15 Ways to Bet on Yourself (& WIN BIG)
People often say you should bet on yourself, or investing in yourself pays the best dividends. But what does that even mean? What exactly can you afford to bet, especially if you weren't born into means? By the end of this video, you'll have a game plan to level up your life, one step at a time. Here are 15 ways to bet on yourself.
Welcome to Alux.
Number one: Assume they are wrong and you are right. You can see something they can't. Look at reality and see what's missing. Some people have this superpower; some see what is, while others see what could be. And it's the second ones who have the power to alter reality. When people doubt your vision, it's because they can't see what you're able to see. This is why most people will tell you to not even try, because to them, what you're talking about feels like a mirage. Deep down, you know you're right. Deep down, you know what you're capable of, so act accordingly. Show them proof. You have some people to prove wrong, don't you? So assume they're wrong and show them the reality that you can create.
This belief in one's ability to craft things through effort, brains, discipline, and creativity is how you'll win the bet on yourself.
Challenge number two: Spend money acquiring equipment that saves you time or increases quality. Trade your time to generate income, but don't spend it poorly. Use the money to buy time-saving tools. This allows you to maximize the return on time. The more tools you acquire, the higher your ROT, or return on time, will be. It's easy to look at professionals and see all the tools and gadgets they have around them to make their lives easier. The problem is you're comparing a level 70 full-stack Paladin with your level one, barely gotten through the tutorial character. The more you progress, the more complex you become. The growth will be gradual, and so will the acquisition of all the tools.
In time, you'll do quite extraordinary things others wish they were able to do, but it all starts with one step.
Number three: Design a life you are committed to making a reality. Turns out, most people are really good at hitting their goals once they know what their goals are. What most people are bad at is figuring out what the hell they want in life because they never take the time to break down expectations, desires, and what a good life will look like for them. So what happens? Well, other people make the decisions on their behalf. Once you know where you need to go, make it explicit.
Most people think that they know; they say things like, "I want to be rich." Well, what does being rich mean to you? What does your day look like? What does your house look like? What do you do for a living? What do you do in your spare time? Who do you have around you? These are all questions that you should answer to create a real image of this life you want to create. Once all of that is sorted out, you can begin closing the gap between where you are right now and this dream reality. Betting on yourself means going after what you want in life, not what others have in store for you.
Number four: Be in rooms, or in minds, that you have no right being in. Send those emails beyond your proverbial pay grade. Send your work to people who are levels above where you are. Be memorable. Create anything you can that lives in the minds of others, be it through your work or who you are as a person. Recruit people to build this vision that you have for reality that we discussed at number one on this list. Get your foot through the door and then get yourself in the room.
As long as you live, please remember the following concept, for it'll change the way you think about life. Let's say you want to eat cake. Well, there are three ways to go about it. One, the hardest way: look for a recipe, find all the raw ingredients, acquire all the tools - the spoons, the measuring cups, the oven, etc. - then proceed to implement the recipe, bake the cake, decorate it, and eventually cut yourself a slice to enjoy.
Number two is the medium way: instead of doing all of those requirements, you figure out one skill you have, you trade it for money, and then you take that money and buy yourself a cake, and then you enjoy it.
And three, the easy way: simply be in the room when the cake gets cut. Sometimes, being in the right room at the right time is destiny-altering. So many people spend most of their lives in the pursuit of ingredients and tools when you would be better off designing the room you're in.
Some of you might know who David Cho is: a graffiti artist, more recently starred in Beef on Netflix. But few people know how David got rich. When he was on the come-up as a graffiti artist, he was commissioned to do a mural for a startup. The pay was sixty thousand dollars, but the founders offered to give him stock instead of cash. David said yes. That startup was Facebook.
The day Facebook listed on the stock market, David's stock was worth over 200 million dollars. The room was a lot more important than the work in this case.
Number five: Spend money acquiring skills. At number two, we talked about acquiring tools that make your life easier and help you progress faster. This is progress brought on by external factors; you're leveraging tech to add productivity to your time. We put them in this order because there's something of greater value than tools. But there is a catch: it'll require time for you to master. We are talking about your skills here: what you know and how well you know how to do it.
A professional photographer with 30 years of experience will crush someone with the latest camera in a photography contest because of all the little things they've learned along the years: framing, lighting, shadow positioning, knowing when to click the shutter. These are all things you become better at through repetition, analysis, and improvements. You can't cheat your way to mastery. But what you can do is acquire multiple skills and allow them to stack one on top of the other.
For example, being great at photography and being great at selling will allow you to market yourself and your products differently to others. Most people are single-skill focused. This is a remnant of the industrial past, where if you specialized in a single task, you eventually got really good at it. Today, we live in a time where everything is everywhere all at once; and yes, that's another movie reference.
