But to unlock it you must understand it in simple terms, and most of the writing about it comes from PhDs who make it unnecessarily complex. Bastards.

I first heard the answer to my problem from a guy richer than me. I told him I wanted to make over $100,000 a month. He asked me how I was making money now, and how I could make more. He gave me some advice and I ignorantly replied, “oh, that's not possible.”

But he quickly gave me the answer of what I needed to do.

This didn't get my attention because my ego was way too strong at the time. I said no, that's not possible. He never talked to me ever again. Then I realized what he was trying to say.

Wanting more money isn't enough. Having a goal isn't enough. Knowing the answer isn't enough. The only way to experience real change is to first change your brain.

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours.

Richard Bach, Illusions

Your RAS is the secret rich people have known about for years.

But it's still not mainstream. If you understand it you can literally achieve any goal & rise to the top of your field while the high school bullies scream "How'd they do that?"

Let me explain the power of your RAS and how to use it in this letter, without all the psychological jargon and brain science.

Once you start to think about something, you’ll start to see it everywhere. It’s like owning a red car. When you own a red Ford Focus, you’ll see red Ford Focuses everywhere. But when you own a red Ferrari, you see red Ferraris everywhere.

I would go meditate every single day for 30 minutes to an hour, I would journal all the time, and it was just really to get it into my RAS to start noticing the patterns of who I wanted to become (this would later make me millions of $$’s a year).

And so "that's not possible" is what you're facing right now. It may be on a different scale.

Maybe you're one of those people that's trying to get to 100 grand a month, or maybe you're one of those people trying to make your first $10,000 a month. We all face these beliefs at different levels in our lives. Inside of this letter, I’m going to break down the beliefs that have been invisible to you this entire time so that way you can finally become the person of your dreams.

So turn off your dopamine receptors. Let's break down these limiting beliefs together.

I - How I removed my limiting beliefs

If you've opened this letter right now, I already know something about you.

You’ve already read a bunch of books. Watched all the different stuff. You have the knowledge, you know how people are getting rich.

And you're still not there.

Neither was I.

I thought I was really smart.

But then I started to notice…

Rich people never have any limiting beliefs whenever you talk with them. They always talk about how anything is possible and they just welcome opportunity into their life.

Epictetus said it best: it is impossible for a man to begin to learn that which he thinks that he knows.

I realized that I was in my own way. The answers were very clear right in front of me, but my ego was too strong, and I was so convicted in the way that I saw things. I had tried everything out. I believed I already did that. It is not possible.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism

It was my limiting beliefs talking.

You can read 100 books about money, understand money intellectually, but still be broke.

Because knowing ≠ reprogramming.

I'm 27 and I've made over $10 million online. The biggest thing that separated my ability of making millions of dollars versus the previous version of myself who was unable of making millions of dollars was beliefs.

Beliefs are what control your behaviors and control your habits and make you the way that you are.

That's the programming.

Just remember that your brain is always going to attract what it thinks of all the time. This is the role of your reticular activating system.

Becoming wealthy starts feeling less like luck or willpower and more like your regular programming.

You weren't born afraid of money. You were taught:

• I need to work harder.

• Wanting more is greedy.

• I'm not ready yet.

• This is just who I am.

Fair warning: this is gonna be a longer one. I want to dump these thoughts deep inside of your skull, so it's inevitable you're gonna become lowkey rich.

You don't know what you don't know. You don't know the beliefs that you have until you start to pay attention to the beliefs that you have.

If you're not aware of the programming, it's likely been working against you since birth.

So before we get into the beliefs that are holding you back the most, here's where they came from.

II - Everything you've been taught about money is a trap

Your brain is evolutionarily programmed to have what's known as loss aversion. A fancy saying that means your brain is built to keep you safe and not rich. Taking risks feels like death to your primitive brain.

You have decades of programming inside of your brain right now. The way that you view the world is from decades of people telling you how life needs to be. Your parents, your teachers, your friends, your boss, every person that you've ever known.

We're hardcore programmed into the beliefs that we have:

• “oh, we're not that type of people.”

• “We don't do those types of things.”

• “We don't go out to dinner”

• “We don't start businesses”

• “We don't take risks”

• “We don't go and travel to a new city.”

Your entire success and how much money you make is dictated by your beliefs. And if you have beliefs that limit you, then you will always be stuck making a certain amount of money.

Then you wonder why you're still not there.

The problem is not that other people have limiting beliefs. They always will.

The problem begins when you inherit their limiting beliefs as your own (you don’t have a choice on this).

They programmed you to stay trapped in a dead end career. Your school, corporations, and even your parents.

Your parents lied to you. The school system lied to you. The world lied to you.

If you're like me, you grew up kind of lower middle class. Rich people aren't all douchebags, it's just that's what you're told because of the programming that we live in, that rich people are assholes. School taught me that if you want more out of life, you're greedy, and that success only came if you sold your soul.

So you're actually not ruining your life. Your childhood is.

The system is made to make you a really good boy, a really good girl of an employee. And for you to become the best employee, so you make the owner extremely rich.

School teaches obedience. Not wealth.

School is a twelve-year jail sentence where scarcity programing is the only curriculum truly learned.

I was deciding to drop out of college. Every fiber within me was screaming, this is dangerous. But I realized the real danger was staying in a system that was built to keep me average.

Broke people are very taboo with money. It's a very sensitive subject, you don't talk about it. My household and my parents, we didn't really talk about money. I never knew how much my parents made. Love them. They never made me worry about money, but I never knew how much money they made. It was a weird subject.

Rich people talk about money like it's the weather.

And it goes deeper than money. Bacon and eggs for breakfast was programmed into our brains just a hundred years ago. It's a marketing campaign. It's a belief that we were handed by the programming of a marketer that wanted to sell more food.

That’s how deep the programming goes.

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.

Edward Bernays

We will challenge all of the beliefs that we have except for the ones that we hold closest and dearest to us. And those are the ones you gotta watch out for. No, no, no, we don't need to talk about those ones. We don't need to touch those thoughts or those beliefs or that programming that we have.

Show me your beliefs and hang out with me, and I'll tell you exactly how much you make. Simply by the way that you talk, the way that you perceive things, and the subconscious language that you have.

I see this very often, coaching so many people and helping so many people become rich for over seven years. I will give two people the same exact blueprint, step by step. Hey, here's how to make a hundred thousand dollars.

One person takes that information and goes and makes a hundred grand, or goes and makes a million dollars. The other person gets that information and they don't do jack sh*t with it.

That one difference between the two people is their worldview, is their beliefs, is the way that they see things.

The better that you become at managing your mindset, and the better you become at managing your beliefs, the more efficient that you will be at making money, and the easier that money will come.

Your brain is not broken. It's just running the wrong software.

Stop saying "that's not possible." That's your limiting beliefs talking.

If you are so smart, why are you not rich?

III - Making more money isn't about working harder

I struggled with this for years, and I see a lot of other people struggle with it as well. They think to make more money they need to work harder, they need to grind more, they need to put in more hours, and they need to do something unique and original.

Blame Shark Tank for this.

when you go on Shark Tank, how do you become somebody who gets the Shark’s money? You have a new product, a new idea, some new technology that nobody else has come up with before. If your technology makes enough sense for the sharks, they invest in you. But real talk, that’s about how 1% of people get rich. 99% of rich people ain’t doing anything new or original.

There's nothing noble about choosing the hardest path just to feel you’re original.

Getting rich is boring. I do the same thing every week, every week… every f****ing week. Same calls, same conversations, same reports, same systems, same processes. We just make it a little bit better every week. That's it.

