What is a “Self-Made Man” if not somebody who wasn’t given success.. but had to take it himself!
Although we agree with the notion that nobody is completely self-made, that almost every successful individual had help in their journey, there is a noticeable difference between people who start from scratch, on their own and build versus those who’ve had some doors pre-open for them.
That’s what we’re looking to break down for you today Aluxers, we’re fascinated by how one person can go from zero and build incredible things worthy of praise.
Because our own journey has been like that, we’ve learned the hard way what is like to go through the entire process; which is why today we’re taking a look at 15 Steps to be Self-Made!
If you don’t feel like reading this long article, here’s the video version.
Step 1:
Find Successful People that are living the life you want
This is the notion of: Finding your goal
When you’re starting out, you simply don’t know just how much you don’t know so the easiest way to get started is by identifying a shining light in the distance.
This is your North Star. It’s the life you want to end up living or at least guide you until you figure it out for yourself.
If you want to achieve your goal, you must first define what that goal is precisely!
In our experience, the easiest way to do this is to find people who are living the lifestyle that you desire for yourself. Once you do, you have your starting position and a direction.
Step 2:
Study these self-made successful people
This is the notion of: Learning the rules of the game
These people got to where they are by following a set of steps, by doing some things differently than others.
Your job is to identify as many of the things that they do which led them to be in the position they are.
If you want to be rich, you first have to study the rich!
Because you look up to them, this process will be enjoyable to you while for others it might look like work.
Step 3:
Break down what their life is and what they do
This is the notion of: Learn how to apply the rules
Some people call them rules, others call them principles, values or whatever you find fitting enough.
These are fundamental building blocks on which these people have built their life.
These are a crucial differentiator between them and everyone else!
Look at how they act, how they behave, what they do, how they think, how they look at life, how they set goals, what their habits are.. Anything that can be translated back to you.
Successful people have a recipe for their success! Learn it!
Step 4:
Emulate successful people to the best of your ability
This is the notion of: Applying the rules
Or put simply: do the things that these people do yourself – at your own level. Apply the recipe!
Do these people read books? Then you have to read books.
Do they wake up early? Then you wake up early.
Do they work 80 hours per week towards their next goal? Then you work 80 hours.
How many hours do they practice their craft every single day? Now you do the same.
The goal is to get your mind and body used to the motions. You’re not gonna tackle the same kind problems as Elon, but tackle the problems you have in front of yourself. Get the website up. Build that content calendar. Write a page per day. Take 30 photos every day. Edit for at least 1 hour every day.
This is where people give up. Everybody knows that sport and quality food help you lose fat, but it’s the motion of putting it into practice, the same way the people who have succeeded are, that’s keeping you back.
This is why people say Success is a mental challenge!
It might be hard physically – to maybe wake up early every day – but your mind gives up before the body does.
Step 5:
You build a milestone system for yourself
This is the notion of: Not chasing the horizon
No matter how quickly you sprint or how long you run, you’ll never reach the horizon – no matter what flat earthers believe – because the horizon is a direction, not a destination – even if you get to it, you won’t know you achieved it for it’s as far away from you as it was when you took your first step.
That’s why you breaking it down into milestones is such an important part of the journey of becoming a self-made individual, it helps you keep track of how far and how quickly you’re moving.
People always set stupid goals. They say they want to become a billionaire and stop at it.
A billion dollars is a goal someone who’s worth between 250 to 500 million dollars should set for themselves.
Goals are medium term objectives that are just out of someone’s current reach!
You want to be a billionaire, but struggle to pay rent. Your first goal should be to become a thousand-er. Make 50k more that you did last year. That’s a good goal. The process of getting from 0 to 50,000 will teach you what you’re missing that will allow you to go from 50 to 250K.
Your long term objective should never be a number, instead have it be a version of reality that you are fulfilled with!
Why? Because then you’re just playing a game of How big is my number and there’s always going to be a higher number than the one you set.
