With this year coming to a close, we reflected on all the lessons we learned in 2023 and we’re about to share them with you.
A man who does not reflect on the year that has passed is destined to repeat it!
With this year coming to a close, we make it a priority to externalize the most valuable insights we’ve drawn and we’re about to share them with you!
Here are 15 Life-Changing Lessons We Learned in 2023.
Don’t worry if you don’t feel like reading; you can enjoy the video below or watch it on YouTube:
1
Results show up in a 5-year window
This is a big lesson we learned in 2023.
Your current reality is the outcome of the decisions and choices you made five years ago.
What you’ve been working on this year will show results 5 years from now, so don’t be worried if you start a new journey and things haven’t been transformational.
Big things take time! And having a vision for where you want to end up is crucial.
The great thing is that you have already knocked 1 out of the 5 years out.
There are four more to go until you get there. As long as you don’t start a different journey, you’re good; just keep going.
2
Large-scale success boils down to the team
In terms of money, you can get to $1–10 million on your own or with a small team, but moving beyond that requires top performers.
A business level’s up when the focus of the founder shifts from building the product to building the team!
This was one of the biggest lessons we learned in 2023.
It also forced us to confront the reality that some of the people we had on our team hit their growth ceiling.
A $1M manager is unable to grow and manage a $100M company!
Not removing these people from key roles will simply sabotage your growth and your relationship with them.
You will set targets for them and give them high responsibilities that they are unable to achieve or manage and they will resent you for it.
You want to give people the opportunity to rise to new levels but pay close attention to what they’re doing.
3
There are things that are way more important than money
If you’ve been following ALUX for a couple of years now, you know we measure life based on five personal key indicators:
- Wealth
- Health
- Relationships
- Emotions
- Intellect
Some years you double down on wealth, and some years you need to emphasize the time you spend with your family.
In 20 years, the only people who will remember you staying late in the office are your children!
Think of your time and energy as live points.
It is your choice in which of the 5 buckets you allocate them and be careful not to neglect any of them. Your money is useless if your health is trash.
4
Third parties can’t get you to the promised land. You have to go yourself
One of the most painful lessons we learned in 2023 is: don’t trust agencies!
We worked with four big-name agencies this year and all of them failed to deliver any kind of positive results.
Everyone hopes to find some miracle solution that will take care of their growth on their behalf.
After spending over 1 million dollars of our funds on this, we can tell you you won’t.
You think they know something you don’t but third parties are usually large organizations with massive overhead; they’re going to waste resources and time on the most random things and they don’t get the customer the way you do.
Instead, buy expertise! Find an individual who’s done exactly what you’re trying to accomplish somewhere else, pay them 20% over what they get paid over there, and bring them in-house.
Specific expertise trumps potential or someone with a flashy sales pitch. Don’t fall for the bells and whistles.
Results over everything.
5
Don’t allow your financial thermostat to go down
Some of you don’t know what a financial thermostat is so let us give you a brief explanation.
Your ability to earn money is influenced by your unconscious decisions about how much you should be earning.
Think of your earnings as a thermostat in your home. If your thermostat is at $10,000 per month and you’re currently earning $5,000 a month, it’s just a matter of time until your earnings catch up.
If the thermostat in your home is set at 25 degrees Celsius and it’s currently 20 degrees in the room, the heating will kick on to raise the temperature. The same goes in reverse.
You might want to be earning a million per month, but if your financial thermostat is set to $5,000 a month, you’re never going to get there.
There are three main ways to increase your financial thermostat:
- You hang out with and around people way richer than you. Hanging out with someone who earns $500 million per year simply breaks your understanding of how the world is supposed to work and what is possible.
- You experiment with luxury. You save up a little bit of money and use it to get a glimpse of what’s outside of your reality. Treat yourself to a business class ticket, a membership to a country club, or at least a nice hotel. It’s an amount of money you wouldn’t normally spend but people with higher financial thermostats do it all the time. This gives you a glimpse into this next level.
- You constantly feed your understanding of money, wealth, and what a good life is. You do this by reading as many books as you want. By watching money podcasts and going to events.
All 3 work and over a medium time horizon, the results are clear and measurable.
For those of you interested in raising your financial thermostat, we built the only tool that does just that.
It’s called the Alux app and you can get it for free.
You listen to it for 15 minutes every day and we infuse your brain with actionable insights and expert perspectives on how to increase your wealth and master the 5 pillars of a good life.