People that are rich are working way less than people that are slaving away, working for $5,000 a month. It's because they understand value exchange, and how money works.

If you are working harder, it's gonna take you a lot longer to be successful.

One of the best examples that I have is somebody like Taylor Swift. How does she make billions of $$’s? She's not building roads. She's not building buildings. But people love her music, and it's emotions that is so valuable to her audience. It's her being able to resonate with the people that are just like her. All she has to do is share her story, and people want to listen to her music, buy her songs, go to her concerts.

That's the crazy thing: asking yourself what is value, what is money? Once you understand that, you can start looking at the world a completely different way.

I can get water out of the tap, but I'll still pay six dollars for a Mountain Valley water bottle every single time. And the question is, why? Why would I do that? Am I a water supremacist?

Working harder is the programming. Understanding is how you get rich.

If you don't have an owner's mindset, you'll never get rich. Unless you're gonna work your way up the corporate ladder, leave your wife and kids at home, have no life whatsoever.

A lot of people have golden handcuffs, where they're working a job and they have to work holidays or make ridiculous sacrifices because they are stuck in a corporate prison that they built for themselves.

Become an owner, and not somebody who's just trading their time for money.

Your nine to five is your financial pacifier. Your nine to five makes you feel comfortable.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor

Rich people don't trade time for money. They're making money off of the systems that they built. Some of the money that I make, I work two, three, four hours a week on that money. Some weeks less than an hour. Why? Because I have systems.

The guy who never talked to me again? He's like: okay, this guy's not listening to me. He says that he wants to make more money, but he doesn't act like he wants to make more money.

Stop saying "I need to work harder." Say "what's the value?"

That brings us to:

IV - You deserve the freedom to do whatever you want

Society made you think that wanting more was greedy. If I want more, then that's gotta be greedy. Your brain thinks you’re asking for more than you’re supposed to have.

There's a lot of different money beliefs that people have that push them away from making more money. The thing is, if you don't think that you deserve to make more money, you're never gonna make more money.

There's this common theme with bank robbers. You hear stories about how they’ll rob the money and then they'll leave it in the car. They'll get out of the car and then they go. Because they don't think that that money is theirs. They don't feel like they deserve it, and so it's easy for them to forget about it.

That's the programming.

There's this good story in the Bible (Luke 11) about how there's this man who needed to get some loaves of bread. And instead of asking for one loaf of bread from his friend, he asked for three loaves of bread from his friend. He pounded on the door and yelled and screamed: I need three loaves of bread.

Why did he need three loaves of bread? It was because it was for other people. It wasn't for him.

Ask for three loaves of bread, don't just ask for one.

You deserve more. You need more to serve the people, to do the things that you're supposed to do in this life.

Then there's the inherited money beliefs. That rich people are bad. Whenever you see a rich person, they're pretentious, or they're egotistical. I never want to be like one of those type of people. Whenever you label other people and how they are with money, and it's something that you don't like, you're just projecting your own belief which is: I don't want to be rich.

That's the programming too.

Money is an amplifier. If you're a good person, you're gonna be an even nicer person. If you're a bad person, you're gonna be an even worse person.

Don't label rich people as assholes, because what does that make you once you get rich?

I can be rich, kind, loved, free, all at the same time.

I'm telling you, the more money I make, the happier I am.

Nobody can give you permission to become successful. I can be like, hey dude, congratulations, you can become successful. That's it. Tell yourself that you have permission. You're not unworthy. You just have to decide that you're the person that can make it happen.

Stop saying "I don't want to be greedy." Say "three loaves please."

Why haven't you started already?

V - People dumber than you are making millions

This one I see often, and it's a hidden one. You're lying to yourself, which is: I'm not ready to go big yet. I don't have the certifications, I don't have the knowledge, I'm not qualified enough yet.

To tell you the truth, all that that belief is, is a fear of failure. It's a fear of public humiliation, and it's a fear that you're just not good enough. It's not that you're actually not qualified.

Realize that you're a dumbass and just call yourself a dumbass: I don't know anything, and it's better.

I'll tell you damn well straight up: there are people way dumber than you, with way less experience, making way more money than you. All because of believing that they were ready, believing that they were supposed to be rich, and doing whatever it was every single day to figure it out as they go.

It's the ego speaking up saying: hey, you're not supposed to be over there. You're gonna fail, everyone's gonna think you're a loser, and you're gonna lose that money.

You're already being judged. So you might as well be judged on the things that you build.

Not ready is the programming.

We can thank public education for this. They made it seem like failure was the worst thing in the world. But I would tell you, you can't make millions without a couple of L's.

If you ever do meet rich and successful people, they all started when they weren't ready. They were thrown to the wolves and they had to figure it out on their own.

You are not going to become rich without failing. And the cool thing is, the faster you fail, the faster you'll succeed, the faster you'll get rich, the faster you'll make money, and the faster you will be where you want to be. Because if failure is inevitable, then all that means is you just gotta go fail.

If someone told you that you had to fail exactly 30 times before it worked, how fast would you go fail 30 times?

You'd get that sh*t done as fast as possible. You'd be on failure 9 by Friday.

Looking back on all the money I've made now, I would get that failure done way faster, knowing how much I had to fail. Because I'm like, oh cool, I want to get to the good stuff significantly faster.

I'm not sure who came up with this quote, but I love it: most people don't succeed because they're addicted to preparation and they're allergic to execution.

This one's hard because it feels strategic, it feels mature, it feels like you're doing the right thing. But you're holding yourself back ridiculous amounts by not taking action.

Same with perfectionism. I love this quote: perfectionism is just procrastination wrapped up in a pretty box. How life works, how business works, how success works, is you just take action, you ship it, and it's gonna be broken, it's gonna be wrong. But you fix it along the way.

You already knew that. Cool. What failure are you on?

Failure is closer to success than thinking about success.

Alex Hormozi

The answers were very clear right in front of me. I said: no, that's not possible.

Stop saying "I'm not ready yet." Say "I'm on failure 9."

Your old self has to die in order for your new self to become a millionaire.

VI - You've been calling your programming "who you are." It's not.

Your nervous system doesn't respond to your goals, it responds to your identity.

The first step is recognizing your beliefs. It's not getting upset about it. Don't get pissed off, like, oh I'm a piece of sh*t, I can never be rich. There you go, those are all limiting beliefs again.

Neuroplasticity is the discovery that the programming is written in pencil, not ink.

Here's how I use it.

1) Write it down. Get a journal. Sit down for 45 minutes and just write down everything that you think. All of your thoughts, the way that you see the world, your future, what that looks like. The more that you do it, the better you can get through the fluffy bullsh*t at the beginning.

One thing to notice is the things that make things feel limited. Money is hard to make. I can't do that. That's hard. I am not capable of doing so. These I am statements.

"I'm not ready yet" isn't just a statement. It's a neural pathway that your brain uses to predict and generate behavior.

2) Talk to people far ahead of you. One of the ways that I became aware of the programing I was running was by talking to people that were much further ahead of me. Based off of their reaction and their body language towards the things I would say, it was instant feedback. Almost like a tuning fork as to what my beliefs were and the way that I saw the world. If I ever said anything and it scared people away, I knew: okay, whatever I just said there was important.

It's like a tape that I play over and over again.

The tape is the programming.

If you feel like nobody wants to share anything, or nobody wants to give away the information, it's because they just don't want to give the information away to you. You make them feel poor hanging out with you, and how you make them feel poor is your limiting beliefs.

