15 Rules to Speed Up Progress in Life

You know, some people are a million years ahead while it seems like you're stuck in the slow lane. Although time has passed, your life hasn't changed that much in the last 5 years. Realistically, it's unlikely you'll catch a break in the next five if you keep going at the pace you are right now. The life you envision for yourself will just be a wish you once had. Other people have the same 24 hours in a day, but somehow they're getting substantially more done than you are.

That's because they know something you don't, but you're about to learn it. By the end of this video, you'll learn how to make 5 years' worth of progress in just one. Here's how to make progress faster in life. Welcome to Alux, the place where future billionaires come to get inspired.

Number one: You pick only one goal and you brainwash yourself into believing it's achievable. At the core of any form of achievement is belief. Many people have dreams and wishes that they know deep down are not going to happen, so they default to luck. Okay, luck is not a strategy. It doesn't have to be believable to everyone else; you have to believe that you can get there.

Define it clearly, write it down, and look at the goal daily to keep yourself locked in. It turns out that we as humans are actually really good at getting what we want, if only we know what it is. Once a purpose is set and a goal is defined, every choice you make should be aligned with it. The progress will come from getting closer to the goal. It'll probably not be a linear path, but make the decisions that get you closer.

In any shape, proximity to it increases the chances of you making it. So, get yourself closer. Where most people fail and get stuck is when they pick two goals that are in opposite directions. A step closer to one of them will take you a step further away from the other. In a panic, you take a step back to remedy it; you just made two steps. Each one took effort; both were oriented towards your goals. But if you look at the map, you're back to where you started. If there's one thing to remember, Aluxir, it is this: speed comes from focus, not force.

Number two: Find one source of truth, research it, and commit to it fully. You're smart enough to distinguish between what has a higher probability of success and what is clear, right? Okay, so find a source of truth. This means a voice, a mentor, an example of someone who did what you're about to do. Deconstruct their actions, learn their playbook, and follow in the footsteps that they've already made. Since their actions led to your desired outcome, chances are that following the same playbook will at least help you to make substantial progress in the right direction.

Don't change plans; don't chase after shortcuts. Just trust the process and put your hours in. The truth is most plans are good enough plans if you just stick with them for long enough. Where most people fail or slow down in life is they begin a plan and then decide to change it partway through. We got rich because we were dumb enough to believe everything we read in business books. We committed fully, and it turns out those people were right.

Number three: You double the daily effort for eight times the outcome. No matter how dumb you are, how poor you are, how unmotivated, if you just double the volume of daily effort, you should see at least a 50% increase in your results. But if you're really smart, if you're excited, and you begin to acquire the right tools, if you double the effort, something weird happens. The outcome doesn't double; it's increased four to eight times in the medium term.

Why? Because you have less time to be distracted, to waste resources on crap that doesn't contribute to your future. Effort compounds. When you reinvest the extra income, you acquire tools that now give you the same output per hour as before, but in only half the time. If you double your effort daily, it won't be long until you double your hourly output. Double the output and double the time: you're now making progress four times faster.

When you approach life with this amount of volume, you'll learn twice as fast as everybody else because you're encountering more situations. That is how doubling your effort gets 8X the results.

Number four: You remind yourself what you run from and what you're running toward. Just focusing on the first three numbers on this list is enough to get you some real progress. You'll see it in your bottom line and in your bank account. Because you've made some progress, you'll begin to slow down. When you slow down, temptation creeps in. Shiny objects will try to lure you away from your path.

Getting back on the horse is a lot harder than never getting off that horse in the first place. So, you need an easy and effective way to self-motivate. That's when you remind yourself what the big goal is, what you're running toward. You visualize what your life will be like when you get there, the impact it'll have on your life and into the lives of those you love. This gives an initial push, but not enough to get you lift-off.

To drive this home, you dig deep into yourself and you realize what you're running from. What would your life be like if you don't take action? That everything you know you can become will never come to be. You will live your life with the regret and disappointment of never becoming what you knew you could be. Your peers will move on; your idols will get further and further, and you will sink into mediocrity as a result.

You'll become bitter and angry at the world, finding excuses and blaming everyone else but yourself. Your family and friends will start to resent you for it, and you'll find it painful to just be you, spiraling down. In that case, the only value you'll add to the world is that your children will grow up with your failure as an example of what not to do in life. That’s what you’re running from.