The more skills you have, the more you can compound them and escape competition. Every educational product we've ever built at Alux is skill-driven. Once you master a skill, you will forever be able to monetize it, and it'll stick with you for the rest of your life. If you go to alux.org right now, you can see all of our skill-driven courses. You either learn to control your mind through meditation, strategically plan your year so you hit your goals with Goal Mastery, learn how to learn, understand a new technology like blockchain, or add a secondary stream of income as a freelancer.
These will all add value to your life long term. Use the promo code "SUNDAY" for 100 off any of our products. This is our gift to you for taking the time to watch this Sunday motivational video. Go to alux.org right now.
Number six: Don't expect others to be your ticket out. The fundamental rule of betting on yourself is knowing you are the only one responsible for your future. Most people expect and wait on others to be their ticket out, to open the door for them, to hand them the opportunity and the keys to the castle.
The inheritance will not come. Your boss won't retire and give you his business. The Nigerian prince isn't going to send you any money. It's only too late in life they realize that nobody's coming to save them. Nobody is going to give you the life you dream of. Nobody will make you healthy, and nobody will make you rich. You have to do all of that yourself.
Number seven: Every obstacle you face can be overcome if you gather the right tools or ingredients. Remember the video game reference we made earlier? Well, the more you progress in the game of life, the harder the challenges you'll have to face. But all of them are within the realm of achievement with either new tools or new knowledge. Life, as an evolutive experiment, is trying to make you stronger so the next generation continues to thrive.
This means that life will put you face to face with the level of hardship your generation will have to deal with in order for us as a group to overcome them. For the Neanderthals, it was food, shelter, and fire. For the industrialists, figuring out how to distribute food and products to a fast-growing population. For us? Well, it's mental toughness, climate change, and fulfillment.
You wouldn't call it strength if it wasn't hard. On an individual level, you're fighting your own battles, but rest assured there are solutions out there. All you need to figure out is the right tool for the job and acquire the knowledge of how to use it.
And speaking of evolution:
Number eight: Trust your gut. You are the product of hundreds of generations of genetic heritage. Inside of you, there's a pool so deep of gene memory that it's hard for our small brains to comprehend it. Think of all the lives your ancestors lived through. Think of all the challenges they've overcome, time and time again. That's the genes you're carrying in your body right now. They all won; otherwise, you wouldn't be here.
The greatest gift they left you with is your gut feeling. That is their ancestral gift to you. Something feels right or it doesn't. You know you should do something; there's a calling out there for you. And it also works on the defensive side of things: you feel it when something is kind of fishy.
The more you use your gut feeling, or intuition—call it whatever you want—the stronger it gets. The more you use it and analyze the outcome, the better your decision-making will become. And we're all the end product of our decisions, so trust your instincts on people; you will rarely be wrong.
Number nine: Don't fall for shortcuts or distractions at any point in time. Other people will disguise outcome as opportunity. If your outcome is the desire for wealth, they will sell you get-rich-quick schemes. If your desire is health, they'll sell you weight loss products that work like magic. If your desire is beauty, they will sell you makeup and magic creams. Deep down, you know that tea isn't going to give you a six-pack. Deep down, you know joining a pyramid scheme is not going to make you rich, no matter what the triple diamond emerald member told you at the hotel meeting.
There are no shortcuts to any place worth going, and you know it.
Number ten: Invest in yourself and commit to the process. So what does it actually mean to invest in yourself? Well, it means spending time, effort, and money to increase your own value. For something to be called an investment, it should appreciate in value over time or turn a profit.
In the past decade, we've spent around ten thousand dollars on books alone. That's around 500 books. That ten thousand dollar investment, paired with the time to go through them, taking notes, and then applying what we learned, made us millions of dollars. Okay, but we didn't stop there. We went to events too. We purchased courses, seminars, and mentorship sessions. In total, we spent between one hundred thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand dollars on self-development alone. As individuals, as a company, it's more like over a million.
We know this sounds like a lot, but we got 100x plus on that investment when accounting for everything. And this is a common mistake that people make when they hear these kinds of numbers: you don't spend it all at once. You start with a 15-book, you buy an online course for two hundred dollars, you go to a weekend event for five hundred dollars, and then you scale up as you see it pay off.
If you apply to any of our courses, you will see a positive return on your money, or under our 60-day guarantee, you'll get all of your money back. We know that 249 dollars for an online course can be expensive, even though the value is in the thousands of dollars. We know because we started from the very bottom.
So through our platform, we give away this kind of information for free, and 4.3 million people have resonated with the message. But there's an important distinction to make: do not confuse entertainment with education. Most people treat this kind of content as financial entertainment and never do anything with it.
Well, say it once and we will say it again! Your life is cheap because you think investing in yourself is expensive. And to make sure money is not an excuse, we built the Alux app. We are finding the best coaches, mentors, philosophers, and neuroscientists on the planet and paying them exorbitant fees to distill everything they've learned into 10-minute sessions.
