Why Most People Will Never Be Rich

Some people will never be rich, and no, it's not about where you grew up, who your parents are, your gender, or the color of your skin. Let us explain.

Welcome to alux.com. These 100 dots are meant to symbolize the world's population. From a quality of life and living standard perspective, to be rich means you're part of the top 20%. To be poor, you guessed it, it's the bottom 20%. Everyone in the middle is called the middle class, where you can be broken into upper and lower middle class. But that's not of interest to you.

You see, being rich is relative; you're only rich compared to other people. In order to qualify as rich, you need 80% of the comparable population to have a quality of life lower than you do. This applies to both a macro level and to your local community. By simple statistics, if we agree that this top 20% rule in terms of living standard applies, then 80% of the population will never be rich. So, we're done with this video, right? Well, there's more to the story.

Because we judge our wealth and quality of life compared to others, the laws of this basic math simply don't allow everyone to be in the top 20%, because then it wouldn't be the top 20%. Make sense? Technically, if you compare the quality of life we enjoy today from a time perspective, almost everyone on planet Earth has a higher standard of living today than someone who lived 100 years ago.

Here's where the mind-blowing part happens. Unless you're in these 0.001% of the bottom of the population, you're enjoying a higher quality of life than most kings and queens ever lived. If you were a king in the 1600s or before and you got sick, you basically winged it through witchcraft and alcohol. Life expectancy was under 40 years, and most diseases would kill you, because witchcraft wasn't that crafty.

It took 200 more years for us to begin developing medicine. So yeah, while we've been living better than kings with our cell phones, electricity, access to water, travel, and without traditional slavery for a while now, but you don't feel rich because the top 20% rule applies. You're only rich if you're doing better than your peers.

"But Alux, what does it take to make it to the top 20% and why aren't more people willing to do whatever it takes?" We are glad you asked that question, imaginary voice in our head. Well, it boils down to two simple truths, and one of them is a lot harder to digest than the other. Here's why most people don't make the leap into the top 20% in terms of living conditions.

One, on a macro scale, it's about access to resources, information, religious culture, and infrastructure. This is why everyone in Switzerland is considered rich compared to everyone in South Sudan, poor people. People love this argument because the reason for their poverty lies, generally speaking, outside of their control. The government is corrupt, and instead of building effective departments to better the population, they're wasting money and keeping everyone poor, which is factually true in most of these struggling countries.

But there's a second truth that's a lot harder to digest, and this time it's not on a macro level, but it boils down to your local community. Two, on a micro scale, the reason why most people don't become locally rich is that they aren't willing to learn and make the sacrifices required for success. Yep, we're going there.

It's only a small subset of the population who are willing to sacrifice decades of their lives, embrace high levels of risk with a very small chance of success, to break out of the general population for financial and societal gain. This happens both in rich countries and in poor countries. Anywhere you look, you can find examples of people who come from nothing and molded themselves into greatness. So, we know it can be done.

What most people choose to ignore is the dramatic level of sacrifice and discipline required to make the leap. If the biggest factor keeping you in poverty is geographical, it usually requires leaving your roots behind in order to relocate to places with more opportunities. It's incredibly hard to leave your hometown, leaving the familiar space and venturing into the unknown on your own.

And guess what? Over 80% of the population is not willing to take that kind of risk. Statistically, you'll be born in the same geography as your parents were, you'll be educated there, find a partner within a 30-mile radius from where you were born, spend the majority of your life working no further than 60 minutes from your home, and you'll probably die there as well.

This is a wake-up call for you watching this video right now. If, in this equation, you aren't able to maximize the opportunity available to you regionally, you'll likely live an average life, a decent life, but nothing out of the ordinary. The second part is finding out your physical and mental limits. Are you able to work 8 hours a day, 10 to 12 to 14 hours a day? Are you able to learn and willing to keep doing it over and over again without any immediate outcome?

This part relies on being able to delay gratification, a concept the 80% is not familiar with. Self-control plays a big part in both. Discipline is the highest form of self-love. Are you willing to learn every single day and deploy what you learn over medium to long periods of time, knowing that you'll be better off because of it?

Well, if you are, there's a specific tool out there that allows you to leverage the smartest minds in the world in order to measurably improve your life based on academic research, like the stuff mentioned in this video. There are no other tools like it, and we know of it because we built it.

We created the Alux app to be your own executive coaching tool right in your pocket. Scan the QR code on screen right now to get yourself a yearly subscription for 25% off. Money, success, and fame are a delayed gratification long-term game, which relies on doing work that compounds over time until a certain goal is achieved.

Basically, are you willing to sacrifice the present for the future? How much sacrifice are you willing to make? Are you willing to work when others are partying? Are you willing to learn skills that add value instead of being entertained? Are you willing to be ridiculed and laughed at for your efforts, knowing that practice and failure are all parts of the journey? Most people are not—most people wouldn't even try.

And out of those who do, a good portion will quit at different stages of the process. But here's the catch. Because richness is a delayed gratification game, you only win at the very end. If you quit at 20, 50, or 80%, you don't get anything. Wealth is the prize for bearing this sacrifice successfully and coming out on the other side. There needs to be a reward for those creating value for everyone else. This is how our society works, and that's how you will.

There's also a good portion of luck and timing involved as well, and these two go hand in hand. If you're watching this video, you already won the luck part. If you survived until now, you're lucky. If you don't have a major physical or mental disability, you already won the luck part. You have access to technology, curated quality information, and the largest marketplace for opportunities humanity has ever known.

Every generation gets its own unique opportunities to build wealth. For us, it was the internet revolution. If we were born 20 years earlier, we probably wouldn't be able to connect with you the way we are. If you're born today, social media, as we know it today, might be oversaturated, and your opportunity might lie in the gamification of AI or digital realities.

This is why you have to understand timing as well. You probably don't want to start a physical newspaper business. Some elevators go up, and some go down; be careful which elevator you choose to enter. Find where the opportunities of your time are and focus your efforts there. Gain specialized knowledge in a field where value is being generated, and society will pay you for your skills.

Most people aren't willing to learn how to use the tools of the present because they're so locked in on the tools of the past. So, those who do learn how to use them have a massive competitive advantage—that's your opportunity. Money, wealth, and success are a lot less complicated than the world makes them seem. Life is a winnable game, but you need to learn the rules to be able to play it right.

Click in the top right corner to watch our video on how to do just that. Once you learn the rules, you'll learn new concepts like asymmetric risk or marginal utility. Concepts that, once you master them, you'll see how other people used them and were able to amass such great fortunes. But that's for future videos.

And since you're a part of the Alux family and watch our videos until the very end, here is a secret bonus we saved just for you. Your ability to win isn't dependent on other people. You're going to win based on what you do today, tomorrow, and every day moving forward.

It doesn't matter what others think, say, or do. You are not racing against them; you are racing against the things that make your current life miserable, and almost all of them are under your control. Even if you don't win big, you have the ability and the responsibility to make your life suck less. So do it.

Go through life naively thinking everything good can happen to you and pay no attention to the naysayers. You will find yourself surrounded by opportunities they are blind to. You get wealthy when you don't listen to those who say it can't be done.

So, are you going to live your life based on what you want out of it, or will you let others decide what your life should be like? Let's see how many of you aren't just looking to get to the top 20%, but make it all the way to the very top. And if that sounds like you, write the word "top" in the comments.