3) Open your eyes. Just f*cking open your eyes, look around. If you look at cars and you add up what the original value of the car was, it adds up really quickly. Have you ever done the math? Every 50 cars that you see is a million dollars. At any given moment of just looking outside for 10 minutes, you just saw a million dollars.

There is money all around you. Are you saying that you can't make five grand a month?

For you to not be able to make money, it's a skill issue. And once you admit that you suck, it's cool, because then you can realize what you suck at, and you can get better.

4) Give it a name. You have this internal thermostat that regulates your success, and if you start to go a little bit too high, your brain starts to regulate you.

Your income isn't capped by your skills. Your income is capped by what your nervous system feels is normal.

A lot of people are about to get the new promotion, they're about to make more money, they're about to have the business succeed, and then they self-sabotage. They get sick. Nothing ever goes their way whenever they're about to be successful.

Label it. Give it a name. I usually call it the little b*tch voice.

I had my own personal story. When I was younger, people would call me Kevin, and I hated it. It was the dumb version of myself. And so I always was like, oh, that's Kevin speaking, whenever I would hold myself back.

Give it a name, or else it's gonna run your life.

Kevin is the programming.

Then honor that version of yourself and just let them rest. How great they were, how good they were, how much they served you. But that's just not who you are anymore. They're not gonna dictate your life ever again.

Your brain makes room for who you are becoming by deleting who you were.

5) Leave the room. You hypnotize yourself. As soon as you touch a door handle or you walk into a room, a smell hits your nose and it triggers you, you just go back into the old programming. The only thing that you can possibly do is remove yourself from your environment. Go travel somewhere, go to a wealthier part of town, leave your hometown.

For the entirety of this week, here's what I want you to do. Get a journal, sit down for 45 minutes, and write down everything that you think. Then write down one of the beliefs on a sticky note, and write down the opposite belief, and put it somewhere. The goal is to constantly remind yourself of the opposite of that belief.

Most people hold so dearly and tightly on to their past: oh, there was this one time I won a sports game when I was in high school. Who gives a sh*t? Who cares?

Stop saying "that's just who I am." Say "that's Kevin speaking."

You're going to become whatever you just keep on thinking

People don't say, I, Sarah, want to be broke. But they are choosing to be broke because of the way that they allow themselves to perceive the world.

School wrote the programming. Your boss wrote it. Your parents wrote it.

They're not the ones pressing play.

You can fight it all you want, but sooner or later you're going to have to admit the reason you're still not there. It's not the time, it's not the money, it's that some part of you already decided who you're allowed to become and you've been obeying it ever since.

Are you just gonna allow the previous programming that you've had for the past decade dictate who you are gonna be for the rest of your life? You get to choose. Do you allow your past self to dictate your future?

Do you value being comfortable, living your same exact life for the next 40 years until you die, a gravestone amongst all the gravestones? Or do you want to actually be something in your life and do something with your life?

How badly do you want to be where you're going? Because that'll allow you to overcome the beliefs.

That belief isn't the truth. It's just a story you've told yourself so many times it feels real. Change the story, change the outcome.

The more that I've leaned into my unlimited beliefs, the more unlimited my potential has become, and the more money I've made naturally as a byproduct.

If I had unlearned the need for permission earlier, I would've started way sooner.

As soon as I showed that guy that I didn't respect his answer, he just walked away, and he was out of my life.

In that moment he knew that my beliefs weren’t a match for his advice.

I wish I knew this sooner. Now you do.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms (to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way).

Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

I'm rooting for you.

Nobody's gonna save you, which is kind of depressing, but also freeing.

They wrote the programming. You run it.

Now it's your responsibility to change it.

Let's get you lowkey rich.

Talk soon.

Devon

P.S If you're reading this and not subscribed, fix that now so the next one lands in your inbox.

You hear them say, "Yeah 30K? I make that in a day." And you're thinking to yourself: what the f*ck are you talking about? That's a real thing?

What the f*ck are they doing differently? How the heck are these people just able to make whatever amount of money they make? Versus me over here slaving away, trying to work so damn hard just to make a couple grand?

This happens to us because right now making money is a conscious effort. You're having to be disciplined. You're having to show up every single day. You're needing to work for every dollar.

And then you see some kid that's making way more money than your parents, way more money than you ever found possible, and your ego gets attacked. That's why most people write it off as a scam, or daddy's money, or some nepo baby bullsh*t. At the end of the day, that's just cope.

I used to think that way. You could tell that money was just effortless for them. And I wanted to be like that.

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.

– Steve Jobs, 1994

It's crazy to say now that money has become effortless for me too. Now, I'm not some Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk type of thing where I'm talking billions of dollars. But I'm 27, I've made over $10 million online, and I've had multiple days where I've made over $100,000 in a single day. And I can tell you it feels like you're literally not doing sh*t to be able to make that money.

That's what I call unconsciously rich.

Becoming unconsciously rich is the same as embodying the identity of a rich person. You don't even try. You don't even think. You just show up and do the things, without even having to think or try, that make you even more money. You show up as a person who checks the numbers on one thing, ignores everything else, and gets on one phone call and you’re printing doctor salaries monthly.

At this point it's easier for me to make money than it is for me not to make money. I don't even know how not to make money anymore. I would have to be drunk every single day for 6 months on her*in under a bridge to not make six figures in a month.

And when you get to that point, that's when you're truly free. One of the most common questions I get is, "What do you do for a living?" I don't do anything. I live for a living.

A rich person is a culmination of three things:

• An opportunist.

• Somebody competent.

• Somebody who is purpose driven.

Once you develop yourself in these three categories, you make sh*tloads of money unconsciously and you print millions of dollars without it being an active effort in your body. So that way you can just live your life, travel, go wherever.

Right now I'm in Italy overlooking the sea. I live out of a suitcase and I don't feel like I work a day in my life anymore. Two months ago I had my record revenue month in business, and I've been traveling full time for the past year and a half. I don't have a home base. And yet I keep making more money, because I'm constantly developing in these three categories, which doesn't require you to be in a physical location.

Turn off your dopamine receptors and lock the f*ck in. Because inside of here I'm going to give you the sauce.

If you just trust the experience of this article, your life will change. You will see differences in your life. You will be living a better life.

Fair warning: I'm going to be a little on your ass about things in this article because I believe in the power of calling someone’s bs out.

Before we get into how to get rich (or what a rich person does differently) you have to understand the system we’re told make money on is fundamentally broken.

Every unsuccessful person I know believes the game is rigged. Every successful person knows the game is rigged and learns how to play.

– Justin Welsh

The mental models that you're currently operating on are built to f*ck you over and keep you stuck. This keeps a lot of people confused, so let's break it all down.

I - Why most getting rich advice is bullsh*t

A lot of it is focused around slow rich activities. Slow rich is a polite way of saying old (someone had to say it).

"If you put $500 a month into the S&P 500 for the next 40 years, you're going to be a millionaire." Yeah, that's technically true. But you also have to account for inflation. And then you also ask yourself, what the hell are you doing with your life in the meantime? Sacrificing your life for 40 years so that way you can finally enjoy your money once you're 65 years old?

That sounds awful. That sounds lame. I want to be rich now! I want to do stuff now! I want to make money now!

The other advice everybody has is work your way up the corporate ladder. You technically are going to make more money, especially if you work in a career for 20 years. Maybe you can get to the point where you're making $500,000 a year because you're a senior executive or something. But that is just selling your soul, kissing ass, and doing what you have to do to barely get by for years and years. If you're going to do it, you might as well just go get an investment banking job. At least you're going to get paid a lot.

And the last one is they always tell you to manifest yourself rich. Well I could just say "I'm going to get rich, I'm going to get rich, I'm going to get rich" all day and nothing would f*cking change in my life.

