15 Truths about Success You Wish Someone Told You Sooner

The most expensive cost in life is the unseen price that you pay on the information you don't have. Some people spend decades figuring things out and wishing they would have found the answers sooner, and this video allows you to bypass all of that. Here are 15 truths about success you really wish someone told you sooner. Welcome to Alux; you will make it. It's just that it's going to take longer than you expect.

Big goals take time. If you start at the very bottom, it will take you even longer because you have to fight your way even to get to the starting line. Fortunately, success isn't a competition; it's an outcome you get from running your own race. As long as you keep putting one foot in front of the other, eventually you will cross the finish line.

Anything you're obsessed with comes into the realm of reality if you go non-stop after it for 10 years. But in an age of instant gratification, most people waste 10 years looking for the shortcut instead of actually building. If you zoom out, most people fail not because of competition but because they gave up when things got hard or were taking too long.

Change your time horizons and commit to that thing you're trying to avoid. You can't; you have to go through it. Your fears are the best indicator of your weaknesses. We are scared of things we're not good at, and one can minimize fear through preparation. Most of the time, you postpone starting because you don't know how to make the entire thing happen, but life rewards those who start and figure things out along the way.

Think of it like this: you're on the road to success, but it's nighttime, and you're in the driver's seat of your life. You don't need to see the entirety of the road to your destination to make the trip. Just by having your headlights on and seeing 30 meters ahead of you, you're able to safely navigate the journey. All of your progress is the result of doing things you didn't want to do but knew that you should.

The quicker you process this and accept it as fact, the sooner you'll be able to level up in life. You can do it all yourself up to a point; then it's about the quality of the people around you. You can brute force your way to one million dollars, maybe a little bit more, but at some point, you'll be capped by the number of hours in a day and your ability to leverage your own attention and skills.

So here's how you become a category leader and escape competition: one, you outwork everybody; two, you outsmart everybody; and three, you hire the best talent and let them help you. One of them will make you a decent living, two of them will make you a mainstream success, and all three will make you uncompetable.

As you transition from individual to team, your job switches from product and sales to getting the best people and giving them the best tools for the job. Nobody will work as hard as you do, and if you stop, it'll go downhill. Everyone lives with this illusion that somehow you'll hire a CEO that replaces you, which you'll pay a fraction of what they're able to generate for you, and you'll be able to ride off into the sunset.

Well, we're here to break that fantasy up for you. In the game of life, the only person who really cares about your success is yourself, and maybe your mom did in the early days. Assume that the moment you give them the wheel, performance will drop by 50 percent. It's not going to happen overnight, but it will happen. They lack the vision of the dots they have to connect, the expertise to generate new dots, and the ability to force dots to connect in the future.

They can never go as fast as you do; they can never innovate the way that you do. Other people are a decimal multiplier of your own efforts. If you're at a one and you hire someone else, together you're at a 1.2. If you are at a 10 effort-wise, hire someone who's a 0.2, and your effort drops down to a five, thinking they'll supplement the difference, but you'll end up at a six results-wise. You're now also responsible for and have to manage this person. The best you can hope for will be that they'll be able to match your hunger.

The fewer people who know about your goals, the better. You don't need advice; you need guidance. Your goals are outside of your current reality; that's what makes you want to strive for them. The problem is the people next to you are unable to see into that unknown direction because they lack an understanding of the variables you play with. Their advice is limited, inapplicable, and almost always a waste of time.

Intelligence is measured by the speed with which you learn. The cost of moving slowly is learning slowly. The more you stop to listen to others, the less progress you're actually making. So instead of advice, seek confirmation on the path. Check your compass to make sure you're still headed north. The most value you will draw from others is when they keep you focused on the path instead of them suggesting alternatives.

There are no shortcuts to any place worth going, and more often than not, you need reminding more than you need to be taught. A good guide keeps you posted on your progress, forces you to keep pace, and motivates you when you feel like quitting. And if you don't have that person in your life, go to alux.com/app right now and download our app.