You do it every day and your financial thermostat goes up. Moreover, the app is like your secret weapon and it won’t take long for other people to realize you know something they don’t.
As a sidenote, in case you’ve not made up your mind yet, everyone who’s already on a paid subscription says this is the best investment they’ve made this year.
6
Doubling your effort usually doubles the outcome
Halfing your effort usually halves the outcome.
Your actions or lack of actions have consequences. There are times in your life when you use leverage, you hire more people, and you buy expertise but nothing will save you apart from brute force.
- Nobody will work as hard as you do because nobody has the same incentives as you do.
- Nobody has more to gain than you do.
- Nobody knows the vision better than you do.
If you’re in charge of your own business, working twice as hard will not only double the results, but it will also bring the future closer at a faster pace.
Based on our personal experience, you will have to spend four times the price to get half the results you would get if you did it yourself.
If you can’t afford that math, get to work.
7
What you don’t focus on goes downhill
Even better said: what you don’t focus on becomes less and less profitable by the day.
And we’ll share a personal example here on why: Passive income without supervision means others are getting rich off of you.
Here’s our story: Our real estate portfolio is made up of luxury Airbnbs.
These properties are managed by a property management company and they take care of everything.
In the past 24 months, they’ve been steadily raising their rates across all services. The cost of cleaning doubled, repairs doubled, and supplies doubled.
They’ve started charging for services that were previously included. All this is on top of their 25% management fee.
The problem with doubling these recurring costs is that the price per night can not be increased proportionally, as you will become uncompetitive, which means the rentability of the entire portfolio is going down.
If you allow it to keep going this way, the expense snowball will just keep piling up, and others will take advantage of their position.
In conclusion, the lesson we learned in 2023 and wish we learned sooner is:
If given the opportunity, people will try to use your wealth to make themselves rich at your expense!
We’ve seen it happen, and once it got to a certain threshold, it simply didn’t make sense for us to keep going this way and build our own property management company just for our holdings.
8
Life is a continuous journey to upgrade different parts of your life
Upgrade your family’s life. Upgrade your relationships and how stressful your work environment is.
You jump from one upgrade to the next and your life steadily builds up.
This lesson we learned in 2023 is kind of weird but we’ve realized that we derive purpose from growth. Maintaining is nice, but it feels like something’s missing.
I’m not sure everyone feels the same way, but as long as growth is happening, we feel like we’re doing well and the even better insight is that it doesn’t have to be material growth.
The money can stay the same but if our relationships are getting better, we feel like we’re making progress.
9
Your friendships need deliberate maintenance
Don’t take your friendships for granted and don’t let them fade away just because life happens.
If you value your friendships, you should spend resources on them.
In 2023, we learned the lesson to distinguish between a 6 PM friend and a 3 AM friend.
Out of everyone you know, there are only 2 or 3 people you can call at 3 AM and they will show up. Everyone else is a 6 p.m. friend.
Ask yourself right now: Who are your 3 a.m. friends?
Cherish them. Let these people eat with you. When they call you, answer, and they’ll do the same.
This year for us has been friendship-deflationary. We got rid of some people and doubled down on the ones we consider true friends.
10
Stop working on anything less than the big goal
The biggest lesson we learned in 2023 was about focus. Whatever you focus on materializes!
The problem is, since you have a limited amount of focus, focusing on the wrong thing can cost you so much money that you’re not even aware you’re losing.
So we decided to hire people to take care of everything else so that we could focus on just the most important things.
You might have noticed that this year we only posted 3 to 4 videos per week instead of 7.
Next year, we’ll probably drop that number down to 1 or 2, but with ultra-high quality and a higher production value so that we can focus on the Alux app.
This will elevate the Alux experience and brand power.
The Alux app is such an incredible product that has the potential to be worth hundreds of millions, something our YouTube channel could never do.
We’ve gotten to a point in our lives where we can make this kind of call. So we’re making an executive decision to focus on things worth 100 million dollars or more.
The app content is far superior to what you’ve been getting on YouTube and you get it daily along with several tools to track your life progress. Try it out if you haven’t already. It’s free!
11
People don’t have the potential you see in them
You know when you look at someone and say they have a lot of potential? We’ve learned something that you’ll find useful:
There is no such thing as potential in other people! What you think of as potential is what YOU would do if YOU were in their position!
Firstly, they don’t have the potential you see in them! It’s just in your mind.
This is one lesson we learned in 2023 that changed the way we look at the people around us.