We’ve re-read every book on goal setting for our next course: Goal Mastery and we were shocked by the triviality of the information and by the lack of concrete advice.
People don’t want or need mambo jumbo crystal-magnets for success, they wanna know how they can get to a point where they don’t have to worry about bills so they can finally focus their energy on growth.
This is why the course is late Aluxers, everything out there is 80% bullshit or super basic stuff like writing down your goals and we didn’t want to release yet another one just to have a quick money grab.. Because that’s not what we do.. If you pay your hard earned money for something we feel responsible to deliver more value than you paid for, otherwise it’s all just a scam. Thank you to those who are patiently on the waiting list at alux.com/goals we’re working hard to make the wait worth it.
Step 6:
Embrace the boring
The boring stuff will take you where you need to go!
No matter what you want to do.. IT WILL TAKE TIME!
We wish we could tell you that there’s a secret method to get things done quickly and effectively, but there isn’t.
Your creativity, your drive, your intellect… these are all just multipliers to the boring things you have to do EVERY SINGLE DAY!
Changing your life takes time, because it requires you to keep changing small things about you and sticking with them for extended periods of time.
Money, wealth, success, health – even happiness – are very much time consuming efforts. It takes effort to solve the problem of make money. It takes effort to get into shape. It takes effort to be happy.
Effort means doing things that are outside of your comfortable self!
Your only job is to not allow that pesky demon you have in the back of your mind who keeps telling you, you’ve done a great job so far and you can take the day off. Screw that demon!
Step 7:
You become a builder
Self made people are always builders.
They build their life.
They build businesses.
They build things that have value.
In order to be great in life you need 2 things:
- To know how to build
- To know how to sell
But the first one is a lot more valuable than the second – at least long term.
Think of the people you identified earlier today and just how much they’ve been able to build.
Now think about that lifestyle you said you want for yourself.. What would it take to build it?
You don’t start with the entire home. Build the foundation, build the structure, build the roof, put in walls…
You see aluxers, everyone loves a beautiful and comfortable home, but while your eye is drawn to the furniture or the small features, you were not there to see the hard work that went into the structural beans and the digging that’s been done to have the foundation in place.
It’s the same in life.
Step 8:
Push yourself
In our experience, self-made people have this second gear in their brain that they can turn on if they have to.
Do you know how many times we wanted to procrastinate? To say we’ve come far enough? How many times our minds went into that very familiar mode of: “this looks hard, time consuming and I don’t really feel like it..”
That’s when you push that button. That’s when you go into the second gear. The one that makes you put in the work despite you not “feeling like it”
Progress is done in the days you wanted to skip!
Everyone has that button in their brain, you might not have found it yet.
You can do a lot more than you think you can. Statistically, people quit at 30% of their ability!
This applies to pain, hardships, hard work, creativity and more.
You enter this second stage when you realize that It’s more important to you to be successful than it is to watch another episode or play another round.
Find that button, push it in the days you don’t feel like putting in the work and that’s how you’ll make something of yourself.
Step 9:
Delay gratification
You’re not a dog. You don’t need a treat every time you do a trick.
Life is a strategy game and your goal is to win the game.
Sometimes in chess you have to sacrifice a few pawns in order to make progress.
What are the small things you’re willing to sacrifice to get that big win?
The concept of delaying gratification or trading with the future as we like to call it is something every self-made individual has been able to successfully use.
I don’t eat the cookie now.. And because of it I will have a lot of cake that I can share with everyone.. Later.
Building yourself isn’t a linear process.
Progress is very slow in the beginning but it starts to snowball once you get to a certain point.
This is why rich people are getting even richer, the snowball works in their favor.
Delay gratification until you have your own snowball.
Step 10:
You specialise in 2 or 3 things
When people hear about specialisation, they think it’s about only 1 thing. You master something and become really good at it.
This used to work in small communities, where you would basically dominate your small local market. The best shoemaker got all the customers. The best baker, sold the most bread and so on.
Then the internet came around and you’re no longer competing with just the folks around you.
