The main quest of career, money, partner, home and family builds your life, but the sidequests listed here, from learning to fight to filming a message for your future self, build the person who is living it. Most people understand the main quest: build a career, make money, find a partner, buy a home, raise a family and stay healthy long enough to enjoy some of it. Those goals give life structure, though they do not automatically make it interesting. The video argues that the experiences that change you most are often the ones you never needed to have.
What follows are 15 sidequests, counted down from number 15, plus a bonus. Some are physical, some are quiet, and a few are uncomfortable on purpose.
Watch the full video here, or skip to the breakdown below.
The 15 sidequests at a glance
- Learn how to fight (0:32)
- Drive across a country or continent (1:29)
- Get a pet and develop a deep bond (2:24)
- Travel specifically to learn (3:33)
- Build something with your hands over several months (4:21)
- Design your home (5:59)
- Run a marathon (7:08)
- See your body in its best shape (8:36)
- Volunteer in a really poor country (9:40)
- Live in another country for one year (11:20)
- Make art and display it publicly (12:28)
- Write a book (13:40)
- Go on a religious or psychedelic search (15:20)
- Have a best friend and do things together (16:17)
- Make a video now for your children or yourself to watch in 20 years (17:17)
- Bonus: Explore sexually (18:22)
15. Learn how to fight
Competence changes your posture and presence. Other people sense it, not because they see a threat, but because they see someone in control of themselves and the situation.
Learning to fight has little to do with violence. It teaches you to be coachable, shows the gap between confidence and competence, and reveals how much repetition mastery actually takes. Above all it teaches you to stay calm while someone applies pressure. Once you know what violence feels like, it tends to become less attractive.
The courage carries over. Difficult conversations, public failure and business risk feel smaller once you have learned to function while tired, uncomfortable and under pressure.
It is great fun, serious exercise, and nobody looks at you as an easy victim.
14. Drive across a country or continent
Long-distance travel is the loading screen of real life. A plane takes you to a place. Driving or riding lets you live through everything between the places, so distance becomes real because you cross every kilometer yourself.
You watch the architecture change, hear accents shift and eat simple food somewhere you would never have found online. The moments you remember are rarely planned: getting caught in the rain, taking the wrong road, nearly running out of fuel, or meeting a stranger who says something that stays with you for years.
The destination gives you photographs. The road gives you a story.
13. Get a pet and develop a deep bond
A pet offers a love built almost entirely on presence. You cannot impress an animal with a résumé, status or intelligence. It cares whether you come back, whether it feels safe and whether you are consistent.
The responsibility reorganizes your days in small ways. You get up when you would rather sleep, go out in terrible weather and decide for a creature that cannot say what it needs. In return you get affection without performance and company without conversation.
The bond also carries an imbalance: a pet may be one chapter of your life while you are there for all of theirs. Everything deeply loved leaves a hole when it is gone, and even that teaches something.
A relationship does not become less valuable because it cannot last forever. Sometimes its ending is proof that it mattered.
12. Travel specifically to learn
Most travel is consumption with better scenery. The alternative is to collect skills instead of photographs: learn tango in Buenos Aires, train Muay Thai in Chiang Mai, or learn to sail among the Greek islands.
Travel with a curriculum. Find a teacher, submit to the process and stay long enough to get past being entertained by the culture. The best version lets a place change how you move, think or work.
Leave with fewer souvenirs and one ability that did not belong to you when you arrived. Go somewhere that has spent generations refining a craft, then let part of its discipline become yours.
11. Build something with your hands over several months
Most modern jobs let you pretend to be competent and get away with it. You cannot restore a car with words. Build a table, fix a motorcycle or grow a garden, and choose something physical that takes months and refuses to be rushed, no matter how good your pitch is.
This reconnects effort with visible progress and teaches the patience of correcting mistakes instead of deleting them. You buy tools, pick up real competence, and earn a kind of pride that nothing off the shelf can give, even if the result is imperfect.
There is one rule: do it for yourself, and resist the urge to monetize it. Not every skill needs to become a business, a personal brand or a second income stream.
