15 Life-Changing Lessons We Learned in 2023

A man who does not reflect on the year that's passed is destined to repeat it. With this year coming to a close, we make a priority of externalizing the most valuable insights we've drawn, and we're about to share them with you. Here are 15 valuable lessons that we've learned in 2023.

First up, results show up in a five-year window. This is a big one. Your current reality is the outcome of the decisions and choices you made five years ago. What you've been working on this year will show results five years from now. So don't be worried if you start a new journey, and things haven't been transformational yet. Big things take time, my friend. And having a vision for where you want to end up is crucial. The great thing is you already have knocked out one of the five years, so four more to go until you get there. As long as you don't start a different journey, you're good. Just keep on going.

Large scale success boils down to the team. In terms of money, you can get from 1 to $10 million on your own or with a small team. But moving beyond that requires top performers as a business levels up when the focus of the founder shifts from building the product to building the team. This was one of the biggest takeaways we've had this year. It also forced us to confront the reality that some people we had on our team have hit their growth ceiling. A $1 million manager is unable to grow and manage a $100 million company. Not removing these people from key roles will simply sabotage your growth and your relationship with them. You'll set targets for them and give them high responsibilities that they're unable to achieve or manage, and they'll resent you for it. You want to give people the opportunity to rise to new levels, but pay close attention to what they're doing.

There are things way more important than money. If you've been following Alex for a couple of years now, you know we measure life based on five personal key indicators: wealth, health, relationships, emotions, and intellect. In some years, you double down on wealth. Some other years, you need to put an emphasis on the time you spend with your family. In 20 years, the only people who will remember you stayed late at the office are your children. Think of your time and energy as life points. It's your choice in which of the five buckets you allocate your points, and be careful not to neglect any of them. Your money is useless if your health is trash.

Third parties can't get you to the promised land. You have to go yourself. Don't trust agencies, okay? We worked with four big-name agencies this year, and all of them failed to deliver any kind of positive results. Everyone hopes to find some miracle solution that will take care of your growth on your behalf. After spending over $1 million of our personal funds on this, we can tell you, you won't. You think they know something you don't. But third parties are usually large organizations with massive overhead. They're going to waste resources and time on the most random things, and they don't really understand the customer the way you do. Instead, by expertise, find an individual who's done exactly what you're trying to accomplish somewhere else. Pay them 20% over what they get paid over there and bring them in-house. Specific expertise trumps potential or someone with a flashy sales pitch. Don't fall for the bells and whistles; results over everything.

Don't allow your financial thermostat to go down. Some of you don't know what a financial thermostat is, so let us give you a brief explanation. Your ability to earn money is influenced by your unconscious decision about how much money you should be earning. Think of your earnings like a thermostat in your home. If your thermostat is set at $10,000 a month and you're currently earning $5,000 a month, it's just a matter of time until your earnings catch up. If the thermostat in your home is set to 25 degrees Celsius and it's currently 20 degrees in the room, then the heating will kick back in to raise the temperature. The same goes in reverse. You might want to be earning $1,000,000 a month, but if your financial thermostat is set to $5,000 a month, you're never going to get there.

Now, there are three main ways to increase your financial thermostat. First, you can hang out with people way richer than you. Hanging out with someone who earns $500 million a year simply breaks your understanding of how the world is supposed to work and what is possible. Secondly, you experiment with luxury yourself. You save up a little bit of money and use it to get a glimpse of what's outside of your reality. Treat yourself to a business class ticket or a membership to a country club, or at least a nice hotel. It's an amount of money you wouldn't normally spend, but people with higher financial thermostats do it all the time. This gives you a glimpse into that next level. And thirdly, you constantly feed your understanding of money, wealth, and what a good life is. This is done by reading as many books as you can, by watching money podcasts, and going to events. All three of these work over a medium time horizon, and the results are clear and measurable for those of you interested in raising your financial thermostat.

We built the only tool that does just that. It's called the ALUX App, and you can get it for free by going to alux.com/app. You listen to it for 15 minutes a day every day, and we infuse your brain with actionable insights and expert perspectives on how to increase your wealth and master the five pillars of a good life. You do it every day, and your financial thermostat goes up. The app is like your secret weapon, and it won't take long for other people to realize, you know something? They don't. Go to alux.com/app and download it today. Everyone who's already on a paid subscription says this is the best investment they've made this year.