Instead you have to understand how people are actually getting rich in the modern day and age.

They're building a cash flowing business. They have high income skill sets that allow them to build a business, or spawn money out of thin air.

So if you want to get rich, you have to be in a better vehicle. You have to be in something that will actually allow you to make the amount of money you want to make. The issue with most people is they're stuck in a career that will take them forever to ever get rich. In order to get rich before you're old, you must find ways of making money a lot faster.

What are these opportunities? YouTube (which by the way is how I made my first million dollars). Being a social media influencer (on camera or not). Having a marketing agency. Affiliate marketing, where you're selling somebody else's product and getting a cut. Day trading or crypto. I'm not saying this is the best way of getting rich, because you're dependent on the markets. But it's a way to get to the point where you spawn money out of thin air. And building a boring business. Landscaping is a huge one. I have many friends (surprisingly) that make multiple millions of dollars a year with a landscaping business, and they're just really good at landscaping. Now, it took them seven years to get to that point, but it's still significantly faster than 40.

You're not going to get rich renting out your time.

– Naval Ravikant

Nobody gets unconsciously rich renting out their time.

You need to be in control of your money through the skill sets that you have.

Stop saying "I'm being realistic." Say "I'm in the wrong vehicle."

II - Why 100 reps beat a four-year degree

The better you get at being a YouTuber, the more views you're going to get. The more views you get, the more money you're going to make. The more money you make, the better videos you can make. And the better videos you make, the more views you get. It becomes this constant feedback cycle.

The beauty of these businesses is you get a very fast feedback cycle on whether or not what you're doing is working. That's why most jobs just pay you a 9 to 5 wage. The business owner is getting the feedback cycle. The market's getting the feedback cycle. You're renting out your time.

So you have inputs, and then you have outputs. You want to close the gap of getting outputs as fast as possible. This is what is known as feedback. Once you see the outputs, you are now getting feedback. And the more feedback you get, the faster you're going to learn and the better you're going to become at the things you do. What we call the thing in between the inputs and the outputs is your process. Your system.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

– James Clear, Atomic Habits

I could write 100 of these articles in the next two or three months and have more evidence, more experience of marketing, than someone would have from a four-year college degree.

The feedback loop is so damn slow going to school. When you put something out, you get immediate feedback. I get to see what the comments are saying. I get to see what the views are saying. I get to see the engagement curve, when you guys fall off and when you want to watch a moment over and over again.

These opportunities allow you to fulfill that feedback loop significantly faster, so you get way more repetitions than the average person. And when you get more repetitions than the average person, you start to be able to make more money.

You have to view success as the ability to understand data points and recognize the patterns. If I had a graph of a bunch of random dots, it just looks like a bunch of random dots. But if the x-axis is the money you made and the y-axis is the video you made, and you do lots of data points, you can see the videos you put the most amount of time into. The videos you put the most thought into. The more refined, developed ideas. The ones you copied and emulated from other people's success. And you're thinking to yourself: oh wow, they get results like this. So if I want a result like that, I need to make more videos that are over here.

The way you do that is through pattern recognition. The way you get pattern recognition is through looking at lots of data points and getting lots of feedback. And that's why people are getting so rich. With the internet you can look at so many data points so quickly. It gets to a point where you're not even thinking about how much money you're making. That's the unconscious part.

Reps = data points = pattern = money.

For the entirety of this week, here's what I want you to do: anytime you pull your card out and buy something, ask yourself how they got you to buy it. Was it the quality? Was it convenient? Did it give you an identity? Every time you buy is a chance to see how they took your money, and how you can replicate it.

So that's the opportunist. You need to jump on things. You need to see the things that can actually change your life and be somebody who jumps on these vehicles, rather than staying stagnant and comfortable in your current reality.

III - Getting rich is a skill issue

Next, you need to become competent. The way you become competent is to master the skill sets that allow you to make money. To become unconsciously good at making money, you must become a master of money. So you have to understand the four levels of money mastery.

I call it your stupidity graph.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

– Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

I hate to break it to you, but you suck at making money if you're reading this. (Unless you're one of the successful people who read these too.)

Right now you're at level one. At level one, you don't know that you don't know how to make money. You're unconsciously incompetent. You must get out of this place as fast as humanly possible and start to move into level two.

Because once you're in level two, now you know that you suck at making money. Nothing changes. You've just become conscious. You have reached a level of awareness.

And this is the hardest phase for most people. Most people realize they suck at making money, so they give up altogether and stay stuck at level one, rather than confronting the truth. They'd rather stay in this delusional state because it's better for their ego.

The reason the graph is drawn like this is because the y-axis is your ego. As soon as you find out that you suck at making money, it sucks. But then what happens is you realize you can actually finally get better.

So you read a bunch of my letters, you watch a bunch of other people's videos about how to make money, and eventually you reach level three, which is consciously competent. And then your real goal is level four, where you are unconsciously competent. Unconsciously good at making money.

So you start off unconsciously bad at making money. Then consciously bad at making money. Then consciously good at making money. Then unconsciously good at making money.

Stop saying "I'm not a money person." Say "I'm at level two."

So how do you go through these stages? All of getting rich comes down to skill sets. The more skilled you are at the tasks it takes to get rich, the more money you will make.

Getting rich is a skill issue.

I'm not pulling this out of my ass. I can teach this because of the amount of data points I've had. Over 4,000 videos in the past few years, seeing what goes viral and what doesn't. Through that, I've developed a lot of different skill sets.

Copywriting is one of the skill sets I'm using with you right here. Packaging, knowing how to title the letter and the thumbnail for it. Teaching. Some of you are going to love my teaching style. Some of you are going to be like, "dude, what the hell is this? This is a box of rocks." Sales. There's a lot of sales and influence going on inside this letter right now. I am selling my idea to you about what it means to get rich, and that's a skill set I learned after doing thousands of sales calls, recording thousands of videos, and the 20,000 posts I've done on social media. And management, running a team, which is what allows me to make all the money.

Some of these I've deliberately gone after. For copywriting, I have watched hundreds if not thousands of videos, and read a lot of the top copywriting books. For packaging, another hundred videos, and then I've uploaded over 4,000 YouTube videos across my different channels. Teaching, from lots and lots of reps. Sales, again, lots and lots of reps. Managing, from having to fire so many people, hire so many people, and rebuild my company from the ground up many, many times.

You can acquire these through trial and error, and I'm a big believer in personal failure and trial and error. You can also actively seek the knowledge.

One thing I love doing is buying courses and hiring mentors. I know, crazy, right? I will go and find courses and mentors that have the skill sets I'm looking for. I bought one called “writing with flair” on Udemy. It was like a hundred bucks, and it was one of the best courses I've ever gone through. A former editor at the Wall Street Journal broke down how one actually writes. I've bought courses on how to make videos. On how to coach people. On how to sell. On how to have better relationships. I have invested at least half a million dollars myself into different courses, so that way I can learn how to make the money I've shown you in here.

So that is really how you get unconsciously good at making money. You do lots of reps, and then you immerse yourself in the world of knowledge acquisition.

And study others. Study other people that are doing what you want to do.

If you want to get fit and jacked, don't take fitness advice from somebody who's fat. You take fitness advice from people that are jacked and have the body and the health that you want. If you want relationship advice, you don't take it from somebody who's gone through five divorces. You take it from somebody who's been in a relationship for 40 years and really understands relationships. You don't take money advice from somebody who's never taken risks in their life. I love my parents. But they're not going to be the best people when it comes to business advice. Who to hire in my company, who to keep, what videos to make.