We used to push people to live up to their potential until we realized not everyone wants the kind of growth you expect of yourself.
You’re better off just chilling with people and if you can’t accept them for who they are, not for who they can be, you probably shouldn’t be friends in the first place.
12
Either move or start shaping your current environment
This lesson we learned in 2023 touches on the social side of life.
Some of you don’t feel like “home” or that you “belong” where you currently are.
You have two choices: either you commit to moving and stop complaining until you’ve successfully relocated or you make it work by infusing yourself into the environment.
The way we solved this feeling of belonging was by talking to the businesses and people within a 2-mile radius of where we live.
We started knowing the names of baristas, restaurant staff, and delivery people.
We started frequenting the same spots more often and more deliberately and behold, we began feeling like we were part of a community around us.
When people know you, they treat you better.
In fact, the only way they get to know you is if you make an effort to get to know them.
As uncomfortable as that may sound to some of you, once you’re past that initial awkwardness, it only has upsides.
13
Negotiate EVERYTHING
One of our staples here at Alux is that reality is negotiable!
Everything is a negotiation, be it in business or life, and if you’re not willing to negotiate, you’re either going to miss out on big opportunities or you will overpay.
Four days ago, we received the last software development invoice for the app we have been shamelessly promoting so far. This invoice included 4 months of development work. The invoice received was $144,950.
Bear in mind that we’re friends with the company taking care of the development. We know each other’s families and have done business together for a while.
This was substantially more than what we expected it to be, so we decided to look into it and put their CEO on blast.
The next day, we spent 4 hours going through everything in the invoice line by line, breaking it all up.
It turns out the manager invoiced us for features that are not fully functional; they logged more hours than they should have and even billed us for meetings.
This negotiation revealed to the CEO that their team was mismanaging resources and as a result, their invoices ballooned up.
By the end of the negotiation, the invoice had dropped by over $50,000.
The average return for each hour of negotiation was $12,500 for our company. If we had decided to simply pay the invoice, we would’ve been out of pocket.
Their company would’ve seen the large payment coming in and would’ve assumed everything was in order.
Negotiation isn’t something you learn in school, but it’s of paramount importance nonetheless.
It reveals the true value of what’s being transferred and sheds light on what each party values.
The lesson we learned in 2023: Always negotiate.
14
Everyone has a personal brand, either by design or by default
This aha moment came to us in the private webinar we’ve done for our Reinvent Mastery cohort with personal branding expert Claudia Miclaus.
Our Reinvent Mastery live webinar line-up
She spoke about personal branding and we realized that if you leave it to chance, people will make up their own stories about who you are and that becomes your brand.
In fact, to take control of it, you need to vocalize exactly how you want people to perceive you and then live according to what you say.
If you do so early on in your network, people will accept it as fact and treat you accordingly until you give them a reason not to.
Moreover, Claudia has a masterclass available for super cheap right now in the Alux app, where she goes through exactly what you need to do.
It made us more deliberate with our branding efforts.
15
Remember to have fun with it
If you go too deep into something, if you’re overworked, if the people you work with are overworked, if everybody has to push themselves to get through the week for extended periods, you’re doing it wrong.
One of the most impactful lessons we learned in 2023 is that life and business are both supposed to be fun.
It’s a challenge you’re supposed to solve. Nobody wants to play games with someone who’s not fun to play with, not even yourself.
So at the top of our yearly goals whiteboard, we wrote in big, bold letters: Remember to have fun with it!
And we proceeded to do just that! We hope you will, too.
And because it’s Christmas time, we couldn’t end this article without a secret bonus for those of you who waited until the end.
Bonus
Anti-goals
Every year, we set goals for the coming year.
Most people do, but for the past 5 years we’ve done something not many people have heard of and we’ll share it with you.
We call these anti-goals or goal traps.
These are things we want to avoid or traps in which we might fall as a result of pursuing a goal.
For example, let’s say the goal is to increase company revenue by 100%. Mighty goal, right?
What if the achievement of that goal means we will have to spend 60% less time with the family because we have to be in the office more?
Are we willing to make that trade? Probably not.
So in the process of crafting our goals, we pay close attention to the traps we might fall into.
Goals should have a holistic approach; otherwise, the negative side effects could destabilize everything.
We hope this made sense to you and that you will set a couple of anti-goals this new year!
These were the 15 life-changing lessons we learned in 2023. There’s a lot of valuable information to comb through, so don’t hesitate to go through this article a couple more times. See you next time!