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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, and I almost quit at $10K a month, which is the part nobody warns you about. We'll get there.

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? And I told you I almost quit at $10K a month.

Here's what happened. The anger got me from $50 in my account to $10,000 a month. And then $10,000 a month was enough. Rent was handled. The car was fixed. Nothing was on fire anymore. And I got comfortable, and the same guy who had locked himself in his room to figure it out started sleeping in.

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.