If you go to alux.com/app right now, for only 99 dollars, you get access to the most valuable insights these people have spent their entire lives to acquire for an entire year. Our goal with the app is to bring you over one million dollars worth of value for less than one hundred dollars a year. And if that's not worth the investment, then hell, we don't know what is. If you're ready to begin investing in yourself, go to alux.com/app right now.
Number eleven: Go for non-linear outcomes and embrace asymmetric risk. Asymmetric risk is the secret why a small percentage of the population massively outperforms the rest. We've made an entire video about it; you can check it out in the top right corner. Betting on yourself means doing the work knowing the results will eventually be there.
Take entrepreneurs versus employees as an example. An employee goes to work and gets paid the moment they start working. Two weeks in, they get their paycheck. With entrepreneurs, it's different. You decide to start a business today, so you get to work for the next couple of months with barely anything to show for it. And even when things start to happen for you, it's just a spec when you compare it to how much effort you've put in. But while the employee has the linear outcomes, the entrepreneur has the potential of non-linear results.
The employee is the red line, and that blue line is the entrepreneur. Notice how in the first part, the entrepreneur deploys all that effort and time and doesn't really earn much while the employee gets paid immediately and maybe, with time and effort, gets a salary increase. But once everything is set in place, the entrepreneur can scale up the business. All effort deployed leads to exponential results, and in time, that blue line shoots up to the heavens. That's what it means to bet on yourself, even when the other option is safer to begin with.
And speaking of employees, number twelve: Instead of making your boss richer, do it for yourself. Unless you own a percentage of the company that you work at, outside of your salary, you're not creating value for yourself. Most people go to work, generate value for their boss, and come home and watch some TV. Years go by and they don't realize they didn't do much with their lives and don't have much to show for it.
If you need a job to make ends meet, sure, do it. But betting on yourself means using everything at your disposal to help yourself escape the rat race. This is a great moment to ask yourself: what percent of your time are you creating value for others and for yourself? If it's zero for you, you might want to reassess that.
A golden nugget of information that ties in really well into the previous point is to pay attention to what happens to the money that you earn. If the money you earn goes immediately to someone else, you will never be rich. Your earnings are not supposed to be spent on things that don't increase or at least hold value over time.
Number thirteen: Admit you have a problem and get help. Sometimes, betting on yourself means being truthful with what's happening in your life and where it's going. If it's not going where you want it to, maybe it's time you found some help. It takes someone truly strong to realize what they're doing to themselves and those they care about enough to admit the problem is real and they need external help. In this case, bet on your ability to change, work the process, go through the steps, and allow yourself to be a comeback story. Life will open up once again.
Number fourteen: Drop out, quit your job, and do the thing you were meant to do. If there's a burning desire inside of you to do something else, if reality seems bland, boring, or even obnoxious, if when you go to bed at night, there's a happy place in your mind where you go, where you're doing something else—where you're doing something you wish you could be doing in real life—well then, quit and do that. Become that person. Go all in while you still can, especially if you're on the younger side. Life is meant to be an adventure. Live in such a way where the story you tell is worth listening to.
The moment is going to pass you by, and this boring reality you experience right now will always be there waiting for you if you want to return to it. But the moment you get just a little bit of a taste of what life on the other side is like, where you do what you were meant to do, you will never want to come back.
Number fifteen: Stick to what you know. If you don't understand it, don't invest. Lastly, betting on yourself means betting on things where you control the outcome. If the win is not in your own hands, don't take the bait, because that's all it is—someone is baiting you to separate you from your hard-earned money.
People will bring all sorts of opportunities to you, many of which they don't understand themselves. As a long-term rule, stick to what you know. Stick to what you understand and what you can control. Control over the outcome is the most important part of designing the life you want.
We know that some of you have gone through extraordinary events, and this is your opportunity to share some of that insight. When did you bet on yourself and win? Let us know in the comments.
And as for those of you watching the video until the very end, you've earned yourself another bonus: Know your limits. Betting on yourself only works if you do it smart. Going headfirst into a wall, hoping it's going to be like a Harry Potter scene, will result in a quick, brutal consequence in the real world. Life is a continuous game where you're pushing reality just a little bit at a time to see where that edge is. Push the limit until you find the edge and then play the game within those constraints.
Most people never know where their limits are; they spend their entire lives in a self-designed cage and never know just how much there is out there. The thing about limits is you can't find them sitting. You have to go out there and test them. This applies to both externally and internally, so go out there and find who you can become and then see where you want to settle.
Write the word "limits" in the comments if you're excited to find out just how much more you can actually be. We'll see you in the app, Aluxers, or we'll catch you in the private chat groups for all of our course students. Thanks for spending some time with us today, Alux. We're so glad you did. If you found value in today's video, please give us a like, hit that bell icon to never miss an upload, and hey, don't forget to subscribe. Thank you.