Doubling your effort usually doubles the outcome, but halving your effort usually happens. The outcome, your actions or lack of actions have consequences. There are times in your life where you use leverage. You hire more people, you buy expertise, but nothing will save you apart from brute force. Nobody will work as hard as you do because nobody has the same incentives as you do. Nobody has more to gain than you do. Nobody knows the vision better than you do. If you're in charge of your own business, working twice as hard will not only double the results, but it'll bring the future closer at a faster pace. Based on our personal experience, you'll have to spend four times the price to get half of the results you would be getting if you just did it yourself. If you can't afford to do that math, get to work.

What you don't focus on goes downhill. Even better said, what you don't focus on becomes less and less profitable by the day. And we'll share a personal example here on why passive income without supervision means others are getting rich off of you. Here's our story. Our real estate portfolio is made up of luxury Airbnbs. These properties are managed by a property management company, and they take care of everything. In the past 24 months, they've been steadily raising their rates across all services. The cost of cleaning doubled, the cost of repairs doubled, the cost for supplies doubled. They've started charging for services that were previously included. All of this on top of their 25% management fee.

So the problem with doubling these recurring costs is that the price per night cannot be increased proportionally because you'll become uncompetitive, which means the rentability of the entire portfolio is going down. And if you allow it to keep going this way, the expense snowball will just keep piling up and others will take advantage of their position. If given the opportunity, people will try to use your wealth to make themselves rich at your expense. We've seen it happen, and once it got to a certain threshold, it simply didn't make sense for us to keep going this way and to build our own property management company just for our holdings.

Life is a continuous journey of upgrading different parts of your life. Upgrade your family life. Upgrade your relationships. Upgrade how stressful your work environment is. You jump from one upgrade to the next, and your life steadily builds up. It's a weird realization, but we realize that we derive purpose from growth. Maintaining is nice, sure, but it feels like something is missing. Not everyone feels the same way, but as long as growth is happening, we feel like we're doing well. And the even better insight is it doesn't have to be material growth. The money can stay the same, but if our relationships are getting better, we still feel like we're making progress.

Your friendships need deliberate maintenance. Don't take your friendships for granted, and don't let them fade away just because life happens. If you value your friendships, you should spend resources on them. This year we learned the distinction between a 6 p.m. friend and a 3 a.m. friend. Out of everyone you know, there are only two or three people you can call at 3 a.m., and they all show up. Everyone else is a 6 p.m. friend. Ask yourself right now, who are your 3 a.m. friends? Cherish them and lose the rest. Let these people eat with you. When they call, you answer, and they'll do the same.

This year for us has been friendship deflationary. We got rid of some people and doubled down on the ones that we consider true friends. Stop working on anything less than the big goal. The biggest realization for this year has been around focus. Whatever you focus on materializes. The problem is that since you have a limited amount of focus, focusing on the wrong thing can cost you so much money that you're not even aware you're losing. So we made a decision to hire people to take care of everything else so we can focus on just the most important things.

You might have noticed this year that we only posted 3 to 4 videos a week instead of seven. Next year, we'll probably drop that number down to one or two. But ultra high-quality videos and higher production value so we can focus on the Alux App. This will elevate the Alux experience and brand power. The Alux app is such an incredible product that has the potential to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, something our YouTube channel just never could do. We've gotten to a point in our life where we can make this kind of call.

So we're making an executive decision to focus on things worth $100 million or more. The content is superior to what you've been getting here on YouTube, and you get it all on a daily basis, along with several tools to track your progress. Go to alux.com/app right now and try it out. People don't have the potential you see in them. You know, when you look at someone and say, "Man, they've got a lot of potential." Well, we've learned something that you'll find useful. There's no such thing as potential in other people. What you think of as potential is what you would do if you were in their position. They don't have the potential that you see in them; it's just in your mind.