In order to have a competitive advantage it is no longer enough to be really good at one thing. Being really good at a single thing makes you a valuable and hard to replace employee.. But being really good at 2 or 3 things allows these skills to be leveraged one on top of the other.
Self-Made doesn’t mean that every single thing you do, you do yourself.
Self-made means that your skill-set is enough to carry you into the future that you want.
You need to understand that It’s no longer enough to be really good at just one thing.
The trifecta when it comes to a winning strategy is as follows:
One skill that allows you to build something of value.
One skill that allows you to communicate or relate to other people why it’s valuable.
Once skill that allows you to expand yourself from a creativity perspective.
This is the part where we would’ve loved to recommend you a book that goes into detail, but we haven’t read or even found one in our research. The closest one we came to is Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers book. He’s the guy who make famous the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to master anything. Outliers is one of our favorite books and you can get the audiobook for free if you go to alux.com/freebook right now and this is the first time you sign up – our friends at Audible have got you covered.
Step 11:
You re-invest strategically
This step builds on top of everything you’ve learned so far in your journey to becoming a self-made individual, many people make mistakes at this point so we recommend you pay attention:
To simplify it we’ll use a metaphor.
Let’s say you live somewhere extremely cold and need wood to keep you and your family warm.
The smart man goes out and cuts 2 trees!
One to keep the current fire going, and one you save up to the side.
The side one is just as important as the main one.
The mistake people make is that they ignore one of the two.
Stop putting wood on your main fire and soon you’ll die of hypothermia.
Not have enough reserves or a safety net and WHEN, not IF, When the hard times hit, you will at least have a fighting chance.
Self made people focus their efforts on the main thing they’re building, but some of the outcomes need to be separated into a safety net outside of the main one.
Step 12:
You hire people to do the things you find boring or hard
By now you’ve specialized and are incredibly good at some things.
These are the big moves that push you further in life. But the road isn’t as even as you’d expect. There are time consuming tasks that you probably dread.
When you’re doing what you’re good at, time is irrelevant, you’re almost having fun doing it.
What for others looks like hard work, for you is basically PLAY.
That’s where you thrive. Do that!
Then find people who enjoying or at least are good at doing the things you shouldn’t be doing yourself.
Successful Self-made people always build strong teams around them!
Step 13:
You constantly dream bigger and are on to the next level
We’re gonna tell you a secret from the future.
The hunger never goes away, you just want better food!
`The moment you hit a milestone, new doors open up ahead filling you with excitement. “What else can I do?” “Holy shit.. If i do this.. Then i might just be able to do that!!”
You fall in love with the process, with the journey, very much like an addict. You’re no longer competing for survival, you’re competing to see just how far you can take it.
You’re like Michael Jordan trying to constantly top himself.
Chained people don’t know what lies above the clouds!
But you got a glimpse yourself and there’s no way you’re stopping half way!
Step 14:
You don’t give up, you adapt or adjust
One of the biggest traits of self-made individuals is their determination to never quit.
Here’s one of the greatest examples of all time. Here’s a teary eyed Elon Musk, talking about how his 3rd attempt at space flight failed and all his idols turned against him and told him he should just pack up and go.
https://youtu.be/CyGqMZQAMio?t=65
You face life with everything she plans to throw at you. Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn. You get back up and prove them wrong, not for them, but for yourself.
This is your journey, do not let anyone else write your story!
Step 15:
You carry the torch
Everything in life is cyclical in nature, it’s how life and existence have been designed to be.
The first step in this video was about finding the people who inspire you, who are doing things worth looking up.
Every self-made individual that drew inspiration from others has the responsibility of carrying that torch for the next generation.
Become the inspiration you needed when you were starting out!
What a great moment to come back to the present moment, to you listening or watching this right now. What is your purpose Aluxer? Stealing a page out of Lucifer’s book: What is it that you truly desire from this life?
Put it down in words in the comments! It would mean a lot to hear that our message came across.
This wraps up our take on the 15 Steps to Become a Self-Made individual!
