15 Things to Prioritize in Life
Your life sucks because you don't understand what makes life suck less. Because of evolutionary pressures, humans are designed to deal with the most imminent threats. But not everything urgent is important. If you get trapped in the pursuit of the urgent, you will wake up one day and realize you messed it all up. You will feel stuck, lost, unfulfilled, even angry at the world. To some of you, this might sound familiar. Well, by the end of this video, you'll have a clear understanding of what ingredients make up for a fulfilling life. Alright, let's do this. Here are 15 things to prioritize in life if you want to max out your experience.
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Number one: Yourself. You are priority number one. Not your friends, and not your husband or wife, not your children—you. If you aren't well, you can't help them. A sinking ship can save nobody. Your health is probably the most important thing on this list. If you're unhealthy, your illness will have ripple effects throughout your life and the lives of others. So, prioritize your health—physical, emotional, and spiritual. If you fly often, you've heard this phrase a lot: “Should an emergency situation occur, you need to put on your own oxygen mask first before attempting to help those around you.”
Hey Luxor, if you don't heal, you will bleed out on the people who didn't cut you, and there's nothing worse in life than realizing you're having a negative impact on people you care about. Rest is health, so prioritize rest, prioritize sleep, prioritize time in healing environments. Weak soldiers win no battles, and if you want to win in life, you need to be in fighting shape.
Number two: Time with your children. Some things are more valuable per unit of time than others. Why? Because once the moment has passed, it'll be gone forever, and time with your kids is one of them. You think you can work now and spend time with them later, but they will never be kids again. They will never be the same age they are today. If you miss it, it's gone. They say a man is not a man until he can love something more than he loves himself, but this goes for everyone, not just men. Children are a rite of passage of sorts. You don't have to have children if you don't want to. We're sure there are other ways of maturing, but if you choose to have them, give them your best.
Number three: Your partner. Early in life, where you live is the most important decision, but once that's taken care of, the second biggest choice is who you choose as your life partner. This person will be alongside you for the rest of your life. They like to say, “happy wife, happy life,” but that's not really the case. In reality, we lean more toward “unhappy partner, unhappy life.” Or, if you want to stick with the rhymes: “happy spouse, happy house.” They will play a crucial role in bringing up your children. They will either be there to hold you at night, or you'll fall asleep alone. Your partner is who grounds you; your partner is what home is. You can win at all other things following on this list, but if you fail at the first three, you're done. People get too caught up in the money or the fame game, and then you wake up one day alone in a mansion.
Number four: Your business and income. Money is the fuel of life. Everything is expensive and growing more expensive by the day. People want to put themselves on a pedestal and pretend like money isn't important, but you can't feed your family with Sacramento quotes. A car without fuel can only go one way: downhill. Neglect your business or put it in the hands of those who don't see your vision, and it's just a matter of time before it turns into chaos. People get rich because they make it their business to become wealthy. In life, everything you want out of life—all the comfort your family needs—is within reach. We both know you're smart enough and driven enough to make it happen. You just need to put this aside and do the work you keep postponing.
Number five: Your growth. Very much like sharks, staying still in the water will kill you. You need to keep moving. A tree that isn't growing is secretly dying, and so are you. If your life feels stressed, meaningless, or like you're wasting it away, it's because you lack growth. When's the last time you evolved? When's the last time you took a mental leap? When's the last time you genuinely felt every day of your life is getting better and better? There's a direct correlation between success, happiness, and fulfillment to the amount of time, money, and energy you devote toward growth. This is by far the biggest takeaway that we took from the rich, and it allowed us to build our fortune as well.
Invest money into yourself, and how do you do that? You find tools and resources that focus your efforts and provide you with insights you didn't have, and as a result, this allows you to make better decisions that compound over time. We spend over thirty thousand dollars a year on personal education, on access, mentorships, books, and business events just to learn the small nuggets of gold needed to help out our community. As a company, this year we spent over two hundred thousand dollars on the premium content in the Alux app. Of course, we won't charge you thousands of dollars a month in order to access it. We leverage technology and these free videos on YouTube to be able to offer it to you at only ninety-nine dollars per year. Almost 100,000 people have downloaded and used the app so far, and the feedback is amazing, especially as we keep improving the product.