So you need to seek out mentors. Seek out people that you can study on how they think about the world and how they act. So that way you yourself can become one of those people. It's only through mirroring and studying and copying other people that you can finally do it.

IV - Personality LARPing

Which brings me to my next point, and I love this concept. I invented it with my team. It's called Personality LARPing.

You want to live-action roleplay the reality you want to live. If you want to be somebody who's a badass who's making a ton of money and traveling the world, then start roleplaying it. Start acting as if you're that person. You need to start pretending that you're that rich dude that's able to travel the world and do whatever he wants every single day.

This is also known as the alter ego. There's a guy that wrote a good book about this, The Alter Ego Effect by Todd Herman. What you're doing is wearing a mask. You're pretending to be the superhero. You're pretending to be this badass business guy in your day to day life.

It sounds corny. But what that does, neurologically and scientifically, is it actually gets you to start acting different. It starts to give you different personality traits. Because your personal reality is just the reality you've created based off your habits and your behaviors and the way you've identified yourself.

There's fifty years of psychology behind that. Daryl Bem called it self-perception theory in 1972: you decide who you are by watching what you do. Your brain watches you skip the gym three days in a row and files you under "not a gym person." The costume isn't fake. The costume is the only evidence your brain has.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

– Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

So you need to ask yourself: who is the person I need to become?

I gave you the skill sets. I gave you the opportunities. So now the question is, why don't you take advantage of the opportunities? It's because you're not somebody who identifies as somebody who is successful. And because you don't identify as somebody who's successful, you're never going to actually make the change.

It all comes down to your identity.

For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.

– Proverbs 23:7

Once you have the identity, you then have the beliefs of the person who is rich. And then you start doing and acting like that person. You do the actions of the person that is rich.

A lot of people, they're seeking the actions. They're looking at what rich people do and constantly trying to figure out what activities they need to do in order to get rich. Which is actually backwards. Instead, they need to focus on becoming the rich person first, then what that person believes, and then from those beliefs and that identity you come up with your own actions.

Because it's very easy to hear "oh rich people read and learn all the time," and go read and learn a bunch of sh*t that isn't going to change your life.

Identity, then beliefs, then actions.

So you need to start acting as if you are somebody who's successful. You need to wear the mask. You need to pretend that you are somebody who is successful. So much so that it just becomes your new norm. Because once you've pretended to be somebody for long enough, your brain starts to rewire and you start to act completely differently. That's where it goes unconscious. You're not acting anymore. You just are.

You don't become rich and then start acting rich. You act rich, and then you become it.

V - Disappear and lock in for six months

So how does this actually work? You change your environment.

Some of you are reading this thinking, I already knew that. But if you actually knew it, you wouldn't still be in the same room, would you?

Your environment is everything when it comes to who you are. Reading this right now on your phone or your computer, you're reminded of this version of yourself, because you've looked at this device so many times. If you look around your room, all these things reinforce who you are right now. It's not until you change your environment (until you shift the location you're in) that you finally start to see the world differently, rebuild new habits, and completely change the person you are.

Because right now (especially if you live in your hometown) the parents around you remind you of who you are. Your friends remind you of who you are. The color of the walls, the smell in the air, reminds you of who you are.

All of it votes for the old version of you.

There's a study on this. Wendy Wood had people log their days and found about 45% of what they did was repeated in the same place, almost every day. Nearly half your life is a rerun.

So you have to move. You have to change your location. If I were to project one lifestyle change onto people that allows them to genuinely get rich, it's move out of your parents' house. Because when you don't, you're constantly reminded of who you already were in the past.

The fastest way to become the person you want to be is to put yourself in a situation where you have no choice but to become them.

– Alex Hormozi

I moved 20 times by the time I turned 20. I hated the town I lived in when I went to high school, in Colorado, so I went to college in Idaho, where I knew nobody. Which is great, because it was a new start. A new life. I didn't necessarily align with all the people in Idaho, and I had a tough time staying there for a long time. But it allowed me to rewire myself because I didn't have friends holding me to who I was. I didn't have my parents reminding me of my childhood and who I used to be.

Then eventually I moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, where I was surrounded by a bunch of entrepreneurs. Then I moved to Orange County, California, and lived there for five years. A house with other entrepreneurs, all building and trying to do different stuff. That completely rewired who I was.

Then once I made enough money and my lease was up in California, I decided: you know what, I'm just going to go travel the world and live out of my suitcase. So the last year and a half, I've literally changed my environment every single week, because I believe in this part so much. It allowed me to turbocharge the change in my life, because I'm no longer tied to a very specific person. And in this process I've 3x'd the amount of money I make, just by constantly traveling and constantly changing my environment. I'm not anchored to any belief pattern or place.

Even when I did stay in a place for a certain amount of time, I would leave and go to a mastermind event, go meet other people that are building stuff. They would help rewire and shift my beliefs and help me see the world in a completely different way.

Two psychologists at the University of Bath tested this. The nudge worked on people who had moved house in the last three months, and did nothing for people who hadn't. Call it the 90-day window. Use it.

So it's just this: you need to disappear and lock in for six months, and you will completely change your life.

Because your current friends, your current environment, they're going to hold you back. They have a certain perspective of you that they are going to reinforce. If you stay where you are, good luck trying to get rich. This is the full send advice I have. If you're a half-sender who's wanting to make a ton of money and get rich, good luck trying to do that. You must remove yourself from all other people.

Is it lonely? Yeah, it's super lonely. But it's for a time. It's for a period of your life. It's for a season. It's hard to wrap your head around changing your life forever. But if you think, okay, for the next six months I'm going through a season of leveling myself up. Of becoming somebody who's unconsciously competent and able to make a ton of money. That sounds a lot more feasible and realistic to your brain. "Oh I'm just doing this for a few months."

And you won't be doing it alone. Build a new friend group on the internet, people locking in for the same season as you. You could probably meet them in the comments of this letter (drop “locking in” down there so they can find you).

Stop saying "it'll happen when things settle down." Say "I'm locking in for a season." Say it to your friends, exactly like that. Then go.

When you physically remove yourself from this environment, it's so much easier to lock in. To stop doing drugs, to stop smoking weed, to stop watching porn, to stop doomscrolling on your phone and wasting immense amounts of time. It's only when you disappear for a season that you can completely rewire your brain. You build the habits that are actually going to get you rich, instead of what you've been doing all along.

VI - What do you actually want?

So the activity for this is to ask yourself: what is it that you want out of life? What do you want? What is your dream life?

Because when you can start really visualizing your dream life, it starts to click inside your head. "Sh*t if I was living like this, how would I act?" And then you can bring that future into your current reality bit by bit, until it just becomes who you are.

Where do you live? Are you still living in the current zip code you live in now? Are you still living in the same house? Probably not. Think no limits. Anything is possible.

What car do you drive? Are you driving a Honda Civic? A G-Wagon? A Lambo? Cars aren't everything. But it helps you understand something tangible. For me, I travel. I have a sports car, but I don't even have time to drive it because I'm never home.

What's your daily routine? Are you up in the morning grinding it out the first part of the day? Then you go to the gym, because you're somebody who really values the gym. Then lunch at a restaurant, a cappuccino, salsa dancing at 3pm? What are you doing in your day-to-day life?

For me today I woke up, got breakfast overlooking the sea here in Italy. Then I came down and wrote for an hour or two, made some content for a couple hours, went and got lunch, and went snorkeling. I was swimming with the fishes for a little bit, suntanned on the beach, came back, recorded a video. I'm about to go to dinner in town. Who knows where the rest of the night takes me. I usually wake up, eat breakfast, work a little bit, do some fun, and eat some really nice food at nice restaurants. I like novelty. I like being places I've never been to before.

