You might not realise it, but life is quickly running by and by the end of today’s article you’ll figure out just how far in your journey you’ve come! Read until the end to find out how to make sure that what waits ahead of you will be better than what lies behind you!
Hello Aluxers, we decided to do this piece on the most important milestones in life because these are such powerful moments and your life changes because of them.
When it comes to the life you wish you live there’s only one mantra we believe it:
Make sure you don’t waste it!
With this philosophy in mind, let’s have a look at the 15 most important milestones in life:
As always here’s the video version if you don’t feel like reading the long article:
1.
Your birth
You may not realize it, but the sheer chance of you being born is quite astounding.
Let’s do the breakdown.. The probability of your parents meeting.. That’s roughly 1 in 20,000 – someone on the forever alone subreddit did the math – multiply that by the chance of those two ending up having sex and we’re already in the millions. Now… we don’t want to get too biological, but believe it or not, you were the fastest sperm that night.. Maybe it was the candle lights or the wine they had, but somehow it was you who beat all the other sperm.
You are already a winner!
Some might call you a miracle.
You survived childbirth, grew up, entered the world and here you are now.. reading this article.
We know that with a population of almost 8 billion people, there are plenty of other miracles running around, but you’re not racing against them.. They just happen to be running their own races. You already have the first milestone checked off, let’s see how far you’ve come.
2.
Figuring out what excites you in life
Believe it or not… this is something you know quite early on in life, but most people forget it as they grow up and struggle to fit in.
Remember the feeling you had when you were spending the entire day playing and enjoying yourself? Remember how time passed?
Remember how exciting it all was and how you could spend hours learning and doing new things that you discovered and loved?
This feeling ends up being lost in the process, mostly through traditional education. Creativity goes out the way and replaced with standardized mediocrity with a focus on who can remember more things.. Ironically, in a society that no longer needs to remember information of the top of their heads.
When you look around and identify someone who’s doing exactly what they wanted to do and crushing it, don’t you feel jealous? Don’t you wish that was you? Their success stems from not allowing their creativity to be traded in for a mediocre experience.
In the words of Ursula LeGuin:
The creative adult is the child who survived.
And we’re all creative when it comes to the things that excite us in life.
3.
Your first money earned
We don’t know about you, but this was a big milestone for us. The first time somebody was willing to pay money in exchange for our time was the moment everything changed. We had our first stepping stone in our financial journey.
Although it was pennies compared to how much we earn today, it set an initial valuation for our time, in the same way May 22, 2010, pizza day set the initial valuation for bitcoin.
The first time you get paid, no matter the amount, is the day the marketplace recognizes the fact that you are valuable.
To this day we still carry in our wallet a dollar from the first paycheck we’ve ever received as a reminder of where we started.
The beauty of this milestone is that it has the power to let you know what awaits in the future. You simply simulate the future with your current “marketplace value” and see where this road will take you; if it doesn’t lead to where you want to be at, you gotta get to work and make some changes.
Maybe we shouldn’t include this here – as we feel we’ll go on a tangent-, but it’s our channel and you’re our community. You’re probably wondering how you can increase your value to the marketplace. Here are your options:
- Serve more people. – the more people you are able to reach and monetize the more value you can draw from the marketplace.
- Increase quality & specialize – this allows you to charge more for your expertise and time.
- Automatize – basically built the machine that does what you’re currently doing, so you free up time to grow.
- Creativity – stand out through a valuable differentiator. The word valuable is key here.
Just because you’re different, doesn’t mean you have more value!
Through time, we’ve learned to leverage all of these to exponentially increase our earning power.
The only thing you should be scared of when it comes to making money is having a ceiling to how much you can earn!
4.
Being on your own
Something changes in you when you’re alone for the first time and realize that you’re actually self-sufficient.
Cooking for yourself. Paying rent. Washing, cleaning & setting your own schedule are all rather simple tasks that mature you as an individual.
The first time you realize you’re actually self-sufficient your life changes. Your learning accelerates and your dependency on other people loosens.
Being on your own and doing ok is freeing and exhilarating, but don’t fall into the trap of being alone until you become lonely.
Being alone isn’t the problem, being lonely is!
5.
