get lucky.
Number five: you can't be worth more without investing in yourself. You invest in order to increase value. You buy an old house, refurbish it, and now it's worth more. It's easy to see how investing in something external makes it more valuable, but people have a problem when looking at themselves. How do you expect to build a million-dollar house without spending any money? Some of you haven't invested anything into yourselves for the past decade. Everyone who makes more, who earns more, has done so by learning new skills, acquiring new knowledge, or simply making what they sell better.
Our most popular quote is: your life is cheap because you think investing in yourself is expensive. Two years ago, when we launched the Alux app, most people said it was too expensive. This is why some people will always stay poor; they confuse price with value. If somebody offered you a Ferrari for $10,000, you would do anything in your power to get 10 grand because you know that car is worth a lot more than that.
Well, we spent over a million buying the insights of the smartest people in the world—insights that you can't get anywhere else, that are time-tested and proven to increase earnings, health, relationships, intellect, and your EQ. If you go to alux.com right now, you're getting at least $1 million worth of value for only $1.99, and some of you will still question it because you don't understand how value works. But a small portion of you do. These are the people who will win; for them, our app is exactly what they've been looking for.
Number six: you can't make everyone happy and still end up happy yourself. Actually, the cost of making everyone else happy is making yourself miserable. You can make some people happy, but not everyone. Pick who those people are carefully and make sure that you are one of them. You can't be yourself without pissing some people off because people want you to be the version that best serves them. And everyone wants something different. So you can't be everything everywhere all at once. In the end, disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.
Number seven: you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, and you might even get a couple of shells in your yolk until you perfect your technique. It's just a rephrasing of the ends justify the means, and your job is to figure out what the means are. What sacrifices or collateral damage are you comfortable with? You can get anything you want in life as long as you're comfortable paying the price. That said, some of you want the omelet but won't get it because you're scared of breaking the eggs. Time to make a decision on which matters to you more.
Number eight: you can't experience the present if you're living in the past or the future. This is what people mean when they say mindfulness. It takes practice to learn to be where your feet are. It's more of an art than a science. It's the art of releasing yesterday's memories and tomorrow's worries and just embracing the present moment as a reward. Picture what your life would be like if your existence isn't hindered by the weight of past regrets or future anxieties.
Number nine: you can't always be negative and expect to attract positive people. People will say that negatives and positives attract each other, but look, okay, we're humans, not magnets. Life doesn't work that way. But birds of a feather, they do flock together, so you end up creating an echo chamber of negativity. So if everything around you sucks, well, this might be the reason why. Start with yourself. You change your environment, you change the ingredients, and the experience starts to change. Everyone wants to hang out with positive people, with those who love life and know how to live it. If you have no cool friends, well, become the cool friend yourself, and then other cool people will find you. This is true with any character trait.
Number ten: you can't screw around and expect to have a happy family. Look, okay, you can't live the Dan Bilzerian lifestyle and be a present, faithful father and husband. These are just different paths in life, and you have to choose the one you want to live. The worst thing is making no choice at all. That's the guaranteed way of ending up resenting your life. Once you make your choice, you have to stick to it and do the best job you can at it. The worst outcome is when you try to do it all. Infidelity breaks individuals, crushes the future, and opens the floodgates for a bunch of other stuff. Astonishingly, nearly 57% of cheaters willingly confess to their spouses, and getting that trust back will be the hardest thing you ever do if you're even able to do it.
As for the remaining 43%, well, around 48% of women who cheat report that their partners discovered the truth; for men, that figure stands around 39%. Just make sure you take a long-term view on these kinds of things. What it'll do to your happiness, to the relationship with your children, with your partner, and even with your finances.
Speaking of trust, number eleven: you can't build trust without being honest. Everything we do could be distilled as a search for truth because truth, on a fundamental level, is immutable. We need trust in order to be able to predictably navigate life. We need trust because it's the glue that keeps our societal structures together. Once a society foregoes honesty and accepts what is not true as fact, the collapse begins. It applies on a macro level and on an individual level. The only way to grow is through truth, but honesty comes with a price.
Number twelve: you can't be honest and expect everyone to be pleased by it. Inevitably, the world will be divided. While the revelation of truth will satisfy one's belief, it will prove the other wrong, and nobody likes being wrong. In your attempt to be truthful, some people will not receive it well, and this is why a distinction needs to be made. Ask yourself: am I trying to shed light, or do I just want them to like me? Because the answer to that question divides the future into two very different paths.
Number thirteen: you can't be brave without experiencing fear. Experience the fear and do it anyway. This is what being brave means. Most people lack braveness or courage—the courage to go after their dreams, the courage of being labeled as crazy or publicly humiliated. You win in life when you can prove the world wrong. You can't create order without rearranging chaos, and in order to do that, you have to have the courage to throw yourself into that chaos in the first place. Hey, at least it'll give you something to sort and order.
Number fourteen: you can't escape struggle. This is a mutually exclusive idea. You can't have a human experience and not experience struggle. That's what the human experience is. Sure, there are levels and different breeds of struggle depending on where you are in life, but struggle itself is inevitable. It takes some people 50 years to understand just how true that statement is. You're just trading one struggle for a different kind. As society evolves, human life is gradually turning from a struggle against suffering into a struggle against pleasure.
Number fifteen: you can't be successful without the belief that success is attainable. Look, okay, you can never achieve something you don't believe is possible in the first place. That's how powerful belief is. Once you see something as possible, that belief becomes a lot easier to assimilate. The most successful people have the belief in the possibility, even if nobody else was able to pull it off. This is a crucial difference between those who are able to literally change the world and those who just make it slightly better.
Now out of curiosity, what mutually exclusive beliefs have you witnessed in your life? Let us know in the comments.
And since you watched this video until the very end, here's your well-deserved bonus: stop living in your mind. Most people only live inside their head; they see themselves in an artificially inflated mirror. You see potential. You've got this great idea for a book, a business, a movie, a product, and you believe life will only start once you bring that idea into reality. Yet you've had it for years, and you keep postponing it. If the previous statement is true, then the second and more important part of your life will only start once you materialize it.
The reason you're scared to do it is because you haven't figured everything out. You're not sure how it's going to play out, and you say that the timing isn't right. But the seed is different from the fruit; you have to plant that seed. You need to grow the tree, and eventually, it'll bear fruit. You don't need to see that fruit when you plant the seed; you just need to plant it with the belief that if you do everything you have to along the way, eventually that fruit will come.
For those of you who want to plant the right seed today, we've got a gift. Instead of paying $1.99 for a yearly subscription to the Alux app, scan the QR code on screen right now and save yourself $100. Let the dirt that other people throw at you become the soil out of which you grow. Society will think it'll bury you, but they didn't know that you're a seed, and soon you will bear fruit. If that's you, write the word "seed" in the comments. Let's see how many of you are about to reach for the sky. [Music]