That's the difference between getting back to work to make your dreams happen and simply not taking action at all. Number five: Win the day before the day starts. Now, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who wing the day and those who plan the day. Those who plan the day outperform the rest on every metric possible by a massive margin.

Okay, those who plan the day are more productive. They get more done in a day; they're exponentially more likely to find long-term success in their professional and personal life. They're better adjusted and emotionally stable, they're less likely to be depressed, anxious, or feel lost, and they achieve much higher levels of work-life balance. What planning does is remove friction from your life.

So, here's a simple example: it's easier to go for a run in the morning if you get your shoes and outfit ready by the door the night before. If everything is set up for you to just do it, you're less likely to chicken out or find an excuse not to. This is your routine, and the discipline to schedule the day the night before is a game-changer. You no longer have to fight against that little voice in your head.

Because once you're out that door, you might as well run, right? You might as well work out, you might as well get some work done, you might as well read or write those pages. Start with focusing your mind; if your mind knows what it should focus on, that little voice quiets down a lot. So, do the hardest thing you can early in the day. If you can already win the day before 11:00 a.m., everything else you do will be extra progress.

This is called eating the frog. You know what actually moves the needle forward and what are just maintainers. Uploading a new product to your store is superior to just checking in on the numbers or answering emails. Pay off your dues before everything else. The experts call this time blocking, where you begin to segment your day in time slots specifically dedicated to action items.

We start every day with a coffee and a daily Alux session, and immediately after, we jump headfirst into the highest priority task that we've selected the day before. This is how we win the morning. In the first half of our day, by the time 1 p.m. rolls around, we've already shipped or delivered what most people would consider a day's worth of work. From 1:00 to 6:00 p.m., anything that we weren't able to ship or get done will just accelerate our progress, and we can give it our focus because we no longer have the pressure of the big thing looming over us.

6:00 to 8:00 is family time, religiously for over a decade, before we plan the day and week. The biggest problem is you'll be so productive that at some point you’ll struggle to find high priority tasks to tackle in the first half of the day. You can make yourself happier by keeping a gratitude journal and reflecting on what you’re learning. Learn specific skills or techniques from experts who've spent their entire lives perfecting their craft.

It takes 15 minutes in the morning to get all of this set up in a way where you dramatically increase your chances of success; so much so that we created the only app designed to do just that. Go to alo.com/slapp right now and download it. Every morning, when you have your coffee or tea, open up the app and go through it for 15 minutes. Listen to the daily Alux, write down four lines in your journal for people who just want the benefits of journaling without all the nonsense, and then get back to work.

Hundreds of thousands of people are living proof that this app has been a game-changer for them, so it's time you did the same. Step one: download the app and create an account. Step two: scan the QR code on screen for an exclusive 25% off the yearly plan and commit to a year of focus. Step three: use it every morning with your coffee and just see how much faster you’re making progress in life. This is an investment you will not regret.

Number six: Have an action bias and a speed bias. Action beats intellect when the clock is ticking. You'll learn more by doing than by thinking. Speed amplifies learning to this extent: done is better than perfect. Done builds momentum; perfectionism keeps you in the same place. The path to success is paved by action, not hesitation. Successful people all operate with a sense of urgency. This is important, even if they have to artificially manufacture it.

If you make yourself believe that your life depends on you getting things done, your output changes. Okay, speed thrives on imperfection. The urgency you bring defines how quickly you'll transform your life. Successful people have a speed bias. We learned an incredible lesson from a billionaire mentor of ours when we were discussing growth goals for our company and telling them about our three-year roadmap. He listened quietly, thought it through, and then asked the question that has changed the way we work: what would it take to make all of that happen in only 6 months?

This forced us to think radically different. We would need more people, more money, and to accelerate the speed of learning by failing faster. Speed might be expensive, but it's worth it when it saves you time. For as time passes, the opportunity you have right now might not be available 2 years from now. This is why Silicon Valley companies raise money so they can make 10 years' worth of progress in 18 months and mitigate that risk of the opportunity disappearing before you have a chance to act.

Number seven: You stop looking at others. As long as you live, you’ll always be a race of one. You're racing against the failure that you could become if you stopped running. It's not about anyone else; they don't matter. You don't need the approval of your peers because they are not your peers. You need to build a sense for distractions—an ability to identify them for what they are.