Finding a partner
Probably one of the biggest milestones in an individual’s life is when they find that person they plan on spending the rest of their life with.
We know some of you might be thinking that you don’t need someone else to make you whole and we agree with that… but this person will bring more happiness, memories and excitement into your life that you could ever do on your own. Trust us, when you’ll meet them you’ll know. Life just gets better and better over time.
We’ve always been skeptical of the people who say “I love you just as much as I did the first day” because that’s not how love actually works, love – when done right – is continuously growing and developing. If years go by and you still love them the same, your relationship is stuck.
Relationships are complicated, but being with the right person not only feels right, but it makes the complicated bits more bearable and easier to overcome.
When you think about it, renowned russian writer Leo Tolstoy was right; All happy families resemble each other, while unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.
If you do it right, it’s never you against your partner, but you two together against the problem!
No matter what your stance on marriage is, there comes a point when the relationship matures enough to start a family and a family is one of the most important -and difficult- things you’ll build in your life. It requires commitment, collaboration, foresight and patience, this on top of all the fun and exciting bits.
In Hawaii there’s this term called: OHANA – which means family but to quote from Stitch from Lilo and Stitch – Family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten.
A family brings exactly that into your life, support and remembrance, both are two of the most valuable things you’ll ever seek to find in life.
Also, can we get a like on this video from quoting from both Tolstoy and Stitch, on the same point on the list? We’re killing it.
6.
Buying your first home
To expand on the building a family point and your general journey through life, a big milestone is when you finally purchase your first property, usually your first home.
We remember quite vividly the feeling we had when we touched the walls and realized that we own a roof over our head; that no matter what happens in life, we have a place to sleep – even if in the first few days it was on an air mattress – you know the kind you inflate with a foot pump… don’t give us that look.. We know at least some of you can relate.
Buying your first home is such a massive stepping stone because it put things into perspective: you now have a safety net, life should never be worse than it is right now. The fact that you got it, it’s exhilarating, it gets your blood flowing just a bit quicker.
Even better.. If you did it once, you can do it again. We did it again, and again and never stopped since. Real estate can be your ticket to freedom. The more properties you own the less likely you are to ever go broke and because we started from nothing, we know what that’s like and we never plan on going back.
The moment you buy your first home you free yourself from the chains of paying rent!
7.
The moment you figure out what it takes to win
In every entrepreneurs journey there will be highs and lows, hardships and small wins, but somewhere in your journey – after many many years – something clicks. You’ve learned enough, you’ve positioned yourself properly, you’re no longer naive when it comes to expectations..
And things start going well.. Really well. There’s a level of predictability in your performance, in your earning power.. You can begin to see 1-2-3 steps ahead.. You figure out how to connect dots other people are missing and you hit those goals one after another.
At this very moment, you feel like you’re on top of the world.
Maybe for the first real time in your life you feel like you’re winning, that all the hard work is beginning to pay off and all those people were wrong about you.
This is when you want to play it smart. Be strategic and don’t lose your grip on the handles.
If you don’t screw this up, almost everything you want from life is up for grabs.
Some of you might have experienced this already while for others this milestone is waiting for you ahead.
Personally, we’ve never left this to luck, because Luck isn’t a long term strategy.. Better year it isn’t even a short term strategy so we don’t like to mess with it at all.
We broke everything down in GOAL Mastery, the premium course we were supposed to release by now, but because we’re such perfectionists when it comes to the quality of our paid products we challenged ourselves to find ways to improve the value by at least 20%. With corona affecting all our lives, the post production process has been postponed. Our promise is that you will be able to purchase it sometime in the next couple of months. As always, if you want to make sure you hear about the release be sure to join the waiting list at alux.com/goals
8.
Your first child
Many have asked what is the meaning of life, why are we all here.. We’d be bullshitting you if we said we had the answer. The best one we can provide is:
The meaning of life is figuring out the meaning of your life!
Did you like how we turn that back at ya?!
Putting the philosophical aspects aside, there is a biological reason why you are alive and it’s been coded in your DNA for millenia: Procreation.