This realization has changed the way we look at people around us. We used to push people to live up to their potential until we realized not everyone wants that kind of growth that you expect of yourself. You're better off just chilling with people. And if you can't accept them for who they are, not who they can be, well, you probably shouldn't be friends in the first place. Either move or start shaping your current environment. Some of you don't feel like home or that you belong where you currently are. And you basically got two choices. Either you commit to moving, and you stop complaining until you've successfully relocated, or you make it work by infusing yourself in the environment.

The way we solve this feeling of belonging is by simply talking to the businesses and people in a two-mile radius from where we live. We started knowing the names of baristas, the restaurant staff, or delivery people. We started frequenting the same spots more often and more deliberately. And lo and behold, we began feeling like we were a part of a community around us. When people know you, they treat you better. The only way to get to know you is if you make an effort to know them. As uncomfortable as this might sound to some of you, once you're past that initial awkwardness, hey, it's only upsides.

Negotiate everything now. One of our staples here at Alex is that reality is negotiable. You've heard us say that before. Everything is a negotiation, be it in business or in life. If you're not willing to negotiate, you're either going to miss out on big opportunities or you will overpay. Four days ago, we received the last software development invoice for the app that we've been shamelessly promoting so far. The invoice included four months of dev work. The invoice received was for $144,950. Now, bear in mind we are friends with the company taking care of this development. We know each other's families and have done business together for a while. This was substantially more than what we expected it to be.

So we decided to look into it and put their CEO on blast. The next day we spent 4 hours going through everything in the invoice, line by line, breaking it all up. Turns out the manager invoiced us for features that are not fully functional. They logged more hours than they should have and even billed us for meetings. This negotiation revealed to the CEO that their team was mismanaging resources and as a result, their invoices were ballooning up. By the end of the negotiation, the invoice was dropped by over $50,000. The average return for each one hour of negotiation was $12,500 for our company, which if we had simply decided to pay the invoice, we would have lost out of pocket. Their company would have seen the large payment coming in and would have assumed everything was in order.

Negotiations reveal the true value of what's being transferred and sheds light on what each party values. Always negotiate. Everyone has a personal brand, either by design or by default. This moment came to us in the private webinar that we've done for our Reinvent Mastery cohort with personal branding expert Claudia McLeod. She spoke about personal branding, and we realized that if you leave it to chance, people will make up their own stories about who you are, and that becomes your brand. So take control of it. You need to vocalize exactly how you want people to perceive you and then live according to what you've said. If you do it early on in your network, people will accept it as fact and treat you accordingly until you give them a reason not to.

Claudia has a masterclass available for super cheap right now in the Alux app, where she goes through exactly what you need to do. It made us a lot more deliberate with our branding efforts, and remember to have fun with it. If you go too deep into something, if you're overworked, if the people you work with are overworked, if everyone has to push themselves just to get through the week for extended periods, you’re doing it wrong, my friend. Life and business are both supposed to be fun. It's a challenge you're supposed to solve. Nobody wants to play games with someone who's not fun to play with, not even yourself.

So at the top of our yearly goals, on the whiteboard, we wrote in big, bold letters, "Remember to have fun with it." And we proceeded to do just that. And we hope that you will too. What was your biggest takeaway this year, my friend? Let us know in the comments. And happy holidays! Say laxer.

And even though it's Christmas, we couldn't end the video without a secret bonus. For those of you waiting until the end. And that bonus is anti-goals. Every year we set goals for the coming year. Most people do, right? But for the past five years, we've done something not many people have heard of. And we're going to share it with you right now. We call these anti-goals or goal traps. They're basically things that we want to avoid or traps in which we might fall into as a result of pursuing a goal.

For example, let's say the goal is to increase company revenue by 100%. Mighty goal, right? Well, what if the achievement of that goal means you'll have to spend 60% less time with the family because we've got to be in the office more? Are we willing to make that trade? No, probably not. So in the process of crafting our goals, we pay close attention to the traps we might fall into.

Goals should have a holistic approach; otherwise, the negative side effects could destabilize everything. We hope this makes sense to you, Aluxer, and you'll set a couple of anti-goals this new year as well. If you're going to stick with us this year and work to have fun, set yourself some anti-goals. Write the word fun in the comments. One more Sunday video to go until the end of the year.