We designed it specifically to accelerate your progress and keep you focused on your next big milestone. 91% of app users have reported that they're already achieving their primary goal in life or have made substantial progress toward it since they started using the app. Go to alux.com/app right now and allow us to be your guide for this chapter of life.

Win the day before 11:59 a.m.; then everything else is accelerated progress. Done work is done work. Between where you are and where you need to be, there's a bunch of work that needs to get done. How fast you get there depends on your ability to go through your real to-do list. The most successful people we know treat mornings and afternoons as separate blocks of time.

You get the most important things done before 12 noon, so you know you've paid your dues for the day. What you do in the afternoon is an acceleration toward your goal. Most people don't even do one productive thing per day that gets them closer to their desired life. That's the difference between being busy and being productive. Productive implies you're closer to the goal than you were before you started. Everything else is a part of the Red Queen's race, where you keep running just to stay in the same place.

A partner who sees the same vision as you is an asset. A partner with a different objective than you is a liability toward the achievement of your goal because you've got two different people pulling in different directions. And even with all the effort you deploy, none of it will get you what you want. The biggest indicator that a couple will not get a divorce is having a common vision for their life together.

Building a family and building toward success in life are both incredibly difficult tasks. It's best if they don't conflict with one another. Your partner will have the largest emotional impact on your success in life. They'll be there for you at your best and your worst. They've been tasked with helping you to get back up and providing safety and comfort for you to regroup, and you do that for them.

They are your stronghold. On the flip side, because of their proximity to your emotions and other vulnerabilities, they're also the ones who can inflict the most damage. Don't expect the world to give you flowers and stop secretly wishing that they did. When you arrive, they'll know you heard them say, "Be so good they can't ignore you."

The problem is people want the praise and the standing ovations without the actions, and they've got it backward. Keep putting on a good show, and over time, people will notice. If you're really good, they will notice fast. You will be tempted to say that they don't get it, when in reality, you're just not that good yet.

When you actually arrive, the award is no longer important because the achievement is real, and you know it. Every failure or "no" is a test of how badly you want this. What if I told you that everything you've ever wanted out of life was at the end of 20 "no's" or failures? How happy would you be to get another one out of the way because you would know you're actually closer to your goal?

You would embrace them. You would hunt "no's" and failures just so you could get to the goal faster. And life actually kind of runs that way; it's just you don't really know how many of these you have to push through. For some, it's two or three; for others, it's 15 to 20. If you’re smart, with every single one of them, you'll spend time analyzing and implementing changes.

Changed behavior is the only proof of intelligence, so it's just a matter of improving and trying as many variations as you can until eventually one works. The great thing about success and money is that you only need to get it right once, and after you do, you'll crave it. But more on that at number 15 on the list.

Don't underestimate the compounding value of small actions and knowledge over larger periods of time. Warren Buffett is the richest investor in the world because he's 92 years old and he started investing when he was 11. Okay, now sure, over time he got wiser, and his growth accelerated through superior decision-making. But most people neglect the fact that he's had over 80 years of compounding work in his favor.

If you're smart, the more decisions you make, the better you get at making decisions. The more money you make, the better you get at making more money. The more you learn, the smarter the place you're able to make. Consistency beats intensity over medium and long-term periods of time, the same way education beats beauty over the same period of time.

Freedom is on the other side of discipline. People think that finding the plan is the hard part, when in reality, most plans will get you there if you just stick to them. You actually have a commitment and a discipline problem; it's not the strategy that's holding you back. So train yourself to do it in the rain so it's easy to do it in the sunshine.

If you've always struggled with discipline or building routines, go to alux.com/app right now and download the app. The app really works, and all you need to prove it is 10 minutes a day for a week. Start the free trial, finish the first Alux experience, and see just how impactful it can be.

Once your fridge is full and your hunger goes away, you will stop hunting. And when you stop hunting, others come and hunt in your territory because they're still hungry. At first, you don't really care that much because you still have enough food in the fridge to last you a while. But in time, the game slowly changes.