Now, everyone is free to decide for themselves whether or not they want children of their own, but something big happens to you as an individual when your first child is born. You transcend from the position of an individual into the role of a parental figure. You are now responsible for making this new blob of pure potential evolve and develop into an individual that will leave the world better than they found it.
Your role now becomes that of the protector and the carrier of light. Your responsibility is sharing with this child everything you’ve learned and spark enough curiosity for them to be more than you were able to be.
If we started from scratch, our children will not have to go through the same hurdles as we did. They will need different tools than we needed, because the environment has changed because we worked our butts off to change it. Their problems will be different than the problems you faced growing up thus forcing you to adapt. Having your first child is such a life changing milestone for everyone which is why we’ve worked so hard developing NewParents – a parenting channel that’s meant to provide guidance for the parents of tomorrow.
Special thanks to everyone who last week subscribed to the channel and for those who have no idea what I’m talking about go to alux.com/newparents or click in the top right corner and find out for yourself.
9.
The moment you realize you have more years behind you than ahead of you
The United Nations puts life expectancy at 72.6 years for someone born in 2019. But this is on a global level. If you’re lucky to live in a more developed society and with the progress of medicine, statistically, you will probably die around the age of 87.
Who knows, maybe we’ll get a breakthrough and we’ll all live more, but we like to act in reality.
That means, the halfway mark in your life will be around 44 years old. It just so happens that’s when the male body has a last chemical hurrah in the hopes of creating another offspring – chemical imbalance which leads to the what is more commonly known as a mid-life crisis.
But we got side-tracked a bit.
We’re going to refer back to Confucius for this one, who put it perfectly:
We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.
Many people quit too early, they think they’ve peaked too early, but that’s not true. The time you have ahead of you is yours to do with it as you please, so do just that!
10.
Retirement or Financial Freedom
Retirement has such a bad connotation these days. In common culture is seen as: You’re done. Your time is over. Society has moved beyond you, so just take a seat back and watch us do everything you wish you could still be doing. Retirement for most people means that you’re old, maybe sick, in most parts of the world, struggling to get by on a pension that’s barely enough to survive.
For us retirement means the exact opposite. It means that we have officially worked enough so that we DO NOT HAVE TO WORK, but choose to. Believe it or not, as humans we love work, we love working with a purpose. We hate doing it because we have to, that someone makes us do it, that we’re constrained by bills to trade our time for survival.
For us, the Aluxers, retirement or better said: financial freedom, is about not having to worry about none of those.
The most simple formula to determine just how much you need to retire is: to earn from passive investments (such as rent, royalties, dividends and so on) twice the amount you need to maintain your current lifestyle.
Financial freedom = 2 x Monthly Expenses (Earned from passive investments)
As of making this video, $10,000 per month in passive income is more than enough to live, almost anywhere in the world, a decent lifestyle.
For some of you, that amount might be lower, for some of you, maybe a little more would be needed.
But let’s do a thought experiment right now. If starting tomorrow, every single month you received 10,000 dollars in your account, would you still work your current job? What would you do with your time? Disregard immediate rational tasks like, paying your debts, fixing your car, basically filling the immediate gaps in your existence… but what would your life be like if you didn’t have to worry about money.. Wouldn’t that be amazing?!
This is why achieving this milestone is so important in life. It might take you 10,20,30,40 even 50 years to get it done, but everyone should do their best to try to get to it. It’s a shame to go through life and struggle financially and then die.
11.
Finding your state of happiness
A big milestone in life is when you finally figure yourself out and how to be in the state of happiness. Do not confuse this point with the one we made at number 2, as you should never confuse the fleeing feeling of happiness with the state of happiness.
The 2 premises you should be aware are:
- Everybody can be happy. (there’s nothing keeping anyone from achieving a state of happiness)
- If you’re smart, you should be able to solve the problem of happiness in your life.
This doesn’t mean you are always walking around with a creepy smile like Freaky Fred from Courage The Cowardly Dog – some episodes still haunt us to this day.. But instead take sadness for what it is.. A part of life. Allow it to enter and leave your life accordingly and then get back to your own self.
So what is this state of happiness?
Happiness is when you are at peace. When there are no fires burning in your life that you need to put out, when tomorrow is predictable is a way that puts your mind at ease, when your desires are no longer pushing on you the feeling that you don’t have enough or that you will only be happy if you get this particular thing or achieve this particular goal.