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Number six: Your freedom to move. Your freedom is in direct proportion to the number of hooks and chains you have in you. If you decided to pack things up and move to the other side of the world tomorrow, could you do it? Oh, how your mind wanders for a second and thinks about what that would be like. Well then, reality starts to creep in, doesn't it? Your job, your mortgage or rent, your responsibilities you have right here, and all of a sudden you realize you're not free. You're a prisoner in a cage of your own design, and cages such as this kill what's left of your identity. All of a sudden, you're no longer you; instead, what you do becomes your identity. All of a sudden, people around you think of you as the job that you do: “He's that guy. She's that girl.”
Be honest and ask yourself, how free do I really feel? That is your mission in life. If you don't like your answer, do something about it. Prioritize freedom, and it'll open up side quests that make the journey extraordinary. But more on that in number thirteen.
Number seven: Your investments and savings. Your business and your income is the predictable inflow of fuel for your life. But even if you're a high earner, that doesn't mean your sandcastle cannot still crumble. You become rich by getting paid a lot of money for your work. You become wealthy by earning money while you don't have to work. Who else comes from investments? Peace of mind comes from savings and emergency funds. If you stopped working today—let's say a car hit you and you don't have insurance—how many months could you sustain your current lifestyle? The answer is less than six. You're in rough waters, my friend. You're one Murphy's Law incident away from crashing.
Rich people prioritize this in such a way that a good portion of their income goes directly into investments or at least savings. But typically, they invest over 50 percent of their income.
Number eight: Your core relationships. When it comes to priorities and relationships in life, you don't need volume; you need depth. You only need the right two to three loyal friends, and you can conquer the world. It's for this reason why Facebook is failing as a social network: too many connections and too few genuine relationships. Who even are all of these people anyway? Your high school colleague got married, another doubled in size, another posted pics of their holiday—all surface, no depth. Life gets kind of lonely after 40. It's impossible to make new old friends, so cherish those you have. If they bring value to your life, fail to do so, and you'll become an island. Family: you, your kids, and your spouse. It might be enough for survival, but you're not thriving; you're blending in as a solo identity.
Number nine: Decluttering your life. The things you own end up owning you. The more you've got, the more you've got to deal with. That fancy car you have? Well, it requires maintenance. The convertible's got a leaky roof. The closet is filled with clothes, yet you wear the same three shirts in rotation. Poor people think having more stuff makes you rich or wealthy because, in their mind, that's how you measure wealth. But rich people know wealth is having as few things as possible and being comfortable with that reality. Declutter your life, and you will find freedom and lower stress.
Number ten: Your long-term goals. Prioritize the long-term vision over what needs to be done this week. For this week becomes next week, which becomes the week after. Before you know it, you're old and can barely walk. Touch, feel, smell, see—look at your life the same way an architect looks at a building they want to create. If it's designed well, it's beautiful, flows naturally, and feels like it's supposed to. When done properly, you don't need to force it. That's what your long-term goal should be: a life beautifully designed.
This principle right here has helped us to create something extraordinary. In all of our Sunday videos, we speak from first-hand experience. This concept of being the architect of your life is something that we've broken down and documented in our Goal Mastery course, which has been closed for several months now. But this Black Friday, we're reopening Goal Mastery with a special discount for those on the waiting list. So go to alux.com/goals and make sure your name is on the list so you don't miss out. If you fail to create a life for yourself, others will do it for you—but on their terms, not yours.
Number eleven: Emotional and spiritual health. What good is the external if the internal feels like hell? What if the numbers on the screen look good but it's hard to go to sleep at night? You're smart enough to understand the impact one could have over the other. When we feel at balance, we are more productive, more creative, and it's easier to keep pushing forward. If your life feels like you just want to quit, maybe you should stop looking outside and start to turn your gaze inward.