To an untrained eye, these might present themselves as opportunities, but most opportunities are just distractions in disguise. Okay, once you stop comparing yourself to others, you need the bandwidth to focus on yourself. You get it by taking your bandwidth back from the people who took it in the first place. A sinking ship can save no one, so fix your damn ship. Okay, make yourself strong; let them carry their own weight for a while, and then save them when you're ready. If you don't, they'll just drown you.

Number eight: You don't quit things at 60%. So, you start something, you put in a couple of weeks, and you made some progress; you're 50 to 60% into something that might change the game for you, at which point—for whatever reason—you quit. All the effort you've put in is now lost. The ROI on that time, effort, and money invested is zero.

Okay, not sure? Keep lying to yourself that you've actually learned a lot. But you haven't, have you? Unless you ship it, go live with it, or stick with it, you've wasted the opportunity, and it kills us when this happens. You find a potential great hire; the first interview goes well, the same with the second or third. When things are about to get serious, you unearth a massive red flag that you know makes them a bad fit long-term, so you end it.

All of that time and effort put in is wasted. The only thing you can do now is to try again until you're able to get to that finish line. Whatever you do, don't make it a habit of quitting at 60%, or else you'll always be stuck right where you are.

Number nine: Get off the platforms you don't need. The news or distractions—there's nothing for you on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TV, Twitch, or the black-and-orange. Your life will be measurably better without you trapped in the news cycle. The secret to speed isn't more effort; it's less noise. Removing that doom-scrolling from your life will reveal just how much unproductive time you're used to wasting with nothing to show for it.

Very soon, you'll realize you've been monetizing—or at least enjoying—less than 20% of your available time. Everything else was just you idling away with no purpose.

Number ten: If someone else knows how to get there faster, pay them to show you how to do it. You accelerate a lot when you go from hiring people that you can grow to hiring people who are already grown. You can go from hiring cheaply to hiring for specific expertise. Per unit of time, you’re getting substantially more with the latter.

They don't need to be employees; they just need to have the expertise to see the things you're missing. That's what experts are for. They've done exactly what you’re trying to figure out, so they've seen all the mistakes that you're about to make firsthand. We used to pay $5,000 a month to a mentor that could be a second set of eyes looking at the decisions we were making, just so we could increase our hit rate.

We realized just how valuable this is and how most people have nowhere near that kind of money to have someone show them the way like we did. So, we started paying experts a lot of money to share the same kind of insights they've learned the hard way with a closed community of subscribers to the Alux app. For just $1.99 a year, you get access to thousands of coaching sessions from the smartest people in the world.

Instead of hiring an executive coach for thousands of dollars a month, get the Alux app and you'll have a portfolio of teachers coaching you. And you know, we're not supposed to tell you this because it's kind of bad for business, but if you sign up for just one month at $29.99, you'll still have access to the entire library of content to see if it's right for you. By far, it'll be the best money you spend today. So, download the app at alux.com/slapp and get yourself a subscription. We'll see you on the inside!

Number eleven: You remove your expectations of instant achievement, and no matter what, you trust the process. The first week you hit the gym, you see no results, right? You get tired; everything hurts. There's no six-pack in sight. But you know that if you just keep this up, 6 to 12 months from now, things will start to look a whole lot better. Not only will you be consistent in a process that you know works, if you just keep going, it'll bleed into the rest of your life.

You'll start eating better so you don't compromise the effort you're making. You'll sleep better and feel better; your brain will be sharper. Before you know it, it'll feel as natural as if it was always a part of your schedule. Once you see results, you'll be addicted; you'll start optimizing your workouts and perfecting your techniques. You'll make real progress and know when you've had a great day. The exact same thing happens in business and life.

Stop dismissing something as if it's not working just because you went to the gym once and you don't have a six-pack. It doesn't work that way, okay? Put your head down and do it daily. Check back in in 6 months and then see how you’re doing.

Number twelve: You build and constantly optimize the machine that gets you what you want. There are two ways to get from point A to point B: one, you walk; that's what having a job usually is. Two, you build a machine that takes you there. If you don't want to go far, walking will do the trick just fine. But if your goals are beyond that horizon over there, you need to build something.

Depending on your goals, it'll be a bike, a car, a train, a plane, or a rocket. A bike is like a bakery where you're the main chef; a car is a small business where you have a handful of employees with you. A train is a big regional business; a plane is an international business, and a rocket is a unicorn that changes the world.