Having a hobby that stays financially useless is an act of freedom.
10. Design your home
Most people spend years inside spaces they never consciously chose. The rooms are already there, so they fill them with stuff until the place becomes a storage unit for earlier versions of themselves.
Your environment shapes you. Just as a seed grows stronger in fertile soil, you get better in places that feed the soul. Designing your home forces you to care about details that look small but compound daily: the light, the materials, the sounds, the objects you keep and the ones you finally remove.
Do not design it to impress people who visit twice a year. Design it for the people who live there every day. A home holds more of your life than almost anywhere else, from the backyard where kids sleep under the stars to the kitchen where ordinary evenings become family history.
9. Run a marathon
A marathon is less physical than mental. The video notes that 98.5% of people who sign up for one finish it, which means the hardest part is signing up. After that you train, and then race day arrives.
The first stretch is manageable. Around the halfway point your brain starts arguing that you should quit, that your body was not built for this, that a comfortable couch is waiting at home. That is where you find a switch. You walk if you have to, you hurt everywhere, and you keep putting one foot in front of the other.
It is you against the voice in your head, and the decision to stop letting it run things. The video also points out that anyone who finishes a marathon significantly lowers the lifetime risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, including heart attacks and strokes. And there is a medal to show off.
8. See your body in its best shape
Get into the best shape of your life once, just to see how differently the world treats the same person. People notice you sooner and assume discipline, confidence and competence before you have proved anything. Part of that is appearance, but a lot of it comes from how your body changes your posture, clothing, eye contact and willingness to take up space.
You can buy peptides or plastic surgery, but you cannot fake a strong body. You also set a benchmark. For the rest of your life you will know how it feels when training, sleep and nutrition line up, and how far you have drifted when they do not.
You do not need to stay at your physical peak forever. The point is to meet that version of yourself at least once.
7. Volunteer in a really poor country
Your understanding of pain, struggle and blessing only stretches as far as your exposure. If you grew up in comfort, someone saying no can register as a level 10 crisis because your mind has nothing worse to compare it with.
Then you meet children who run barefoot because they own no shoes, and families who carry water for kilometers while you complain about shower pressure. Your problems do not become imaginary, but they return to proportion. Gratitude stops being something people tell you to practice and becomes an automatic response.
The advice is not to treat this as sightseeing. Leave the resort, be with regular people, work with those who understand the community and contribute where you are actually needed. You return to the same life with a different scale.
That is why Alux built the Alux International School in Uganda, which opened in 2022, and finished a first Alux International School in India this year. Subscribers and Alux app members are part of those projects too.
6. Live in another country for one year
Travel and living somewhere are different things, and you only learn the second by doing it. One of the most freeing discoveries is that people are living happy, meaningful lives in places you have barely considered.
There are cities where your money stretches further, your values fit better, the weather suits you and the life you want is easier to build. Living abroad shows you different ways to organize work, family, friendship, ambition and leisure, and that your country never had a monopoly on doing life correctly.
Most of all, it shows that your current location is not a life sentence. If things collapse or the place stops feeling like yours, you can begin again somewhere else.
Starting over is a choice, and the life you are trying to force at home may already be waiting somewhere else.
5. Make art and display it publicly
Art is how something invisible inside you enters the physical world. That feels uncomfortable because most adults have spent years neglecting their creative side. We get excellent at consuming other people’s taste while growing afraid of revealing our own.
Art is not meant to appeal to everyone, and work that tries to offend nobody usually moves nobody. The more you make, the better your odds of making something worthwhile, and you start noticing proportion, rhythm, light, silence and small details that used to disappear into the background.
Then display it. Let people see a part of you that competence, clothing and conversation would never show, and leave evidence that you contributed instead of only consuming.
Art is not a vote on whether you are worthy. It is evidence that something inside you was alive enough to demand a form.
4. Write a book
You do not need to be famous, scholarly or unusually wise to write a book. You do need to develop a perspective and articulate it. Most of us carry thousands of unfinished thoughts, memories and beliefs that feel coherent until we try to put them on a page, and writing forces you to decide what you actually mean.
