8 Success Rules That No Longer Work

If you did everything you were told, worked hard, got educated, stayed patient, saved money, and still feel behind, you know, this isn't your fault. Those rules were built for a different economy. One with stable careers, cheap assets, and predictable outcomes.

But that world is gone. In this video, we'll break down eight success rules that no longer work and show you what actually matters right now so you stop playing a game that's already over. Welcome to Alux.

Rule number one, that hard work guarantees progress. For decades, hard work reliably moved people forward. [music] Today, it often doesn't.

Now, this rule worked because it was conditional, right? In industrial and early corporate economies, effort compounded by default. You showed up, you learned the role, you stayed longer than others, and that system rewarded you.

Careers were linear, roles were stable, [music] skills aged slowly, and competition was limited. If you worked harder than the person next to you, your value increased over time. Promotions followed tenure, raises followed loyalty, experience itself became leverage.

Hard work was a multiplier inside of a predictable machine. But that machine no longer exists. Modern work is optimized for efficiency, not accumulation.

And three things have changed for this. First of all, effort stopped scaling. Most roles cap output.

You can only handle so many tasks, calls, or hours. Once you hit that ceiling, additional effort produces diminishing returns. [music] Second of all, experience depreciates faster.

Skills now expire. Tools, platforms, and processes change constantly. What once took a decade to master can become irrelevant in just a few years.

Now, entire careers change or literally stop existing after [music] 3 to 5 years. Now, third of all, rewards disconnected from effort. Productivity gains increasingly flow upward to owners, platforms, and capital.

You can generate more value than ever while capturing [music] less of it. So right now, the only hard work that matters is the one after leverage is in place. Scale, ownership, distribution.

If these three don't exist, [music] hard work is just busy work. Rule number two, loyalty is rewarded. Now, for most of the last century, loyalty was a rational strategy.

You stayed, you endured, you didn't jump ship at the first opportunity, and in return, the system took care of you. This used to work because companies [music] used to optimize for retention and continuity. Markets moved slower and products lasted longer.

Knowledge lived inside of people, not software. So, replacing someone was extremely expensive and risky. So loyalty created leverage.

Staying longer meant institutional knowledge, seniority based promotions, defined benefit pensions, and predictable career ladders. The longer you stayed, the harder you were to replace. Time itself became a moat.

So what changed here? Well, the short answer is cost control. Modern businesses are optimized for flexibility.

If you've ever worked in a big corporation, you are well aware of the fact that absolutely everything is standardized and documented. There's a process or a tool for everything. This essentially means that firing and rehiring is cheaper than ever.

So when conditions change, loyalty is not a factor on the spreadsheet. [music] Staying longer does not increase your leverage. Even more, it often reduces it.

You see, loyalty has three hidden costs that not many people talk about. First of all, career risk. If you hard lock into a career with no other options, you're at risk of being made relevant real quick because of how technology moves.

[music] Secondly is skill stagnation. If you're doing the same thing over and over again for years, sure, you get some mastery out of it, but mastery in a skill that mattered 5 years ago isn't really that amazing. >> [music] >> And finally, there's the opportunity cost.

Doing one thing realistically means not doing at least three to five other things that you could be doing. Right now, the only thing you should be loyal to is your own trajectory. Rule number three, education secures your future.

Now, the sole reason education had such a huge impact a while ago is because of scarcity. Few people had degrees. Even fewer had advanced ones.

So in that environment, a degree signaled a rare skill. Employers competed for people with degrees and pay scaled with education level. But most importantly, careers lasted long enough to make the student debt investment worth it.

[music] You knew you'd be able to comfortably pay off your student loans. Now, three things happened that completely broke that scarcity model. First of all, we got credential inflation.

Degrees became baseline requirements. Now having a degree is [music] pretty much the norm. What once differentiated you from everybody else now simply gets you through the automated filters.

Secondly, education costs have pretty [music] much exploded through the roof. According to the Education Data Initiative, the cost of a medical degree is literally double what it was 20 years ago. And finally, practical marketable skills can now be learned faster and cheaper outside of formal education.

So while education still opens doors, it doesn't guarantee that going through it is worth [music] it. Education still matters, absolutely. But no longer does it work as a predefined path handed to you by an institution.

Today, learning is a personal system, something you design, update, and adapt continuously based on the market you're in. The people who win aren't the most credentialed, they're the most adaptive. And this is a foundational reason why we created the Alux app to serve as the best financial education ecosystem in the world.

We not only have daily coaching sessions, but we also hire industry experts, sit them down in a studio, and have them explain to you on camera the lessons that helped secure and expand their careers and fortunes. With a membership to the app, you also get access to the newly launched Alux Network, an exclusive community of founders, builders, and entrepreneurs where you can network, share insights, offer support and advice from which accountants are the best to brainstorming and troubleshooting a project you're working on. Being an entrepreneur, you know, it can be lonely, but it doesn't have to be.

On the inside, you're connecting with people on a journey just like yours. And as a little gift from us to you, we've got a special offer for you for the new year. If you follow the link in the description to download the app and scan this QR code on screen, you'll [music] get lifetime access to the app for 50% off.

And you know, we don't always have the lifetime subscription available. Usually, it's monthly or yearly, but until January 7th, you can get a lifetime membership for $4. 99 instead of $9.

99. One taxdeductible payment and unlimited lifetime access to our library of over 2,000 lessons. And that library gets bigger every single day.

I'll see you on the inside. But in the meantime, let's get back to the video. Rule number four, play it safe and be patient.

You know, for a long time, patience was rational, right? Imagine you're standing at a bus station. There's a schedule on the wall.