Happiness is when your reality matches your expectations of what reality should be like.
12.
Losing your parents
There are very few things that will smash reality into oneself more than the death of your parents. Your world will begin crumbling down because they were the pillars on which your entire childhood stood. With them, a part of you also goes away..
You become the oldest living member of your bloodline. Generations before you went away and soon so will you.
With them gone, you are force to face the idea of temporality, that time forgives no one and that you are next.
Many of you dream of luxury cars, big homes, adulation of others with just as many of you feeling lost for these material goals might be out of one’s reach… leaving you questioning yourselves and your place here. “If I can not have the riches and fame that I desire, what purpose is there for me here?”
Here’s a purpose for you: Be the person your family can rely on at your father’s funeral!
Be the person your family can rely on when hardships come your way. People are so scared of this event and how it will expose their insecurities so they burry it somewhere in the back of their mind and let the future self deal with it, but here’s the catch..
You can’t build the ship the day the flood comes!
13.
Your children moving on with their lives
Speaking of big milestones that force you to re-evaluate what you know about yourself, there will come a day where -hopefully- you would have raised strong enough children that they are able to go into the world and thrive on their own. For at least 2 decades, your priority have been these children, they changed your role in society, their changed the way you behave, you see the world and now they’re gone.
Many adults – in the process of being parents – lose their individual identities. They identify as parents instead of individuals with dreams, pleasures, desires and what have you.
Almost all of them have a hard time going back to being something other than parents.
This particular milestone opens the door to the third act of your life. One of re-evaluation, of rediscovery and for new opportunities of growth.
You can rediscover your passions, re-ignite your love, pursue new hobbies and indulge yourself in the beauty of the world.
14.
Realizing the world has changed
There comes a point in everyone’s journey where reality smacks you in the face with change. The world you grew up in is no longer the world of today.
Every evolving society embraces change!
And so does every smart individual.
It’s shocking for most of us to see the abundance of older folks who seem so disconnected from what’s happening today, holding on by the last tooth of their dental plaques to beliefs that are no longer acceptable.
Technology allows for the free flow of new information!
The moment you allow technology to move beyond you, you’re missing out on this new information. This is why these people seem to be so out of the loop, because they genuinely are. No wonder your old auntie or uncle can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction and keep sharing the onion & those conspiracy articles on facebook..
When they were growing up they had a single source of truth, the newspaper and later on the 2 tv channels they used to watch. For them whatever got in the paper or on screen was the irrefutable truth. Technology came along and this is no longer the reality we’re living in, but their programming didn’t keep up with the change.
Your goal with this milestone is to understand when this is happening – or even better – prolong it as long as you can. For if you do it, life remains exciting, it’s changes, your beliefs get questioned, you evolve, you become what they like to call: WOKE.
15.
Your Death
This is the last milestone of your life… might as well call it the finish line.
One should always be aware of it, to know that it might be closer than you expect it to be, but not allow it to ruin the present with its glooming shadow.
Death is part of life and although your brain can comprehend the idea, the notion, that death will come, we’ve always been fascinating by its inability to truly accept that itself, one day will be no more.
Try it now if you want. One day the voice you’re hearing in the back of your head probably processing and repeating some of the things you’re hearing will no longer be there. The brain can not tolerate it so it pretends it didn’t hear your request, very much like a dog who has no idea who peed on the carpet.
But death should be embraced like an old friend, one you can’t wait to tell all the amazing things you’ve went through, all the achievements you have under your belt, all the stories about your children and your own life and how the world is better of because for this tiny speck of time you were apart of it.
There’s beauty in the finality of things, it makes everything we do so much more important, which is why we’re asking you Aluxers to LIVE today, instead of being ALIVE. After this video, do something memorable, make today just a bit more interesting and if there’s nothing that comes to mind, a glass of champagne always works for us.
Which brings us to the question we were eager to ask: How many of these milestone have you achieved and those of you who have lived a little, what value can you share with the community because of your past experiences. Let’s learn from one another and use the comments as a breading ground for ideas and lessons.
This wraps up our take on the 15 most important milestones in life!