What does your daily routine look like? Genuinely, what does it look like?

What does your spouse look like? What do they think of you? Who are your friends? What do your friends do? For me, a lot of my friends are entrepreneurs, business owners. They live very similar lives to mine.

Do you travel? Where do you travel? How do you travel? That's a good one. A lot of people want to go to Hawaii. But do you want to go to Hawaii and sit next to the bathroom with the screaming kid, because that's all you could afford for a plane ticket? Or do you want to fly first class and stay at the five-star hotel with all the crazy amenities? Are you traveling for a few days, or a whole ass month? I was just in Monaco for two weeks because I enjoyed it. I was supposed to stay there for a couple days and I was like, you know what, I'm going to stay here for a couple weeks. One day I said I'm going to go to Saint-Tropez, so we drove an hour, rented a convertible, and did that for a little bit. Just being able to jump and do whatever it is that you want.

The reason we do all this is so you can develop the identity of the person you want to become. Because if you can't visualize who the person is that you want to become, good luck trying to get rich. Let alone unconsciously.

When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind.

– Seneca, Letters to Lucilius

Stop saying "I don't know what I want." Say "I haven't drawn the day yet."

The paradox: you've been larping this whole time

All of this advice on success really comes down to: who are you? Who are you becoming? Who's the person you want to be? Because once you understand that, now it's just showing up as that person every single day. What are their activities? What are their behaviors? Once you have the behaviors and the beliefs, then you just take the actions.

That's the whole thing. That genuinely is it. Then it's just doing it for a long enough time period that you brainwash yourself into becoming this new person, until you are unconsciously competent at the things you do.

And here's the part that should sting. You already are.

You've been roleplaying a character for years. The broke one. The one who's "not a money person." That character has a costume (the room), a script (your friends), and a routine (the phone). You perform him every single day without thinking about it.

You're already unconsciously competent. At being them.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

– attributed to Carl Jung

So the delusion isn't the problem. The direction is. You've been delusional about your limits. Be delusional about your ceiling instead.

At first it's going to feel weird. You're going to feel like you're acting. You're going to feel like you're pretending. But eventually you get to the stage where you're unconsciously good at making money. And when you're unconsciously good at making money, you're living your best life. I can't paint this picture enough. It feels so good. You just show up and live your life, and you just are. You just exist, and you get to live your best life, making whatever amount of money you could possibly think.

It's not easy. But it is simple.

Decide who you want to be. Become good at becoming the rich person. Get to the point where you're unconsciously just doing the things that make you a f*ck ton of money without even having to think about it.

I believe in you.

Lock in.

Let's get you lowkey rich.

If you're reading this and not subscribed, fix that now so the next one lands in your inbox. The stuff I actually did, not the stuff that sounds good.

Talk soon.

– Devon

P.S. If you want the vehicle I picked, done for you, I put the whole YouTube system in a free training: watch it here. It's the same thing I'd walk you through on a call.

Prefer to watch? This letter is also a 14-minute video: watch it on YouTube. Or keep reading.

Tell me if this sounds familiar.

You've watched 40 videos on how to make money online.

You know more about business than most people running one.

And you're still exactly where you were last year.

Here's the uncomfortable part. It's one of five things. And most people go their whole life without finding out which one.

I found all five the hard way. My name's Devon Canup. I've made over $10 million online in my 20s off the exact principles in this letter.

First, flip the problem on its head. Instead of asking how to get rich, ask what it takes to NOT get rich.

That becomes a much more useful question: why are you not richer than 99% of other people?

Here's the five reasons.

1) You never did the math

That brings me to a study conducted in 1997.

There was a group of students. They went home for Christmas break, and half of them were told they just had to tell themselves they were going to get the homework done. The other half had to give themselves a specific time they were going to do the assignment (breakfast, the morning after Christmas).

31% of the first group did the assignment. 71% of the second group did.

It's the same exact thing when it comes to weight loss. Relationships. And the exact same thing happens when you try to become wealthy.

You need to set yourself a specific goal. Without a specific goal, with a tangible way of achieving it, you will never get rich.

So that's why we need to just do the math. As soon as you do the math, getting rich becomes significantly easier.

If we're going to get into the top 1% of income in the world, ask yourself: how much money have you got to make?

The sad reality is, if you're a single adult, you only have to make $70,000 a year to be in the top 1% of income for the entire world.

For most of you, you're probably already making that, or really close. But most of you actually want to get rich. You want to make more money than most other people in the world. In the top 1% of the US, it's about $700,000 a year.

Okay, there we go. That sounds a little bit more rich. Something we can actually go pursue.

Instead of going after a straight up $700,000 right out the gate, let's go with something more attainable. A good halfway point.

If you've seen any of my content, you've seen me talk about this concept of getting lowkey rich. It's where you make enough money to pay all your bills and cover all your expenses, and then some. I believe you get lowkey rich around $30,000 a month. So let's use that as the baseline, and then we can talk about how you make even more.

So, how do we make $30,000 a month? Let's break it down.

$30,000 a month is about $7,000 a week. $1,000 a day. Break it down into 24 hours, it's about $40 an hour.

If you can make $40 an hour, 24 hours a day, you are making 30K a month.

That doesn't sound too complicated now, does it?

So how do we actually make that happen? If you're doing that with a YouTube channel, with the AdSense you make off the advertising dollars from a video, that's just 3 to 5 million views a month you have to achieve. That's about 100 to 200,000 views a day.

That starts to feel pretty realistic. If you can make a 100,000-view video every single day, you're cranking. This is how I've made over $3 million with this exact process of building YouTube channels.

So the question becomes, how do we get to the point where we get that many views a day?

Go find other YouTube channels getting 3 to 5 million views a month and just model them. Model the thumbnails. Model the titles. Model the hooks. Model the content they're talking about. Model the strategy.

When you do that, it becomes very black and white what you have to do to get to 3 to 5 million views a month.

And you don't have to be on camera to do it. I keep a list of over 300 six-figure YouTube channels where nobody ever shows their face. You don't have to record videos. You don't have to edit them. You go down the list, find the channels, and model them.

So at this point, you know how to make $30,000 a month. Simple, right? I've definitely delivered on the title of this letter.

And it still feels like we're missing something.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is what I call the paradox of getting rich.

2) Comfort is the most expensive thing you own

That segues perfectly into our next point, which is that most people are too comfortable to ever get rich.

Because making money is actually super simple.

The reality is we've grown up with programming that makes it insanely difficult to actually get rich, because making 30K a month is not that complicated. But we make it extremely complicated.

We were told the only way to get rich is you go work for 40 years and save every single penny. Or you sell drugs and do something illegal. Or you show your body publicly. Or you win the lottery.

Or you don't even try in the first place.

Sadly, this is what 95% of people run into. They just don't even try to get rich, to become the 1%, because they feel like it's not even in the cards for them.

When in reality, it's never been easier to get rich.

The crazy amounts of reach and leverage with social media. AI tools up the wazoo that can do all sorts of stuff. Access to knowledge and information in insane quantities, now more than ever before. You're literally on your phone, reading a letter that literally teaches you how to get to 30K a month. We have supercomputers in our pockets 24/7. Plus, the quantity of ways to get rich these days is so long it would probably take me a week just to explain all the different ways there are to make money.

Yet you still don't get rich.

At the end of the day, society has given us zero pressure and zero reason to actually get rich, because we're told it's not too bad to live life, have a salary job, have a good paying career, and live a comfortable life. There's a study that says once you make $75,000 a year, happiness doesn't really increase the more money you make.