You've been out of it for a while. Coming back, you realize you're no longer as fast as you were before, that the game has gotten a lot more difficult, and there are other players who've grown strong based on the vacuum you created when you left. Your mind slowly readjusts to this reality, and the voices inside your head tell you it's okay to settle for less.

At this point, you've got a choice to make: one, you accept you're no longer the dominant force and live off opportunity scraps for however long these might last; or two, you take a cold shower and go into beast mode; bigger and stronger than ever before. And speaking of choices and decisions, you'll make two or three decisions during the year that alter the future.

It's true that small actions lead to big results over extended periods of time, but a couple of times a year, you'll have the opportunity to make a leap. Some years, it may not happen at all, but in other years you'll get two or three. You prepare your entire year for that moment when you have to make the right call, the same way a boxer trains for half a year for a belt fight.

This is why consistency in training is so important, because the last thing you want is the opportunity to present itself for you to not be able to take advantage of it. There's a reason they call them once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. Meetings and learning are fun, but progress is made through reality-altering effort. We hate meetings; okay, they're a massive waste of time.

Since the business has evolved, we find ourselves more often talking about what needs to be done than actually doing the work. At the end of the day, somebody's gotta pick up the boulder and move it from here to over there, and this implies effort. Talking doesn't take much effort. This is why those who are successful are much better at actually moving that boulder than they are about talking about the boulder altogether.

You only need two skills to find success in life: one, the ability to build; and two, the ability to sell. All of your employees should be able to do one or the other; otherwise, you're just wasting time. Don't allow others to bother those building or selling unless they're able to accelerate their progress. You will wish that you started and done it sooner.

The sooner you start, the faster you learn; the faster you learn, the faster you earn. Who are we? Dr. Seuss. Information is time-sensitive; okay, use it before everyone else has it and its value diminishes. The sooner you start, the more compounding on your decisions you can take advantage of.

The reason why others are miles ahead of where you are is because they took action while you were still waiting for the timing to be right. Success is addictive because it tastes just as good as you imagine it will, and then that feeling goes away once you win the game. You want to play it again; people see you when they give you praise.

You're able to provide for those that you love, and this feeling gets ingrained within you. You thirst for it; you want more. But because of the law of diminishing returns, the second time you do it at the same level, it doesn't feel the same. So you have to up the ante. Like a video game, you want to tackle higher-level boss fights and level up along the way.

Pretty soon, you realize you're playing a vertically infinite game, and everything below you no longer gives you the thrill it once used to. At this point, you either commit to becoming a player of games by which you forever climb because you like the game so much, or you live out a position of gratitude where you realize you've actually climbed higher than you ever thought possible, and you wake up to the idea that you've already won.

Or at least that's what we are dealing with right now. Most of these lessons will not click until you experience them firsthand, but it's the hard truths that we wish we were aware of earlier because it would have made the journey a bit more predictable than it's been. Some of you have experienced success in your life, and it's a great opportunity for you to teach our community something of value.

What's the one truth about success that you wish you knew earlier? Please write your most valuable answer in the comments because we're all going to be reading them. And for those of you who've made it this far, here's your well-earned bonus: all success boils down to impulse control. As you keep climbing, there'll be a fight between the rational and the emotional.

Your mind will tell you to keep grinding, to keep your head down, and stay focused. Your emotions will tell you to show the world just how bright you shine, how well you're doing, and convince you that you should reward yourself for getting this far. Impulse control pushes the emotion aside and does what's right for you in the long term over the short term.

You don't need stuff; you need to never have to worry about stuff again. You don't need their applause; you need to make sure that your loved ones never have to suffer again. The culture has lied to you and convinced you to want all of the things that studies have proven to not impact our general happiness or well-being.

Would you rather win the game or sacrifice it to win the round? Control yourself, Aluxor, and you will control your destiny. If this bonus made you realize just how much more careful you have to be with yourself, please write the word "control" in the comments. Let's see how many of you are committed to controlling your impulses and mastering your future. Go get it, Aluxor.