Now, every category has been previously built by somebody else, so you know it's possible, and you have an understanding of how difficult building each part will be. What we're about to tell you is incredibly important; okay, so pay attention. In your early days of building your machine, you'll feel like you're not making much progress. Actually, the people walking will be further along than you are.

But once the wheels are mounted on your thing, the engine is running, and you've got the steering wheel in your hands, you'll pass them in the blink of an eye. In the long term, the worst car will still get you further than the best walk. Once you've got a machine built, small tweaks to it will make a lot of difference. You get the right tires, the right kind of fuel; you swap out the parts that don't work the way they should.

Keep optimizing the little things for big results. Recently, we've increased the conversion from our funnel from 5% to 6% by just tweaking the onboarding process. 1% might not seem like much to you, but it's actually a 20% jump in people trying our product. It was a lot easier for us to optimize our conversions by 1% than it would have been to increase the volume of people hearing about the product by another 20%. Plus, if you do the optimizations first, the returns stack up on top of all future efforts.

Number thirteen: Twice as long but done by others is better than doing it yourself. One of the biggest mistakes amateurs make is they think progress is linear, like a straight line from point A to point B. Yeah, okay, not really. In reality, progress is more three-dimensional, and you measure it in volume, and volume can be layered.

So, to use the prior example, this is what walking or riding a bike is like. Instead of doing that, this is how you can make the same kind of progress in a fraction of the time. By the way, this is called a Gantt chart, and this is how you're supposed to track all of your ongoing efforts in your company. Amateurs will say you can't juggle more tasks at the same time, but the pros know they can hire people to do the boring parts while they work on those tasks that can't be outsourced.

You don't need to be a genius to move fast; you just need to outsource wisely. Progress that you don't have to create yourself is the Holy Grail of growth. Once you find it, you will never go back.

Number fourteen: You surround yourself with faster runners. Your heart sets the pace; you're moving slowly because you're surrounded by slow runners. Even if you're faster than your current circle, you're still leaving a lot of availability on the table. The fastest way to level up is to join a group of faster runners. In the business world, it's the people who make substantially more money than you just by being in their circle.

Your pace will improve; you'll see how they operate, the systems they've built, and how they move. They'll force you to keep up with them, and as a result, your output and focus will shift. In life, it's always better to be the poorest house in a rich neighborhood than the richest house in a poor one. You'll work harder; your kids will have better friends, and the quality of your life will be objectively better.

Number fifteen: You learn to surf instead of swimming against the current. Waves are inevitable. Some people never get in the water because of them, and others, well, they learn how to surf those waves. Swimming against the current will require incredible effort, and you'll make very little progress, not to mention it'll be exhausting and unsustainable even in the medium term.

Choose your entry points carefully. You don't want to go all in on selling newspapers or black-and-white TVs in the modern day. The old way of doing it is an elevator going down. You want to be where the puck is headed. How fast you make progress depends on your ability to navigate your current reality and distinguish between the two. A great sailor learns to read the sky and the water, using every modern tool at your disposal to predict the weather and position yourself for success.

When the wind blows, you just adjust your sails to give you an extra boost, so you get there faster. But never rely on the winds or the current alone to get you all the way to the end. Because when there's no wind, you better start rowing.

This video was filled with gems and aha moments for those who know how to listen. So, which one of these do you think will have an immediate impact on your life? Let us know in the comments!

And you stuck with us until the very end of this long video, and you know you've earned a well-deserved bonus. Today's bonus is: the biggest obstacle to speed is thinking that you have more time. This sense of later that we all have, it's a mirage. You don't have as much time as you think you do.

Here's an insight you might not know but will realize when you get older: as time passes, how much time you have shrinks, both in the sense that you're closer to death, but also available time to do things. Life fills up as you get older. Small obligations, little tasks, varied commitments all take away slices of time that you have to deploy toward your goal.

The time will never be right. Telling yourself you're waiting for the right time is the biggest trap most people fall into. The truth is you'll never have more time than you do right now. The only resource you have to build a better tomorrow is right now.

If this entire concept made sense to you, write the word now in the comments. Let's see how many of you realize you don't have as much time to build the life of your dreams and are committed to operating with a sense of urgency until you get it. We salute you in the comments; we see you, and we're standing with you.