So the question is, what are the reasons why we NEED to get rich?

You never know what'll happen. You have no reason until you get laid off from your job. No reason until AI takes your job from you. Until you get to a point where your kids are growing up without a dad or a mom because you're never around, never present anymore. Until you say something out of line that's not a good fit for the culture of your company.

Until recently, the only people who actually got rich were born into it, got insanely lucky, or just really pursued greatness and were overachievers.

Recently, especially after 2020, it's not even a choice anymore. It's a necessity to figure out how to use these tools and become the top 1% of income earners.

3) You're not angry enough

Which brings us to our next point: you don't have a strong enough desire to get rich.

This endeavour has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure.

– Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

Freud figured it out a hundred years ago. We're either running away from pain or running toward pleasure. That's the whole engine.

The reality is most of us just don't have enough pain in our lives. We don't have a strong enough desire. And a lot of that's because we're told the wrong thing about emotions. "You don't want to be angry. You shouldn't be pissed off. Those are bad." Especially by society.

But in reality, most of the emotions out there are very debilitating. So what's the emotion that has the most amount of activity and movement, that will allow you to actually get rich?

It's anger.

When you're angry, when you're frustrated, you feel the urge to change something in your life. Remember the last time you were angry? You probably threw something. You probably punched the wall. You needed an outlet for that anger, needed to do something with that emotion.

And it's the same with getting rich.

When I got rich, I decided to be angry with my situation. It got to a point where my car actually broke down and I had $50 to my name and I had to figure out rent. I couldn't even leave my apartment because I didn't have a car.

I got to a point where I was so angry at my situation, that I couldn't make more money, that I literally locked myself in my room and figured out how to make money. Because I hated being in that situation. Because I was so angry, it made it so easy to go out of my way to actually get rich and do the work and the activities I needed to do to make tons of money.

Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.

– Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

So ask yourself: what's something inconvenient in your day?

Maybe you're sitting in traffic. Maybe you're away from your kids. Maybe your relationship with your wife hasn't been so good recently.

Instead of putting it off, like "oh, that kinda sucks," or being fearful of losing it, or shameful, or guilty... get angry about it.

Because when you get angry about it, now you have fuel.

Now you want to move. Now you want to go build that business. Now you want to go make 30K a month. Now you want to start that YouTube channel. Now you want to go do the work it takes to actually get rich, because you have a strong fuel source.

And when you have a strong fuel source, then it becomes easy.

You see, a lot of people suppress it. We take pills, we do drugs, we do all these things to suppress these emotions. When in reality, the pain you're feeling is a good thing, because that means it's time for change.

It means it's time for you to do something else with your life.

4) The money is already printed

Which brings us to my next point: you don't believe you can get rich.

I'm going to give you a few statistics that helped change my mind.

First of all, the government printed about $6 trillion in the two years after 2020. That's $8 billion a day. Just new money, created out of thin air. That much new money every single day. Not month. Day.

And there are 557,000 people with an ultra-high net worth (that's a net worth greater than $30 million). Ten years ago there were 280,000.

You'd think, okay, nobody's becoming rich, nobody's becoming wealthy. But in reality, that number doubled in ten years. And they're expecting another 190,000 of them by 2030.

So the question is, why can't you be one of those people?

Another thing I do that has allowed me to make a ton of money is, I always put the price and the value on things. I'll be driving around and I'm like, "oh, that was a $30,000 car at one point. That was a $50,000 car."

It starts to add up really quickly as soon as you start valuing everything in your visible world. You start to realize: why are you not wealthy at this point? Why are you not making more money?

Money is all around you. It doesn't matter if you're in a broke place or a rich place. Every building, every skyscraper is like $100 million depending on where you are. The numbers and the math of all this stuff starts to get kind of funky.

The starting point of all achievement is desire.

– Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

So the question really does become, again: why are you not rich? Why are you not one of these people making more money?

5) You're a prisoner of your own intelligence

Which then brings us to the last point: you are too smart for your own good.

This is where I see so many people, after coaching so many people, helping so many people get to the point where they're making really good money: the amount of people that overthink things. Even the people that are talented and smart, they overthink the littlest of things. Like how to pick the topic for their YouTube channel.

We ran a statistic for my coaching program and found that on average it took people 34 days to pick their niche.

Thirty-four days.

So we started cutting down that time, and people started making money significantly faster. Literally by just becoming somebody who makes a faster decision, you make money faster.

The reality is people just overthink things. They need to do due diligence. They need to look at all the options, see what's best worth their time.

So you always want to break decision-making into two types of decisions, which I actually got from Jeff Bezos.

Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible (one-way doors) and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. But most decisions aren't like that. They are changeable, reversible. They're two-way doors.

– Jeff Bezos, 2015 Amazon shareholder letter

Ask yourself: is this a two-way door decision, where you can go in and out, you can unmake the decision? Or is this a one-way door decision, where you can never go back?

If you're choosing to end a relationship with your wife or spouse, that becomes a one-way door decision. What you eat today is a two-way door decision.

The other thing is, you're a prisoner of your own intelligence. You can think up every wrong reason why you shouldn't do something, and it just gets to the point where you can never do anything. It's debilitating.

Instead of putting your attention on the negative, on why something won't work out, just ask yourself: what if it does work out? What's the best case scenario? Just start asking that question rather than looking for every reason something won't work.

Tim Urban drew this better than I can say it:

Because at the end of the day, the people getting rich are the ones trying to get rich.

Stop waiting for next week. Stop waiting for some better time. Stop waiting for more information.

Just do the thing, and finally become rich. Become the top 1%.

The paradox: stay broke on purpose

At the end of the day, that's what I got. What are you waiting for at this point?

At the beginning of this letter I promised, okay, so how do I make millions of dollars a year, tens of millions a year?

Anger got me to $10K. Comfort almost kept me there.

Because what'll happen is you reach a new income level. You get to $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a month, and then you get comfortable again.

And then the clock resets.

The only way I got past it, and the way I eventually got to millions, is I kept hiring mentors, people who had already gotten to where I wanted to be, applying these principles and refusing to get comfortable.

Instead of getting too comfortable, how do you make it so you don't get comfortable? I always reinvest. I always try to stay broke. I always try to create an environment that allows me to get rich. And I constantly go look at other people who are where I want to be in life.

That forces me to want to become somebody who is lowkey rich, making tons of money, making even more money, and growing myself.

You start to realize it's a game, and it's fun. You hit some income goal, then you set the next one, and the next one. You start to do it for the pursuit of hitting goals rather than because you have to pay your bills or do something to survive.

That's when it starts to get a lot of fun.

You can get really good at this cycle of resetting your baseline, having humility, taking action, not overthinking, and on to the next stage.

Let's get you lowkey rich.

This is the first of a lot of these. Every week I'm going to send you one letter like this, the stuff I actually did to get here, not the stuff that sounds good. If you're reading this and not subscribed, fix that now so the next one lands in your inbox.

Talk soon.

– Devon

P.S. If you want the full blueprint to how I made $3million with Faceless YouTube Channels, I’m hosting a live masterclass this week: save your seat. No gatekeeping and ill be revealing my full unfiltered process!

The only real job I ever had was stocking wood in a warehouse. Under the table. Cash.

I can still feel it. Sawdust in my nose, splinters through the gloves, the specific silence of a Tuesday afternoon when everyone you graduated with is somewhere becoming somebody, and you’re stacking lumber a foreman pays in folded twenties because you’re not even on the books.

Not even on the books. That was the part that got me. I wasn’t losing the game. I wasn’t in the game. There was no record I existed.