You know the bus is coming. You just you don't know exactly when. If you wait long enough, you'll get a seat.

[music] Leaving early only increases the risk of missing it. In that world, well, in that world, patience pays. Older systems were scheduled systems.

Careers followed paths. Promotions followed tenure. Markets moved slowly.

If you stayed put and avoided mistakes, outcomes eventually would arrive. Patience worked because timelines were predictable. [music] Rewards were delayed but guaranteed.

Waiting reduced risk. The optimal strategy was to hold position. Now imagine you're in the same place but there is no schedule.

You don't know when the bus is coming. You don't know if it's full. You don't even know if any buses are running at all.

As a matter of fact, this might not even be a bus station. So, what exactly are you waiting for? At this point, waiting stops being patience and becomes inaction.

This is how the modern world works. In unscheduled environments, success doesn't come from waiting for one thing to pay off. It comes from iteration, trying, learning, adjusting, making small moves instead of one big bet, gathering information through action.

Each attempt increases your understanding of the system. Each iteration reduces uncertainty. People who win, they aren't more patient.

They simply get more attempts. Modern advantage comes from how many times you can try, not how long you can wait. Rule number five, save money.

For a long time, saving money was the responsible move. You earned and you set some aside. You avoided debt and lived below your means.

In earlier decades, wages, inflation, and asset prices moved at roughly comparable speeds. If your income grew at 3 to 4% per year, and housing prices grew at a similar rate, saving closed the gap. Time worked in your favor.

cash preserve purchasing power long enough for you to convert it into assets. [music] Now, as you can probably imagine, those numbers no longer line up like at all. Here's the structural mismatch.

[music] Okay, wages have grown slowly, roughly 3 to 4% per year over long periods. Inflation compounds against cash every year. Asset prices, especially housing, have grown faster than wages.

In the US, the median home price used to be about 3. 5 times the median household income in the mid 1980s. [music] Today, well, today it's closer to five times the income.

Between 2019 and 2022 alone, US home prices rose about 43% while median incomes increased only around 7%. And that gap [music] matters. If you're saving from wages that grow slowly, but the asset you're targeting reprices faster than your savings rate, then the finish line keeps moving away from you.

In other words, it's mathematically impossible to save money to buy an asset straight up because by the time you saved all of the money you needed, that asset, say a house, now costs much more than it used to. So, you're right back where you started. So, what's the updated rule here?

Well, there isn't really one to be honest. Savings cannot buy major assets on their own anymore. It's just math.

There's no modern version of save and wait. Either money moves into assets or it falls behind. [music] Now, this doesn't mean that saving money is useless now.

It still has an important support role. First, [music] having 6 months worth of living expenses protects you from curve balls that [music] life can and will throw at you. And secondly, it gives you the option to act when opportunities appear.

Essentially, savings are now a form of protection rather than growth. Rule number six, follow your passion. Find your passion and you'll never work a day in your life.

Beautifully said and extremely wrong. When you are passionate about something like truly passionate, when it's all you think about, work indeed never feels like work. [music] You spend countless hours reading, researching, talking about it, watching videos about it, and you slowly become very knowledgeable and skilled.

Now, here's the thing that people don't really think about. There are millions and millions of people all passionate about the same things. Fitness, [music] music, gaming, design, content creation, you name it.

and they all live on the internet in the same marketplace. You're no longer competing on skills alone because there are millions of people that are really good at what they're passionate about. And there's one more thing that's especially true around things that people are usually passionate about.

[music] Demand doesn't automatically follow quality. That's why the most viewed content online is pure brain rot. You see, when passion becomes the starting point, people build in isolation.

They perfect the craft. [music] They assume quality will be enough and they wait to be discovered. Do you have any idea how many extremely passionate and talented musicians are on Spotify that have like [music] three monthly listeners all the while Spotify is pushing fully AI generated playlists.

[music] So, where does this leave passion? Well, we don't really have an answer to this one. Being passionate about something that actually works is honestly a luxury.

In most cases, you find demand first and then you let your passion catch up to it. Rule number seven, the old finish line, stability. Now, most people are still chasing stability because they believe that's what winning looks like.

Have a steady job with a predictable income and a future you can plan for years in advance. If nothing goes wrong, life just works. Stability feels like success because it acts like a psychological relief.

When things are stable, you don't have to think about all of the probabilities. You just maintain how things are. That's easy.

That's why stability became the finish line. Now, when your entire life depends on one income source, one skill set, and one economic assumption, you are not exactly secure. You are exposed to one concentrated point and when conditions change like with massive layoffs, inflation and industry shifts, everything falls apart at once.

[music] That's why stable setups fail catastrophically instead of gradually. You see, [music] stability trains people to avoid anything that could disrupt the balance, to protect the present [music] instead of preparing for the future. So when change arrives, they're behind because they were optimized for a world that no longer exists.

Now, if stability isn't the goal anymore, then what is? If locking everything in place increases fragility, what does modern success actually optimize for? [music] Well, the question to that doesn't get answered right here.

That is rule number eight, the new finish line, optionality. Now, optionality essentially means not needing things to go perfectly for your life to work. And it looks like multiple income paths instead of one paycheck.

Skills that transfer across industries, assets that generate cash flow independent of time, the ability to walk away from bad situations. The problem for most people is that optionality looks messier than stability. Income might be uneven.

Paths may overlap. The future may look less obvious or clean. But at the end of the day, stability locks you into one future.

And optionality gives you many to choose from. In a world that simply does not stand still, the safest position is to not stand still either. Thanks for watching today, Aluxer.

We'll see you back here next time. Until then, take care.