It is hard because a book cannot be finished on occasional inspiration. You return to it while bored, uncertain and afraid the result may not be good, and that discipline changes you.
The finished book also becomes a window into how you saw the world at one moment. Photographs preserve your face. A book preserves your humor, fears and convictions, and your kids and grandkids may read it. Almost everything has been said before, but never through your particular mix of experiences.
It does not need to be a best-seller to be a success. Finishing it is.
3. Go on a religious or psychedelic search
Most people inherit their picture of reality before they are old enough to question it. The suggestion here is to step outside that framework deliberately at least once. The video lists walking a pilgrimage, attending a silent retreat, studying a faith seriously, or taking a psychedelic trip such as DMT or ayahuasca.
The method matters less than the interruption. You may find that identity is less solid than it feels. The value is not in seeing something strange or believing you have decoded the universe. A worthwhile spiritual search does not answer every question. It makes your old answers feel too small.
2. Have a best friend and do things together
After a partner and children, a best friend may be the most important relationship you have. Around them you can step out of the roles of parent, partner, boss or provider and briefly become the version of yourself that existed before life got so serious.
They are someone you can call when things fall apart, and someone who can call you. There is value in being known, and also in being needed. Some of your best memories will come from trips that go wrong, nights of talking until sunrise, and laughing over something nobody else would understand.
Two people build an internal universe and lore that matters only to them. A best friend remembers versions of you that no longer exist and notices when you drift away from yourself.
1. Make a video now for your children or yourself to watch in 20 years
This may be the highest-return sidequest on the list. It costs nothing, takes under an hour and may become priceless. Record your home, your voice, your mannerisms and an ordinary day. Talk about what you love, what worries you and what you think the future will look like, then speak directly to your future self or to the children who may watch one day.
It will feel awkward and trivial now. But memories compound in value, and the mundane becomes extraordinary once it is gone. It is the same reason people love old photos and videos of how their city used to look.
Photos preserve your face. Video preserves what it felt like to be you.
Bonus: Explore sexually
The final entry is framed as the spicy one. It is explicitly not about collecting partners or turning intimacy into another scoreboard. The idea is to step a little beyond what is familiar and find out what is really yours, the way you might try an oyster at a restaurant.
You may learn that some fantasies should stay fantasies, that novelty is easier than being deeply known, and that the quality of your intimate life is limited by the conversations you are willing to have. The advice is to explore safely, define your boundaries and stop pretending about what you want.
The video also admits that people differ. Some want a simple, predictable life, and others treat life as an amusement park.
Which sidequest will you take?
None of these will raise your income or fix your career, and that is the point. Each one adds a story, a skill or a piece of perspective to the person who has to live the main quest.
Pick the one that makes you slightly nervous and give it a date this year. Then see which of the other fourteen it pulls into view.
FAQ
What is a sidequest in real life?
A sidequest is an experience you never needed to have for your career, money or family, but that changes you anyway. The video contrasts it with the main quest of work, partner, home and health.
What are the best sidequests to take in life?
The video lists 15, including learning to fight, driving across a continent, getting a pet, running a marathon, living abroad for a year, writing a book and recording a video for your future self, plus a bonus.
Why should you run a marathon?
The video says it is mostly a mental test. Around the halfway point your mind urges you to quit, and pushing on proves you are not a quitter. It also notes that finishing a marathon significantly lowers lifetime risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.
Why should you write a book even if nobody reads it?
Writing forces you to decide what you actually mean and preserves your humor, fears and convictions for the people who come after you. The video says finishing it is the success, not selling it.
What is the highest-return sidequest on the list?
Number 1: record a video now for your children or your future self to watch in 20 years. It costs nothing, takes under an hour, and video preserves what it felt like to be you.
Keep reading
- 15 Things That Are NOT WORTH IT in LIFE
- 15 Real Life Superpowers to Win in Business & Life
- 20 Things I Want to Cross off my Bucket List until I Turn 30