I’m 27 now. I’ve made more than $8 million on the internet. And most of the people who ask me how I did it are older than me.

I need you to sit in that warehouse with me for a minute, because if you’re 22 and lost, you’re standing somewhere just like it right now. Maybe yours looks like a dorm room you can’t afford to be failing in. A retail counter. Your childhood bedroom at your parents’ house with the same posters on the wall, which might be the loudest room on earth.

And at 1am you do the math. You know the math I mean. Everyone from high school laid out on a scoreboard in your head. He’s got the internship. She’s engaged. That kid who ate glue in fourth grade just posted his new car. And you’re lying there doing subtraction on your own life, coming up negative, feeling your chest get tight about a future that hasn’t even happened yet.

Nobody says this part out loud, so I will: it’s not laziness keeping you up. It’s grief. You’re mourning the person you were supposed to be by now.

I know that grief. I dropped out. My “friends” (and I put that in quotes on purpose) laughed at me. I was posting videos every single day that got under 100 views. For months. Grown men I knew sent them to each other as jokes. There is a specific flavor of humiliation in trying, publicly, badly, while everyone who isn’t trying at all watches you from the bleachers. It tastes like metal.

Here’s what I didn’t know then, that I would drive to that warehouse and tell 19-year-old me through the fence:

The scoreboard is fake.

Not “don’t compare yourself” (you’ve heard that, it doesn’t help, comparison is involuntary). I mean the actual scoreboard is measuring a game that ended. Degree by 22, career by 25, house by 30. Who wrote that? Not you. You inherited it, the way you inherited your last name. Your parents drew you that map with love. With love. And it’s a map of a world that stopped existing while they were paying off the degree that got them into it.

You are navigating your one life with a map of a city that got demolished.

Meanwhile the internet quietly reset the clock for everyone, and almost nobody has noticed. Somewhere right now a kid who can barely spell is making more in a month than your professor makes in a year, from a couch, off some silly internet thing nobody even understands. I’ve met a lot of those kids. I became one. We are not impressive people. You would not hire us.

The only difference (and I mean the only one) is that we started before we felt ready, and you’re still waiting to feel ready.

So let me kill that wait for you right now.

Feeling ready is not coming. It does not exist. It has never once arrived for anybody. Readiness is a receipt you get after the reps. You’ve been treating it like a ticket you need before you’re allowed in.

And every year you wait, the waiting gets more comfortable. That’s the real trap. You think the pressure builds until you finally snap and act. It doesn’t. The pressure fades. The job you took “for now” becomes the job you have. “For now” is the most expensive phrase in the English language, and it’s charging you interest.

I want to tell you what changing your life actually looked like, because it’s not the montage.

Nobody clapped. That’s the headline. There was no moment where the music swelled. There was a long stretch where my checking account said -$5,000, my credit cards said $80,000, and I was getting better at things nobody was watching me do. The doubt was louder than the progress the whole way through.

That’s the part no one warns you about. The evidence arrives years after the decision. In between, you run on conviction alone, in the dark, while everyone you know politely assumes you’re failing.

And that gap is where everybody quits. Not because they’re weak. Because nobody told them the gap was part of it.

Now you know.

So here’s the end of this, and it’s the part I’d say slowest.

Underneath all the research and the planning and the “getting your ducks in a row,” I know what you’re actually doing, because I did it too. You’re waiting for permission. For someone with authority to look at you (you, specifically) and say: you’re allowed to want more than this.

Your parents can’t say it. They want you safe, and safe means the old map. Your boss won’t say it. Your friends are waiting on their own permission slip, and you going first would say something about them they’re not ready to hear. That’s why the group chat goes quiet when you start moving. Nobody’s mad at you. You’re evidence.

So it has to be me. Some guy on the internet who was getting paid in folded twenties a few years ago and now gets asked for directions by people older than him.

You’re allowed.

You’re allowed to skip the line. You’re allowed to want money without apologizing. You’re allowed to be embarrassing for a year. You’re allowed to be delusional for twelve months and see what happens. You’re allowed to fold up the map they gave you, put it in a drawer, and thank them for it later from somewhere they never imagined you’d be.

Nobody is coming to hand you this. That was never the plan. This is me handing you this.

You’re not late. You’re barely early.

Go.

2018. College bedroom, door closed, talking to a camera that nobody was on the other side of.

I’d check the numbers at night like they might have changed since the afternoon. They hadn’t. Double digits. Again. I was making a video every single day teaching what I knew about real estate (my whole credential was $50K from flipping a few houses in college and a few hundred YouTube videos I’d watched), and the internet’s answer, every day, was almost total silence.

The worst part wasn’t the silence. It was who broke it.

My “friends” (quotes intentional) found the videos. They sent them to each other. I was a group chat joke while I was doing the bravest thing I’d ever done, and I knew I was the joke, and I kept posting anyway. If you’ve ever tried something publicly, badly, while people who’ve never tried anything watched from the bleachers, you know the exact taste of that. It doesn’t leave.

That summer I made a decision that changed my entire life, and I want to be precise about how unimpressive it felt at the time:

I decided to post every day for a year no matter what the numbers said.

That’s it. No montage. No sign it would work. A decision made by a kid the evidence said was failing.

Here’s what the year actually looked like, because nobody shows you the middle of these stories.

It took me FIFTY videos before one crossed a thousand views. Fifty. Imagine doing anything fifty times in a row, in public, to near-zero response, while people laugh. Every one of those days the rational move was to quit. Three months in, I finally made money (a couple grand a month selling simple digital products). Rent money. Nobody’s dream.

And at the end of the year? I had posted every single day and had “nothing” to show for it but 10,000 subscribers and a joke reputation. By every scoreboard my hometown believed in, I had just wasted a year of my 20s.

Now watch what the scoreboard couldn’t see.

Every one of those invisible days, I was getting better. Not feeling better. Getting better. Hooks, pacing, titles, what makes a stranger stop scrolling. None of it showed up in views yet. All of it banked. You get better in the dark, and the dark keeps no receipts, so you have to take it on faith (which is exactly why almost nobody stays long enough).

Then judgement day came, the way it eventually comes for everyone: as an opportunity that looked small.

I took everything that “wasted” year taught me and started a new channel: Reddit stories. Three months later it was doing 10 million views a month. It made me more in a single month than most people I grew up with make in a year. The same people who’d been laughing asked me how I got so lucky, so fast.

So fast. I almost couldn’t answer.

Because I knew the real math. It wasn’t 3 months. It was 15. The overnight success was just the first time anyone bothered to look.

Here’s the sentence I’d tattoo on the inside of every 22-year-old’s eyelids if I could:

If I had quit at month ten, I would have missed my whole life.

Sit with that. Month ten, I had every reason to quit and no evidence to stay. The people who quit at month ten aren’t weaker than me or dumber than me. They just didn’t know month thirteen existed. Nobody told them the reps were still counting when the numbers weren’t moving. Nobody told them opportunity doesn’t reward the talented. It rewards whoever’s still standing there, ready, when it happens to walk past.

You catch luck by showing up when there’s no reason to. That’s the whole cheat code, and it’s barely a secret. It’s just a price almost nobody’s willing to pay in the currency it costs: looking stupid for a year.

So fall in love with getting good. Not with the outcome. The outcome will spend years ignoring you and then arrive all at once, and if you’re only in it for the outcome, you’ll be long gone when it shows up. Fall in love with the skill. The reps. The version of you that month fifty builds.

Most people won’t ever get good, because they’re not willing to be bad long enough.

Be bad longer.

Waste a year like I did.

It’ll be the most profitable thing you ever do.