Rich people simplify their lives by judging everything as an asset or a liability, scheduling only their real priorities and removing every decision that does not matter to them. With billions in assets, shareholders to answer to and employees to consider, you would expect the lives of the rich to be tangled. The video argues the opposite: they have always kept things as simple as possible, and that is how they reached those levels of success.
Steve Jobs said that simple can be harder than complex, because you have to work hard to get your thinking clean. Simplicity here is not dumbing things down. It is getting great results through clarity, and it takes focus, discipline and cutting through the noise. Complexity is the enemy of execution, so these are 15 ways to get to the root of it.
Watch the full video here, or skip to the breakdown below.
The 15 ways at a glance
- Everything in life is seen as an asset or a liability (0:55)
- Show, don’t tell (1:43)
- Don’t prioritise your schedule, schedule your priorities (2:32)
- Big ideas trump the day-to-day details (3:20)
- Theme your days (4:14)
- Spend deliberately, spend selectively, invest the surplus (5:21)
- Say no to almost everything (6:48)
- Don’t waste time on details (8:00)
- Pillars to structure plans and create simplicity (8:49)
- Ask questions immediately until you get to the bottom (10:44)
- Call out the wrong information on the spot with the right information (12:17)
- Plan the method and follow the plan (13:27)
- Learn and study the things everyone else thinks are complicated (14:41)
- Remove decisions for things you don’t care about (15:30)
- Obstacles are speed bumps, not stone walls (16:34)
- Bonus: perceptions and expectations shape reality
1. Everything in life is seen as an asset or a liability
Every action and decision either adds value to your life or takes it away. See everything that way and your decisions become quick and simple: if it adds value, do it, and if it does not, throw it out.
Say you are building a new habit and wonder whether it is worth it. Or you are deciding whether to miss a friend’s birthday to work late on a project that could win you a promotion. If you know which choice brings more value to your life, the decision is easy.
Everyone’s values differ. Yours may even be different from what they were five years ago, and from what they will be five years from now.
2. Show, don’t tell
Almost every conversation, plan and deal includes a moment where you have to convince someone to see your side. The better you get at it, the easier life gets, because one conversation is enough to persuade and you do not have to fight for what you want.
The advice comes from journalism: show, do not tell. Paint the picture and photograph the different outcomes, so people see what you mean instead of just receiving information.
Give them scenarios and emotions that make them feel they are already there. You can do it in three sentences, and they will be all yours.
3. Don’t prioritise your schedule, schedule your priorities
Author and businessman Stephen Covey said to forget about prioritising your schedule. It is an interesting take from someone whose own schedule was notoriously packed and rigid.
The point is not to fill your days with activity. It is to fill them with what brings you value now, so your calendar holds action assets and no liabilities.
In a simple life the schedule is a lifeline. You should never have to think about what comes next, because it is already on the calendar. Focus on what matters most, spend more time there and cut the rest.
4. Big ideas trump the day-to-day details
Details make a day long, complicated and time-consuming. Larry Page, of Google and Alphabet fame, said that on a premium product, small incremental adjustments do not cut it. They complicate things and leave too many tabs open.
Success comes from big, transformative ideas, because they force your mind onto one core focus. That kind of success needs consistent, major breakthroughs, which come from bold, visionary goals that challenge the status quo.
Your goals should still be realistic and achievable. Your ideas are what should push the boundary of each goal and test the limits of your potential.
5. Theme your days
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey kept his work life simple with one hack: theming his days. Mondays were for management, Tuesdays might be big ideas and Wednesdays meetings and deals.
Not everyone can theme a whole day that rigidly. You can still theme your early mornings, late mornings and afternoons so each block has a single focus.
Doing one thing traps your mind, in a good way, inside that subject. After a few hours your brain digs deeper and works more efficiently, whereas constant switching keeps it skimming the surface. Theme the day well and by the end you have reached the bottom of the task, and that is where innovation lives.
6. Spend deliberately, spend selectively, invest the surplus
Budgets give you guidance and a framework for channelling money, and they create the surplus you invest. Rich people may look like frivolous spenders, but the video says they got rich by making sure each expense serves a specific purpose or goal.
Tracking every item is hard, so group spending into blocks. Nights out with friends fall into a block where the purpose is to relax and be happy. Rent, food, gas and bills are survival blocks. Savings, investments and retirement plans belong to a future life block.
Each time you spend, drop the expense into one of those blocks in your head. It shows you whether the spending serves your goals or is a robotic reaction to marketing, a wish to fit in or pressure from others.
7. Say no to almost everything
How often do you say no compared with yes? Saying yes can bring opportunities and experiences, which are life assets. But it can also push you to invest time and energy in the wrong things, lose focus and overcommit.
No filters out the noise and other people’s expectations from what you actually want. Warren Buffett has often spoken about its importance, and no gives you more focus, deeper expertise and more energy, which lead to better results.
One strategy is the 25/5 rule. Write down your 25 biggest goals, circle the top 5 and focus only on those. Forget the other 20, saying yes to the five and no to everything else.
8. Don’t waste time on details
Reaching goals takes planning, but there is a line between an effective plan and using the plan to avoid the goal. You have crossed it when you obsess over aesthetics, minor details and worry about small potential setbacks.
Successful people start an idea with just five steps. Once those are done, they add five more for the next level. You do not need to plan the next level yet, because that is confusing the plan with the execution.