Number twelve: Your network. The more we evolve, the more we learn to appreciate the powers of networks. One could have nothing but a network, and it's just a matter of time before they've got something. Prioritize these relationships over the more trivial ones. Let them know you're thinking of them. Send them small gifts as tokens of your appreciation. When the time comes, they'll be there for you like a safety net of opportunity.
Number thirteen: Adventure. We want you to listen to this very carefully: a life not lived is a life the universe wasted on you. So, live it, Luxor. Travel. Experiment. Leave the world behind. Sometimes you will make the money back. You will get another job. You will get over your ex. But you will never have a second chance at living this life. This is it—the only ticket to the theme park that is life. So what are you going to do with it? Will you take it for a ride, or will you spend your remaining days in the teacups because they're familiar and predictable?
Number fourteen: Time with your mom and dad. We know you might not be on good terms with them. Maybe the relationship is just okay, or hopefully some of you had some emotionally mature parents and everything is great. But the reality is, you won't have them around for too much longer. You only have maybe 10 to 20 more Christmases together. If you only see them during the holidays, you'll see your mom and dad only 20 more times, and that's it.
The beautiful thing is that there is an easy fix to this: you. Yes, you—not them—have to be the one making the effort. You're doing this for you. The more you understand your parents, the more you understand the soil they grew in. The more it'll make sense why they are the way they are. Your relationship with your parents is the perfect teacher for what to fix in the relationship with your own children. That's how we, as a human species, progress. So if you don't want to do it yourself, do it for your children.
Number fifteen: Sustainable happiness. People confuse pleasure with happiness a lot. This is why poor people think money will bring them happiness, because they think eating a good meal will make them happy. But unfortunately, that's pleasure. We know plenty of obscenely wealthy individuals that can no longer purchase pleasure because they've overindulged in it. And on the other side of the coin, we know people who have a fraction of what we have who are very genuinely happy.
The more you do what feels natural inside of you, the happier you'll be. Every compromise you make, every morning you have to step on your soul to get out of bed, your happiness gets a little further away from you. Sustainable happiness is when you find a rhythm for your life—not too fast, not too slow, just right. If you know when to step on the gas and when to stop the car and grab a coffee, you might just find that sweet spot—the perfect spot, the optimum one, the ideal route where all the lights turn green for you. For every red light you have on your proverbial road of life, know that there's someone out there who's pacing themselves and getting all those green lights.
We strive to be that person, and we hope that you'll someday get there as well. And look, the list doesn't stop here. Think deeply: what is one other thing you should prioritize in life, one that we didn't mention on this list? Write it down in the comments and allow the world to learn from your experience.
And as for those still around, here's your secret bonus: Life is a circus, and you're the center clown. If you've ever been to a circus, you know there's usually a juggling act. We actually like juggling acts because they're incredibly entertaining. But this idea of throwing things into the mix got us thinking: what's the most number of things a circus clown can juggle? Well, believe it or not, the Guinness World Record for the most number of balls juggled at the same time is 14, and the record holder's name is Alex Barron.
Now, beyond 14, it's humanly impossible to juggle more, as the rules of physics come into play and stop you from effectively doing it. Now this idea of a limited amount of things that one can juggle in life has stuck with us. It's the same in life, isn't it? At some point, if you keep adding things into the mix, everything will fall apart. We need to be careful how many things we try to juggle at the same time, and this idea has helped us to know when to say yes and when to say no in life. It's also why our videos are lists of 15 items or ideas—one more than the world record, just so there's something to strive for.
Now you know. If you enjoyed this nugget of gold and think you will apply the juggling rule to your life, write the word "priority" in the comments. Let's see how many of you are jugglers and how many are just pretenders. Thanks for spending some of your valuable time with us today, Alex. We're so glad you did. If you enjoyed this one, please give us a like, hit that bell icon to never miss an upload, and hey, don't forget to subscribe.