Details may add a small amount of value, but they do not significantly contribute to the overall goal.
9. Pillars to structure plans and create simplicity
The Alux app holds a lot of content: daily sessions, courses and collections on finance, emotional regulation, toxic people, negotiating, culture and the world. Life has thousands, even millions, of avenues, so the team needed a way to group the paths by purpose.
The answer is five pillars: financial, emotional, intellectual, relationships and physical. Each piece of content focuses on one of them.
You need a pillar for everything you do, holding up your actions and decisions. You cannot analyse every action individually because you lack the time and mental energy. Understand your pillars and how actions fit into them, and what you do and decide becomes easier, more efficient and has a greater effect on your acceleration.
10. Ask questions immediately until you get to the bottom
Somewhere growing up we decided that asking questions makes us look stupid. In fact, knowing what you do not understand and being able to say it shows a willingness to learn, and that signals you will be able to understand it.
When something is unclear, ask out loud. If the explanation is more confusing, keep asking. Someone who knows their subject can fill gaps quickly, while someone who does not gives more convoluted answers.
Rich people ask because it makes them seem more engaged and more knowledgeable. Two limits apply: do not ask just for the sake of it, and never ask what has already been answered. Listen intently, ask immediately and leave knowing exactly what the other person meant.
11. Call out the wrong information on the spot with the right information
Your friends, colleagues and the people who work for you shape your actions with their opinions. If they are wrong and you know it, say so, because they could be running with information that hurts you.
Correct them, then move forward together. If you let something wrong slide, you end up doubting all your later conversations.
Follow the correction with the right information. And if someone does it to you, take it on the chin: you learned something, and they stopped you from embarrassing yourself.
12. Plan the method and follow the plan
There are only two steps to getting what you want: plan how to get there, then follow the plan. Everything else is an evasion or an excuse.
Excuses, a focus on possible problems and sadness about barriers only complicate execution. They may be real, but they do not help you arrive. Punctuate your goals with buts and you are choosing to stay where you are.
Compare two sentences. The long one says you want to own a home but were not born with money, so you must work two jobs, be frugal, and it is not fair. The short one says you want to own a home. That is where you stop.
13. Learn and study the things everyone else thinks are complicated
If you understand what everyone else finds complicated, you already have an edge over the competition. You should know things like the tax basis and unrealized gains in your portfolios.
Otherwise, you have not found the right source yet. Keep searching until you reach the aha moment.
Throwing out important lessons about how a system works because you do not get them at once makes your life even more complicated. Successful people use their grasp of the complicated to simplify theirs.
14. Remove decisions for things you don’t care about
Mark Zuckerberg is known for wearing the same style of grey t-shirt every day. He does not care about style, so why spend time thinking about it?
You probably have your own examples. Say you go to the same five restaurants because you know the food is good and you dislike trying new places: remove the other options. Considering them only wastes time and mental energy and feeds decision fatigue.
Sometimes you spend energy on things others find important just to fit in. The sooner you work out what does not matter to you, the sooner you can save decisions for what does.
15. Obstacles are speed bumps, not stone walls
Whatever the size of an obstacle, treat it as a speed bump: you take the knock and keep going. See a dead end or a high wall instead and you will spend too much time working out how to get around it, break it down or build a machine strong enough to push through.
Successful people see each obstacle as a blip on their radar. No vision cannot be realized, however crazy others think it is.
Let even one thing cloud that vision and you open the door for everything else to cloud it too.
Bonus: perceptions and expectations shape reality
In The Alchemy of Finance, billionaire investor George Soros covers ideas such as the theory of reflexivity, the role of market sentiment and the fallibility of human knowledge. The video takes two threads from it and applies them to life: perceptions and expectations.
Market prices are shaped by collective beliefs. Expectations distort reality, and they are active forces that can change outcomes, not mere predictions.
Trends are valuable only for a short time, and they lose their value at the inflection point. Life follows a pattern until it does not, and expecting it to follow your predictions distorts reality. Once you understand how the way you see the world, the way others see you and what you expect from life shape outcomes, you can shape outcomes yourself. That is something you can work on right now.
Simplicity is the work
Each of these 15 habits does the same job: it removes noise so effort lands on what matters. None of them requires more money or more hours, only clearer thinking.
Pick the one that fits your week best and run it for a while. A themed morning, a short list of five goals or a plain sentence about what you want costs nothing to try.
FAQ
How do rich people simplify their lives?
They see everything as an asset or a liability, schedule their priorities, say no to almost everything and remove decisions about things they do not care about.
What is the 25/5 rule?
Write down your 25 biggest goals, circle the top 5 and focus only on those. Say yes to the five and no to everything else.
What does it mean to theme your days?
Give each day, or each block of a day, one focus, as Jack Dorsey did with management, big ideas and meetings. A single focus lets your brain dig deeper and work more efficiently.
Does asking questions make you look stupid?
No. The video argues that saying what you do not understand shows a willingness to learn, which signals you will be able to understand it.
How should you organise your spending?
Put each expense into a block such as survival, relaxing with friends or future life (savings, investments and retirement). This shows whether it serves your goals.
Keep reading
- 15 Secrets RICH People Use to Get Everything in Life
- 15 Ways Rich People Prepare for World War 3
- 15 Ways to Master the Art of Decision-Making
